Mateo Leija, reconditioning supervisor of GiveMeTheVIN.com, shows a Subaru Impreza that was damaged by a hailstorm at a parking lot of Manheim Dallas, Wednesday, May 6, 2026, in Dallas.
Chitose Suzuki/The Dallas Morning News
While the hail storm that blew through Dallas-Fort Worth the night of April 25 wasn’t as bad as it could have been, for John Clay Wolfe, founder of vehicle wholesaler GiveMeTheVIN.com, it was “my worst nightmare.”
Every Wednesday, Wolfe hosts a car auction at his lanes at auction house Manheim Dallas, and on the last Wednesday of every month, that auction includes classic and collector cars. It’s a high-octane affair with multiple auction lanes going simultaneously in Dallas and other cities and a live radio show to pair with it.
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By the time the hail storm hit that weekend, there were already around 800 cars on site, uncovered for the April 31 auction, including 80 collector cars and 300 highline (sports or luxury) cars. One truck had 1,000 dents, a Ferrari’s windshield was cracked, and countless others were dinged, cracked or in need of inspection.
In total, Wolfe is looking at $3 million in potential damage, accounting for an average insurance deductible of $2,500 and additional supplements for repairs to the expensive cars that need extra attention.
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“The Ferraris and the Lamborghinis and stuff, we can’t drill holes on those cars to do paintless dent repair,” Wolfe explained. “And so they’re going to have to be painted in some cases, and you’ve got to have it super-duper professionally done.”
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A cracked windshield of a Ferrari that was damaged by a hailstorm is seen at a parking lot of Manheim Dallas, Wednesday, May 6, 2026, in Dallas.
Chitose Suzuki/Staff photographer
Wolfe started selling cars in the mid-90s, but this is the first time something like this has happened to him. He spent the days leading up to last week’s auction negotiating with his insurance company on how much they would pay out per car and which cars would get repaired versus simply sold with hail damage. The annual bill for the policy is nearly $700,000, and like the home, auto and health insurance we all pay, it’s getting more expensive.
Wolfe explained that dealer insurance previously had something akin to your health insurance’s out-of-pocket maximum. While each damaged car had a deductible, after a certain amount paid — for Wolfe it was $50,000 — no more deductible needed to be paid. Over the past few years, insurers in Texas have done away with that, called an aggregate, for the same reasons consumer home and auto insurance has risen: increasing frequency of natural disasters.
There’s also not much Wolfe and other wholesalers can do to mitigate the impact of storms. Manheim controls the auction lots, and at more than 100 acres, Manheim Dallas is too large to practically cover. Wolfe said there were 17,000 cars on the lot that were hit by the hailstorm.
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“It’s kind of one of those things you’ve just gotta eat, to tell you the truth,” Wolfe said.
In addition to the cost of fixing the cars, the hail storm also put a chunk of last week’s inventory in time out, about $25 million of $70 million worth of inventory, to be exact. While 35 classics still sold April 31 and 140 cars were repaired in time to be sold at auction May 6, the rest have not only been sitting unsold as they get fixed, but clogging the pipes of future auctions, where selling cars quickly is crucial.
John Clay Wolfe, CEO of GiveMeTheVIN.com, is seen at Manheim Dallas auction, Wednesday, May 6, 2026, in Dallas.
Chitose Suzuki/The Dallas Morning News
The car auction business is fast-moving and very low-margin, buying and selling thousands of cars per day to dealers at wholesale prices, but there isn’t enough demand right now to support selling additional cars each week as the backlog is cleared. That cash flow disruption isn’t something insurance can pay for, nor is the loss of selling cars for less than they would have gone for before the storm.
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At the end of the day, though, GiveMeTheVIN.com will be fine, Wolfe said. He’s tapped into an emergency line of credit he’s paid for for years for this exact purpose. But the profitability of the company for the year will take a major hit, he said. They typically do about $1.5 billion in revenue per year at a gross margin of 3%, which leaves $45 million before expenses like rent, salaries and taxes. A potential loss of $3 million is a big bite out of that.
“Remember when Fort Worth got hit so hard it was like basketball sized? That would have been better for us, because it would have totaled everything,” Wolfe said. “This was just bad enough to cost a s— ton of money.”