By Mike Davey
Hamilton, Ontario — July 6, 2016 — There are new rules for storing vehicles in Ontario, particularly with regards to how soon a lien holder must be notified after a repair shop or tow company receives the vehicle. For more on the new rules, please see “New regs in Ontario for towing and storage now in effect.”
The new rules state that the lien holder must be contacted within 15 days. This is a big change from the previous regulation, which gave vehicle storers 60 days to notify the lien holder. However, the new rules also state that the notification can be via email. Previously, lien holders had to be notified via certified letter.
There’s a service that might be of interest to anyone who stores vehicle in Ontario. It can be found at eimpound.com, and it is free to use for identifying and notifying lien holders.
Users enter a VIN or tag, then eimpound identifies the lien holder and sends them an electronic notification showing information on the vehicle, its location and appropriate contact information.
“If no match is found, users can email eimpound, and we will search our private and public sector databases to find the lien holder manually and for free,” says John Haliburton of Locator Technologies, the company that operates the site.
In an email conversation with Collision Repair magazine, Haliburton noted that Locator Technologies has many of the major auto finance companies as clients, so it has access to over 40 million lien records, and the company is working on adding more insurance companies’ vehicles to its lien record database.
“We realized that collision repair companies, towing and storage companies, and others needed a way to identify and notify lien holders for free and that Locator Technologies can bring in additional vehicle occurrence data, so eimpound.com was created,” says Haliburton.
The site can be used across North America. The site is free to use to identify and notify lien holders. Instead, lien holders pay monthly fees to Locator Technologies based on the number of VINs that the company is monitoring on their behalf.
For more information, please visit eimpound.com.
