Ask Doug Verdier about the backlog at his auto body shop, and he laughs.
“That’s sort of a bad joke around here,” he said. “What are we booking?” he calls out to the office. “The end of February right now.”
Portland-area auto body shops are grappling with huge backlogs due to losses within their ranks and a growing population – a timeline that can only grow with the recent spate of snowstorms and the fender-benders they tend to spawn.
A sampling of five metro-area auto body shops showed that anyone in need of a repair would have to wait at least three weeks — maybe as long as two months — just to get into the garage. With the actual repairs, along with inspections by insurance adjusters, most customers can expect to be without their car for more than a month.
And that’s before the expected influx of cars. Oregon State Police hasn’t yet released numbers for this week, but after last weekend’s ice storm, the agency said its officers throughout the state had responded to nearly 400 crashes in 36 hours.
“It really makes it tough now if you want to get your car fixed,” said Verdier, who owns Active Auto Body in Northwest Portland. “For a business to say it’ll be two months before you get to us? It’s like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’ ”
Thankfully, he said, most customers are understanding and patient.
Shop managers say there used to be an ebb and flow to the business — slow in the summer, busy in the winter. Now it’s busy year-round.
Dave Meeker, general manager at Sharp Auto Body and Paint Works in Southeast Portland, said business has been ticking upward recent years, as gas prices dropped and Portland’s population grew. ( Researchers have found that cheaper gas results in more driving, which leads to more crashes.)
“Before that we were up and down, but since gas prices dropped, we’ve been extremely busy,” Meeker said.
Now, the shop has a six-week backlog and has stopped accepting tow-ins.
“We’re still trying to get to cars from the first snowstorm,” he said, referencing the early December weather event. “It’s been a month. I’ve got such a full schedule, anything extra that comes just messes us up.”
Over at Speed’s Auto Body in Southeast Portland, owner Matt Pitsch estimated he had about a month’s worth of work backed up.
“It’s absolutely related to the weather,” Pitsch said. “We’ll probably still be cleaning them up in April, I would think. Some of the walking wounded.”
Pitsch said the weather-related business was up about 25 percent from a typical winter.
In Beaverton, Scott Duwe, an estimator at Carr Subaru’s auto body shop, said they’re scheduling jobs for the beginning of March.
Most shops were already busy due to population growth, but “the weather events have just overbooked everybody,” he said.
“Last summer it was a normal, two- to three-week backlog,” he said. “Now we’re approaching an eight-week backlog. We’re accepting tow-ins but they have to wait in line.”
Though the surge in business may seem like a great problem for such companies to have, Verdier says that the underlying reasons don’t bode well for independent shop owners.
“When I first came into this neighborhood 40 years ago, there were 15 shops,” he said. “Now there are three. We had two of them go out of business this last year.
“What’s happened is that the insurance companies have put the squeeze on this industry. They direct all the work to mega-shops. So a lot of the smaller shops in this neighborhood weren’t getting the work, so they started shutting down.”
One such shop was Jim Fisher Volvo on Burnside, Verdier said. When the dealership recently closed its auto body shop, they called Verdier, saying they would refer future customers to him.
“That sounds great, but we can hardly handle what we’re doing now,” he said.
Meanwhile, as cars become more high-tech, repair shops must update their equipment accordingly.
“It’s hard for people to open a body shop nowadays,” Verdier said. “It takes a lot of money.”
Now, the only companies opening body shops are likely dealerships or large conglomerates, he said.
