By the Numbers

By John Yoswick

The past 16 months have been unusual, to say the least, but to help you get a handle on what’s happening in and around the industry, here’s our annual collection of stats and trends impacting collision repairers. 

Backlog still on the light side, but returning  

“This is the most backlog we have had in nine months,” the owner of a multi-location collision repair business in the suburbs of Philadelphia wrote in January, as the national scheduling backlog rose for the third consecutive quarter to an average of 1.6 weeks at the start of this year. But that was still the lowest average for the first quarter in any of the past four years, according to tracking by CRASH Network, leaving many shops uneasy. 

“It’s on the edge, where we could add staff, but we are seasonal here and want a little more backlog [before we] make that move,” a shop owner in rural Montana wrote. 

The survey results show that…

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