For auto dealers near New York City, space is often limited and expensive.
So when Oliver Brodlieb — a fourth-generation dealer on Long Island — came across a 5-acre site in Oyster Bay, N.Y., that could provide his growing dealership with some much-needed “breathing room,” he seized the opportunity.
“The amount of sales that we were growing — double-digit year-over-year growth — and all of the service business that that generates, it was like fitting 10 pounds in a five-pound bag,” said Brodlieb, president of East Hills Chrysler-Jeep-Dodge-Ram in Greenvale, N.Y. “We couldn’t continue to grow without expanding our footprint.”
He bought the site in 2015 for $5.3 million along with business partners Ken and Tim Brodlieb — his uncle and cousin. Ken owns East Hills Auto Group, which consists of Brodlieb’s dealership as well as three Chevrolet stores and a Subaru store.
The partners are using the site — formerly a Chevrolet dealership — as a storage facility and reconditioning center for Brodlieb’s dealership and the group’s Chevrolet stores. It employs 10 people and can hold about 700 vehicles.
“For us, it was like ‘control your own destiny,’ ” Brodlieb said of purchasing the site, which has freed up space at the dealerships, creating a better — and more efficient — experience for customers.
The site is used to store and clean vehicles for the four dealerships as well as prep them for pickup and delivery without taking up coveted space on the dealerships’ lots.
“It has tremendous storage inside and out, and it has a huge shop,” Brodlieb said. “We have six lifts. We probably have room for another 10 as we continue to grow, so it really gives us flexibility and growth opportunity.”
Brodlieb’s dealership, which employs more than 90 people, sold 2,248 new and 411 used vehicles in 2020. At its peak in 2016, the store sold 3,838 new and 609 used vehicles.
He said purchasing the Oyster Bay site was the perfect opportunity to expand his store’s footprint, including the service department, which was averaging about 28,000 repair orders annually.
“The biggest benefit was the customer satisfaction and the ease of which we were operating,” said Brodlieb, who in June was elected chairman of the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association, which represents more than 400 franchised new-vehicle retailers in metro New York.
“It really killed two birds with one stone,” he added.
“One of the major issues that car dealers face on Long Island is storage because the price of dirt and real estate is so high.”
Brodlieb said the storage and reconditioning center has allowed the dealership to expand its service department by seven lifts, adding that customer satisfaction scores also have “improved drastically.”
“To be able to free up more lifts by taking out all of the internal work, it gives us growth opportunity, where many dealers are just completely landlocked and they can’t grow,” he explained.
While the facility has “plenty of space” right now because of the microchip shortage that has created low inventory levels for dealers, Brodlieb expects that, in time, that will change.
“Being able to control your own destiny, being able to know that you have places to store cars, to recondition them, prep them — it’s just good business,” he said.