The Car-Sales Business Grows Up -- Eastside Dealers Outdo Seattle Rivals In Yearly Receipts

The car-selling business was much simpler back in 1957, when Art Evered opened his Mercury dealership at 104th Avenue Northeast and Main Street in downtown Bellevue.

Now, with a proliferation of domestic- and foreign-auto dealers, the car trade isn't just more competitive and complex. It's become a huge local business.

Thirty-one Eastside dealers sold $715 million worth of new and used cars in Bellevue, Kirkland, Issaquah and Redmond in 1997, the last full year for which figures are available. The number rivals Bellevue Square's annual receipts and is well above Seattle's $520 million in car sales.

Auto sales represent 24 percent of the retail trade in Bellevue and 28 percent in Kirkland.

In contrast to the rapid growth and instant wealth created by many Eastside high-tech companies, the story of dealers of U.S.-made cars has been one of persevering through good times and bad.

Back in 1957, Evered's Bellevue Mercury consisted of a showroom and gas station with two repair hoists in one small building.

"All of us washed cars and dug ditches and changed oil," recalled Art's son Tom, who split his time between running the gas station and attending the University of Washington.

Like most of the other auto dealerships on the Eastside and around Puget Sound, it's remained a family-owned business. Tom Evered runs Bellevue Lincoln Mercury with his brother Mike and their longtime friend Roger Rohrich.

During the partners' years together, they've seen sales plummet with the Boeing layoffs of 1970, watched a dismaying number of consumers shift to fuel-efficient Japanese cars and now are warily eyeing nationwide attempts to consolidate dealerships into high-volume, low-cost operations.

Evered sold more new cars last year than any other Lincoln Mercury dealer in the Northwest. But those 490 sales represent a slower pace than the 300 sales the dealership recorded in just three months before the energy crisis of the 1970s crashed in on the U.S. auto industry.

"It was so bad I don't want to remember," Tom Evered said. "There were all kinds of things. There was the Boeing downturn. There was the competition. You got up every morning, you put on your pants or your skirt and sold cars. That's what we did. We sold. We did our share."

Before Art Evered went into business there were, according to the 1955 Yellow Pages, 10 Eastside dealers selling Chevrolets, Fords, Chryslers and Plymouths, Pontiacs, Dodges, Buicks, Nashes, Studebakers and Volkswagens.

By 1961, car sales were booming in Bellevue, and downtown dealers needed more space. Four dealers jointly purchased 11 acres on 116th Avenue Northeast in Bellevue, establishing a new auto row. They drew straws for locations, with Art Evered drawing the second-most-desirable lot, the second-closest to Northeast Eighth Street. Bel-Air Chevrolet won the top spot.

Auto row, which has expanded since then, remains the heart of the industry.

But the auto-row dealers' share of the total market has declined as competing shops have opened in other parts of Bellevue, Kirkland and Issaquah. Some of the newer dealers are responding to wealthy customers' demand for high-performance, high-ticket imports.

Jimmy Barrier, a BMW dealer in Charlotte, N.C., was chosen by the manufacturer to open a Bellevue dealership in 1985. Since then he has added Volvo, Saab, Jaguar, Porsche and Audi to his lineup. Prices at Barrier Motors' still-growing lots range from $25,000 for a lower-end Audi to $100,000 for a top-of-the-line Porsche. The company employs 230 people, three times Evered's work force.

Bellevue Alfa Romeo-Lamborghini-Laforza is even more upscale. Laforzas start at $50,000, and Lamborghinis run to $284,000.

The more familiar American names, such as Ford and Chevrolet, recently have held their own as sales of sport-utility vehicles have breathed new energy into the market. Sport-utility vehicles now account for 60 percent of new-car sales in major markets on the West Coast. At Brooks Chevrolet on Bellevue's auto row, SUVs, minivans and pickups account for 80 percent of all sales.

Greg Brooks, whose father, Harland Brooks, and partner Jack McKnight bought Bellevue's Chevrolet dealership in 1969, will open a second showroom in Issaquah as early as November.

But even as Brooks prepares to expand, he and other local dealers are looking over their shoulders at a trend that could displace family businesses: consolidation of smaller dealerships into larger, corporate-owned outlets.

The leader in the trend, Republic Industries, operates nearly 400 dealerships and 42 used-car megastores under the AutoNation USA banner. Some manufacturers, including Ford, are consolidating dealerships in selected markets.

So far, Brooks and Evered haven't seen signs of consolidation in the Seattle area. But they know it's likely to come to an industry in which change is one of the few constants.

In they meantime, they struggle to compete in a field crowded with local dealers.

"There are so many more dealerships than there used to be," says Brooks. "You marvel at that a little bit and you wonder how all these dealerships make it."

Retail extra

Bartell Drugs is again targeting the Redmond market. Just three months after opening its 44th store in Redmond's Bella Bottega shopping center, Bartell announced that its 45th store will open in Redmond Town Center next summer. At 17,640 square feet it will be among the largest in the chain.

Construction of a 67,000-square-foot Top Foods at Crossroads will begin by summer, with opening scheduled for late this year or early 2000. As in Woodinville, the store will compete with a nearby QFC.

The downtown Bellevue Taco Time will move early next month to the northwest corner of Northeast Second Street and 106th Avenue Northeast. The chain is moving because it could be displaced by the expansion of Meydenbauer Center. Shop Talk appears on the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month.