Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009

Columbus Kia dealership's sales rise as West Point plant opening nears

In 2000, Columbus automobile dealer Carl Gregory had seen enough.

He sold his local Kia store to Monroe Lee, a Florida dealer who had gone from selling high-end luxury cars to more affordable transportation.

“For every two I would sell, I would buy one back,” Gregory said of his Kia venture. “The quality was incredibly bad and it started to hurt my reputation.”

So, Gregory — who had a diverse collection of brands that included Chrysler, Dodge, Volkswagen, Jeep, Honda, Ford, Lincoln, Mercury and Hyundai — dumped his Kia investment.

Nine years later, Lee’s Kia AutoSport of Columbus is turning into a high-volume location thanks in part to Kia’s decision to build its first U.S. manufacturing facility 40 miles north of here in West Point, Ga., and the dramatic increase in product quality.

The Georgia plant, which has already hired more than 1,000 workers, will begin production in November. By the middle of next year, it will employ more than 2,500 in the Chattahoochee Valley.

Car for life?

Lee, whose only new car brand was Kia, figured out how to market the South Korea-manufactured vehicles — which by all accounts was an inferior product compared to other foreign and domestic cars in the mid-1990s. Lee would sell them, then fix them. And he was doing it in stores in Tallahassee, Fla., Pensacola, Fla., and Albany, Ga.

“The product was not very good,” Lee said. “I came from a technical background — I’m a mechanic. I didn’t want to sell people one car, I wanted to sell them a car for life. But the Kias had bad wiring problems, so we developed a service follow-up program. And we kept most of our cars running. Most of it was just stupid stuff — poor quality and poor quality control.”

Lee offered free oil changes to his customers.

“We did that simply to ensure the product would last,” Lee said last week.

Lee offered to take the Columbus Kia store off Gregory’s hands. He had paid $34,000 for the Tallahassee store, $48,000 for Pensacola and moved into Albany when no other dealers wanted the location.

“Carl was a little harder to negotiate with,” Lee said. “I paid a lot more for that one than I paid for the other ones.”

66 vehicles was previous best

The best sales month for the Columbus Kia store was 66 vehicles in early 2001. That will all change by the end of this month.

Since Aug. 1, Kia AutoSport has sold 100 vehicles, General Manager Ed Braun said. With a good final week, the store could double its best sales month ever.

There are a lot of factors in the sales spurt, not the least of which is the West Point plant. For now, Kia AutoSport of Columbus is the closest store to the facility. That will change next year when a Kia store will open in LaGrange, about 15 miles from the plant.

Part of the spurt in sales is related to tent events Kia AutoSport held in the parking lot of the plant. Those events, held over two weekends earlier this month, drew more than 6,000 people to look at and test drive the new Kia automobiles.