Repo company brings buses to Beverly
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The Inter-Mountain photo by Edgar Kelley
A line of repossessed charter buses sit in a row in a field off the Beverly Five-lane. The buses were brought to the area by a company called TFS Recovery, which provides equipment recovery for banks.
HAZELWOOD -- A long row of charter buses sitting in a field just past the Country Club Road on the Beverly Five-lane has left many citizens in the community intrigued.
Residents have noticed that the grounds, which once housed Woodford Oil, now hold a large amount of wreckers, tow trucks and extra-large buses. Some have wondered if the buses are there as part of a new tour bus company or bus station.
Actually, the facility is a business called TFS Recovery that recently moved from Mineral, Virginia to its new location just outside of Beverly.
TFS Recovery is a repossession company that has locations in seven states throughout the United States, with its main office in Florida. The new facility on the Beverly Five Lane officially opened at the beginning of July.
"We basically dig up equipment for commercial banks," TFS owner Kevin Davis, who started the business in 1992, told The Inter-Mountain. "We don't do any consumer recovery, no cars or anything like that, nothing personal. We just pick up equipment across the country for larger banks and do worry-free repossession work for them."
Davis said the reason there are so many tour buses at his facility, compared to other equipment, is because of the toll the COVID-19 pandemic took on that particular industry.
"Having all the buses is definitely COVID-related," he said. "A lot of the bus companies shut down and turned all the buses over because they couldn't operate them."
He said there are two main reasons banks turn to his company for recovery, the first being that they are tired of dealing with auctions and taking a loss when they sell items "as is." Secondly, because of how much money dealers have to put back into the items before they are resold.
"We pick the equipment up and ultimately prepare it for resale for the banks," Davis said. "We do some reconditioning and remediation on the equipment and the banks put it up for sale. They do very well with it this way, it helps to alleviate a bunch of the losses they're going to have on the repo."
It was for those reasons that a bigger facility was needed for TFS, and the location in Randolph County fit the bill perfectly.
"I'm glad that I ran across the property because we have a lot more room here than we did in Virginia," Davis said. "Because of the amount of equipment that has been coming back and the response the banks have had with us getting things ready for resale for them, they've been putting more on us. So that's why we had to find a bigger facility."
It's not just buses, tow trucks and wreckers that the company is sent out to recover. Davis said he gets many unusual requests, including one that was handed to him just days ago.
"We will repossess anything commercial," Davis said. "One of the unusual items we've had to get in the past was a liposuction machine. And I just got an order (Friday) on a large industrial sewing machine for an apparel company out of Illinois."
TFS Recovery brought seven employees to West Virginia from their Virginia location and has since hired two additional people from this area. Davis said things have gone well in the short time he and the company have been at its new location.
"I really like the smaller town feel," he said. "The people have definitely been the best thing. I mean in Virginia you get a lot of mean people and you can't talk to anyone over there without them giving you an attitude about something. Over here everyone is just nice and really super helpful."