Advice personal property/repo case ?
Advice personal property/repo case ?
I am in Southern California. I volluntarily turned my car over to the finance
company which owns it. They sent an impound company to retrieve the car from the
auto shop where it was. Six days after the car was retrieved, I received a
letter from the impound company with a list of the items that were in the car.
My issues are:
1. Many valuable items are missing from the inventory list. I am a seller on
eBay, and at the time that the car broke down I had packaged merchandise and
shipping supplies in the car. The dealership has comfirmed that the (plain
brown, unmarked) boxes were still in the car when it was retrieved.
2. The impound company wants to charge $120 to return my items to me, plus $12
daily storage fee for each day from the day the letter was written. The letter
is dated 11/13, the envelope is postmarked 11/17, and I received the letter
11/18. But they want to bill me from 11/13.
Apart from the fact that there are missing items from their inventory list, I am
deeply upset that this company is apparently allowed to "sell" back to me MY
personal property which they (in my opinion) have in their possession illegally.
The finance company owns the car, and authorized this company to retreive their
property, but NO ONE gave this same company the right to take MY property, much
less to hold it for ransom.
And I wrong? Is this legal, or is this just something that most people accept be
cause the BELIEVE it's legal and don't question it? Is there anything I can do
to fight this?
My take on it is that the impound company became a bailee for your
personal property when you turned the car over. They owe you some care
in accounting for and returning your property, but I don't think you
can make a pretense that they should do it for free; they are entitled
to their costs and a profit for doing so. If they lost some of that
property (or allowed somebody to steal it), that's negligence, not
theft, and they may have some liability for that.
What I don't understand is why you left the goods in the car when you
voluntarily relinquished it. That would be negligence on your part.
California is a comparative-negligence state, so that would not
prevent you from recovering something.
Whether they would owe you anything for the missing property would
depend on just what standard of care they owed you. This is the sort
of question that attorneys are paid well to argue.
You need to weigh the value of the lost goods against the cost of
retaining an attorney to help you recover them and the likelihood of
recovering anything.