Dealers Auto Auction of Spokane, a 6-year-old vehicle wholesaler, has been in its new, enlarged auction facility on the West Plains for only about two yearsand its already expanding.


Its adding three sales lanes to the facilitys auction arena, boosting the total number of sales lanes to eight, and enlarging its adjoining vehicle-storage area, says Bob McConkey Jr., the companys president. Over the next year or two, if business remains strong, the company also plans to expand its offices and vehicle-reconditioning area, McConkey says. In all, it expects to spend about $1.5 million on the improvements.


Dealers Auto Auction, which holds auctions every Thursday, sells vehicles on consignment for banks and finance companies, rental-car companies, and fleet and lease companies. It also sells cars traded in on new vehicles and excess inventories consigned by dealers. Only dealers can buy cars at the auction.


Our volumes are expanding at a tremendous rate, McConkey says.


He says the auction has added several new major accounts since January and that its dealer consignments were up about 24 percent in the first quarter of this year over the year-earlier quarter. In addition to customers from the Inland Northwest, the facility has been drawing an increasing number of buyers and sellers from Western Washington, Oregon, Northern California, and Utah, he says.


The business, which is owned by McConkey and Greg Mahugh, expects to sell 40,000 to 42,000 vehicles this year between the Spokane facility, which is located at 2215 S. Hayford Road, and a sister facility in Pasco, Wash., called Dealers Auto Auction of Tri-Cities, that the two men bought and renamed in April 1996. The Spokane facility now has about 140 full-time employees, but its work force swells to nearly 200 people during peak periods with the addition of part-time and temporary workers, McConkey says. The Tri-Cities facility employs about another 70 people, he says.


Dealers Auto Auction of Spokane moved into its $4.7 million facility on Hayford Road in June 1996. The facility is located on 35 acres of land that McConkey bought in the summer of 1995. It includes a 23,000-square-foot auction arena and office, which is being expanded by 5,000 square feet with the new sales lanes; a 12,000-square-foot detail shop with an automated car-washing system; and a 9,000-square-foot body and paint shop. Adjoining parking areas now can accommodate about 2,500 cars.


Baker Construction, of Spokane, which is the general contractor on the $300,000 sales lane addition project, began work on that project about a month ago and is expected to finish the job next month, McConkey says. The storage-area work will be done separately.


McConkey and Mahugh are auto-auction veterans who formerly worked together in Seattle. They started Dealers Auto Auction of Spokane in the fall of 1992, buying the former Inland Northwest Auto Auction Inc. facility at the corner of Geiger Boulevard and Electric Avenue in the Spokane International Airport Business Park. That facility included a 10,000-square-foot administration building with a caf and an adjoining two-lane auction pavilion, located on a fenced and paved seven-acre site that the auction business leased.


In 1994, the two men leased another six acres of land and disclosed plans to spend about $1 million to expand that facility. They later scrapped those plans, however, after deciding that the main building there was too small to handle their companys future needs. They later sold that facility to the airport business park.