Monroe company provides data, photos for car dealers
Thursday, November 29, 2007
If you're shopping for a used or new vehicle, chances are some of the information you've obtained from a car dealership's Web site about the automobile's warranty and inventory is compiled by Dealer Specialties Inc., in Monroe.
Dealer Specialties, 20 Overbrook Drive, is the nation's largest provider of data and photo collection services for car dealerships such as Acura, Audi, Chrysler, General Motors, Honda, Toyota and Volkswagen, according to George Nenni, vice president and general manager of Dominion Dealer Solutions. Dealer Specialties is a Dominion Enterprises company.
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The company has about 800 field representatives located across 48 states, excluding Alaska and Hawaii, that service about 9,000 mostly used and some new car dealerships, Nenni said.
"We go to the dealership's lot with a laptop computer and digital camera and we take a bunch of photos of the vehicle, capture all the information — the serial number, the make and model, the vehicle identification number and all the options — and then upload it to their Web sites," said Nenni, whose two brothers — Mike and Jack — launched the company in 1989.
"So our data is really the backbone of the Internet used in car classifieds. There's only 21,000 new car dealers out there, so we have maybe 40 percent of them."
Some of the 2,000 Web sites the company sends the information to include AutoTrader.com, Cars.com, eBay, Craigslist and certified manufacturers like GM certified.com, he said.
"That way the dealer doesn't have to do any work and they have consistent imaging and data and pricing across all the Web sites," Nenni said.
The company also works with dealerships certified programs — VW certified and GM certified — by placing a window label on used cars outlining the warranty and description of the vehicle.
"We take all that data that we just worked so hard to capture and we put a little merchandising label on the car to help the shoppers," he said.
"Then that same data gets sprayed across the Internet and then, in addition, we'll give the dealer some inventory management tools so that the dealer can go up there and delete cars and change prices."
The company employs 85 people who perform a variety of tasks such as software development, customer and technical support, accounting, human resources and senior management at its one-story 20,000-square-foot headquarters.
Nenni said the company grows about 15 to 20 percent each year and it has a payroll of between $2 million to $3 million.
For more information about the company, visit www.
dealerspecialties.com.
Contact this reporter at (513) 705-2595 or dewilson@coxohio.com.
