Corwin Automotive acquires store, Wood Motor buys 2 from same retiring seller
Corwin Automotive Group and operating partner Jeff McConville reached an agreement with retiring dealer Bob Beine to buy his three Missouri dealerships.
The group, however, wanted just one store — Republic Ford-Lincoln. Corwin, of Fargo, N.D., hired Performance Brokerage Services, a buy-sell firm in Frisco, Texas. It was charged with helping find a buyer that Corwin could assign through its purchase agreement the other two dealerships, Carthage Ford and Carthage Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram, said Mike Sims, president of Performance Brokerage Services.
Wood Motor Co., of Harrison, Ark., was assigned as buyer of the Carthage stores. Corwin and McConville bought the Republic dealership Dec. 6; Susan Beine also was a seller, McConville said. Wood Motor bought the other stores Dec. 8. Sims and Wes Hamilton of Pinnacle were brokers in that transaction.
McConville, also operating partner with Corwin at Ford and Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram-Fiat dealerships in Springfield, Mo., said he had known Beine for about a decade, and the two had talked several times over 10 years about buying the Republic dealership.
“When he was finally ready, we were able to put together something,” he said.
McConville said Republic, just west of Springfield, is growing. “We felt it was a good location for us,” he said.
An 8,000-square-foot reconditioning and photo booth facility are being built at the dealership, now called Corwin Ford-Lincoln Republic, McConville said.
He said the Carthage stores — renamed Wood Ford Carthage and Wood Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram of Carthage — were smaller “than what we usually buy” and were outside of metro Springfield.
Corwin and operating partner Mario Wierzchowski in October bought Gus Johnson Ford in Spokane Valley, Wash. In addition to Missouri and Washington, the Corwin group has stores in Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada and North Dakota.
Wood Motor, which in August bought a Nissan dealership in Lee’s Summit, Mo., found the Carthage opportunities attractive, said Chip Johnson, dealer principal and president.
The stores gave Wood “the opportunity to have stores in northwest Arkansas, in the Joplin-Carthage market … and then the Kansas City market, which is kind of the three most populated areas in that north-south [Interstate] 49 corridor,” he told Automotive News.
Johnson said his group now has five stores near I-49 in Missouri and Arkansas, plus two others.
“We have another Ford and Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram store about an hour away,” Johnson said of his Carthage and Jane, Mo., dealerships. “And so with the inventory shortages, I think these two locations being an hour apart with the same brands gives us the ability to share inventory and kind of compete better against the bigger stores.”
