It's a Family Business at Uvalde's Regency Chevrolet

January 23, 2008
By Hal Brown
Special to LIVE!

H.T. Langford doesn’t do anything fancy at Regency Chevrolet—no pressure, just consumer-oriented car sales. It’s got to be that way to survive in the car business the way Regency Chevrolet has. Regency is located right in the middle of Uvalde, at 825 Main St., and has been since 1986. But the dealership itself is almost 50 years old.

A homegrown Uvalde resident, H.T. Langford has been at Regency almost since it opened.

“Originally my father purchased it in 1986,” Langford said. “I’ve been working here since 1987. I took over for him: The previous partner he had running the place passed away kind of suddenly. Then about 1990 my father passed away. He wasn’t actually active here at the dealership, he was an investor.”

Langford is active. After growing up in Uvalde and going off to the University of Texas for an accounting degree, he came home. After a few other jobs, he recognized his best business opportunity was at the dealership.

“I never really planned on being in the car business,” he said. “My father had an accounting business here. The car dealership was one of his clients, and the previous owner approached him about selling it to him. That’s how we got into the business to begin with, and we’ve stayed in it since then.

“We handle pretty much all the General Motors lines. We’re Uvalde’s only General Motors dealer. We have Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, and Pontiac. I guess compared to a metro dealership we’re probably not a big dealership --maybe not even compared to Del Rio. I think of us as a small dealership.”

Regency is literally a hometown business for Langford. He tries to run it just that way, dealing with the friends and neighbors he’s rubbed shoulders with all his life.

It’s definitely not an urban attitude.

“The big dealerships in the city—sometimes they don’t respect their customers or pay attention,” Langford said. “Here we’re more consumer oriented, a low-pressure dealership, whereas in the city you get more high-pressure tactics.

“When you’re in a town like Uvalde we have to try to get a lot of repeat business, not just sell a customer one car. We try to make them a customer for a lifetime and treat them that way. In the city they can get away with doing whatever they can to sell to somebody once. There’s enough people there that they can sell a person once and they’ll be okay. Here we couldn’t do that with the population we have. We have to try to bring people back.

“I think that philosophy goes into the way we treat people here,” he said. “I think it’s a matter of treating people fair and treating them they way they want to be treated. You treat people like you want to be treated.”

And things remain consistent at Regency.

“Our salesmen have been here a long time—we don’t have a lot of employee turnover like you see in the bigger car dealerships. That’s one thing that’s a little bit different here.”

That even carries over to the location, on the same spot for the last half-century or so.

“Originally the building was up in front of where the service department is now,” Langford said. “We built a new sales office building in the back and tore down the building in the front in 1996. At that time we doubled the size of our shop facility and built this building.”

Langford said he’s comfortable in the middle of Uvalde; the two other local dealers are on the outskirts of town, toward San Antonio.

“I like being here in town,” he said. “The traffic count here on the highway (US 90) is so high. Pretty much everybody goes by the dealership once or twice a day. Whereas further out, they may get out that way or they may not, depending on if they’re specifically going that direction. It’s convenient for customers, too.”

Chevrolet and GMC trucks are Regency’s biggest sellers along with sport utility vehicles. Practicality sells in Uvalde, even as gas prices go up. Langford, with a universe of GM vehicles to choose from, has the same tastes as his customers: Nothing exotic for him.

“I drive a half-ton crew cab pickup, four wheel drive. My wife drives a Suburban or a Yukon or something like that -- a family car,” he said.

“I think some people are looking for a little more fuel economy, but we sell trucks the most. The utility vehicles are still real popular: Suburbans and Tahoes, Yukons, those kinds of things.

“We’ve kind of gotten some new small utility vehicles, the GMC Acadia, that and the Buick Enclave have been kind of popular. They’re smaller utility vehicles, not quite as big as the Tahoe. I guess it’s partly people like the size of them, the design, and they get a little better gas mileage, too. Those have picked up here lately.”