YORK, Maine — Steve “Hoaty” Houghton, general manager of Starkey Ford, was at a car auction in Kittery on the evening of Aug. 4, when a freak storm hit the seacoast. He didn’t think much about it because, although torrential, it only lasted a few minutes.
“But as I headed back to York, I started noticing hail on the grass, and it started getting bigger and bigger. That’s when my heart sunk. I thought, ‘This can’t be good,’” he said.
In fact, every single vehicle on the Starkey Ford lot — some 200 altogether — had some kind of damage from hail that evening, millions of dollars worth, he said. When the dealership discovered in the preceding days it would take several months to take the dents out of all of them, Houghton came up with idea of holding a “hail sale.”
The dealership at this point knows how much it will be receiving in insurance money to repair the dings and dents in each vehicle, so it’s offering the new and used trucks and cars “as is” for a discount of up to 25 percent off the listed cost, he said. People can save $5,000 to $12,000, depending on the vehicle.
“The average person would not be able to find the damage on most of them,” he said. “At least 50 percent received very light damage, and the other 50 percent light to moderate damage. It isn’t like the hail storm that hit Exeter eight years ago. The vehicles in those dealerships were totaled.”
The quick-moving hail storm appeared to hit Boston-area dealerships but largely skipped those in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he said, based on conversations he has had with other general managers, before crashing down in York.
And the vehicles at Starkey weren’t the only ones damaged in the storm. Wendy Tapley of Tapley Insurance in York said her office has processed at least 50 individual claims since Aug. 4. “We’re one of five or six agencies in town. It’s been crazy. Everyone in this office has been working straight out since then,” she said.
She said it appears to have hit York proper the worst. She said she lives in Cape Neddick, and her cars were not damaged.
Houghton said this is the first time in Starkey’s 60-year history it has experienced a hail storm. In fact, he said, the Ford Motor Co. disaster team, which arrived the day after the storm to assess the damage, said it was the first time they had been to Maine for this kind of occurrence.
A hail repair team from the national company Dent Wizard will be setting up a tent on the dealership grounds to begin to repair the cars that aren’t sold. Starkey also is opening those services up to anyone from York who wants to have a car repaired from hail damage — regardless of where they purchased it. Houghton said to call the dealership to make an appointment.
He said word about the “hail sale” is just getting out, though major ads are running in the Seacoast in the next few days. Just by word of mouth and Facebook, they already have sold 10 cars. He expects the sales to be brisk in both used and new vehicles, with a nod to used vehicles because of “Yankee frugality. People want to know, how much of a deal am I going to get?”
While he said he’s “curious about how this will go, I believe sales are going to break wide open. I expect we’re going to be pretty busy.”