Auto Repair Shop Feasibility Study in the Fresno, CA Metro Area

Fresno: repair shops seventh of 39

Auto repair shops rank 7th among the 39 classes in SBA's Fresno, CA file, and the area is 68th of 660 for the class. 29 loans worth $10.2 million are on file for Fresno, covering FY2017 to FY2026. Location quotient 1.06x; median loan $250,000, or 1.06x the national median. Half the loans sit between $150,000 and $493,500, with the rest above and below. Both ratios sitting almost exactly at the norm make Fresno a useful baseline for a lender.

Of the 29 loans, 24 are 7(a) and 5 are 504. No bank in Fresno holds 5 loans, so none is shown. The page also prints no county tally, so the file says little about which part of the area the loans come from.

Zero years and the class

In FY2019, FY2020 and FY2023 alike, Fresno records 0 loans and $0; those are values, not gaps. Years not shown for Fresno sit beneath the display floor. Truck repair is indexed with car repair and cannot be separated; this class stops short of body and paint shops, glass shops, oil-change stops and the catch-all automotive repair code. Fewer than 30 loans back Fresno, so no cancellation or charge-off rate.

The three printed zero years are worth a closer look. FY2019, FY2020 and FY2023 are not missing: they are years in which the file shows no loans at all for Fresno repair shops, while the other years are too thin to print. A lender reading this will see a cell in which volume is lumpy, and a study should avoid describing the flow of shop loans as steady on the strength of the total of 29 loans alone.

Fresno shop plans against the $250,000 median

A lender can treat a request near $250,000 as typical here and anything far above it as needing explanation, so a borrower should be ready to show how many bays, what equipment and what lease or purchase terms make up the number. Because the ratios sit near the national norm, the argument for a particular project has to come from the site and the business plan: the car count the location supports, technician supply, parts margin, and payments covered in a slow first year. Real estate and the operating business should be valued apart.