---
title: "What the tape said: the lot behind the branch"
url: https://lendriskanalytics.com/insights/the-lot-behind-the-branch.html
publisher: LendRisk Analytics
series: What the Tape Said
issue: 12
published: 2026-08-31
kind: Research brief
description: "One line on the NCUA call report counts cars already repossessed and not yet sold. Roughly seven in ten credit unions leave it blank. Across eleven consecutive annual cohorts, the institutions filling it in charged off more the following year, every time. Every figure recomputed from the raw filings; inferences labeled."
html: https://lendriskanalytics.com/insights/the-lot-behind-the-branch.html
---

# What the tape said: the lot behind the branch

[← All insights](https://lendriskanalytics.com/articles.html)

What the Tape Said · Issue 12
Research brief · 14 min read

Credit unions · NCUA 5300 · Repossessed inventory

# The lot behind the branch.

NCUA 5300 call reports, 2022–2026 · Public record through August 31, 2026 · LendRisk Analytics

Delinquency reports a promise already broken. There is a different line on the same quarterly filing, one field on schedule FS220P, that counts something physical: consumer vehicles the credit union has already repossessed and not yet sold. Cars sitting on a lot, waiting to become a charge-off. Roughly seven in ten federally insured credit unions leave it blank. Among the ones that fill it in, the size of that number, relative to the vehicle book, sorts next year's losses. It has done so in eleven consecutive annual cohorts without an exception at the top of the scale.

$585M

Repossessed consumer vehicles on credit union books, March 2026

69%

Of 4,250 federally insured credit unions report zero or nothing in the field

2.0×

Next-year charge-off rate, top repo quartile against non-reporters

11 of 11

Annual cohorts in which the top quartile charged off more than every group below it

## Bottom line

Take every federally insured credit union with at least $10 million of vehicle loans in both March 2025 and March 2026. That is 2,284 institutions. Rank the ones reporting repossessed vehicle inventory by that inventory as a share of their vehicle book, cut them into quartiles, and put the non-reporters in their own group. Then wait a year and measure vehicle net charge-offs.

| Group, March 2025 | n | Median repo / vehicle book | Vehicle NCO, year to March 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reports none | 1,159 | 0.000% | 0.877% |
| Quartile 1 | 282 | 0.027% | 0.959% |
| Quartile 2 | 281 | 0.086% | 1.349% |
| Quartile 3 | 281 | 0.173% | 1.394% |
| Quartile 4 | 281 | 0.438% | 1.753% |

Charge-off rates are dollar-weighted within group: total net vehicle charge-offs over total vehicle loans, annualized. Every figure in this brief was recomputed from the raw NCUA files for publication, not carried over from working notes.

Twice the loss rate, top of the scale against the bottom, from one field most institutions do not fill in. The same construction run on every available annual pair back to September 2022 produces the same ordering all eleven times.

The read
Delinquency is a payment that stopped. Repossessed inventory is a loss the institution has already committed to and not yet booked. The gap between those two is lead time, and one line on the 5300 measures it. **The honest version of this finding is narrower than it sounds:** repo inventory is a weaker standalone predictor than the credit measures everyone already watches. Its value is what it says about the institutions those measures call clean.

## I · What the field measures, and what it does not

Account AS0024 on schedule FS220P: consumer vehicle foreclosed and repossessed assets. When a credit union takes a car back, the loan comes off the books and the car goes on, held at its estimated value until sold. The difference between loan balance and sale proceeds becomes the charge-off. So the field is a photograph of losses in transit: committed, sized approximately, not yet recognized.

The obvious objection: if the car is already on the lot, the loss is already made, so predicting next year's charge-offs with it sounds like predicting rain with a wet umbrella. The answer is that the objection concedes the point. A measure that mechanically precedes recognition is exactly what lead time is. Delinquency has the same relationship to charge-offs and nobody calls it a tautology; it just sits earlier in the same sequence. Payment stops, car comes back, car sells, loss books. The field reads the third position in that sequence, the last one before the number everyone waits for.

What the field does not do is beat the standard measures head to head, and this brief will not pretend otherwise. In the March 2025 cohort, ranked by Spearman correlation with next-year vehicle charge-offs: prior charge-offs +0.691, prior vehicle delinquency +0.480, repo inventory +0.387, indirect-lending concentration +0.372. Repo inventory is the weakest of the four as a standalone signal. Controlling for prior delinquency it retains +0.337; controlling for delinquency, prior charge-offs and concentration together it retains +0.156. It carries some information of its own. Not a lot.

**Inference**
A signal that ranks third of four on its own has one legitimate use: the cases where the signals above it say nothing. That is where this one earns its place, and the next section is the evidence.

## II · The quadrant that matters

Split the cohort twice. Once at the median of prior vehicle delinquency, 0.576%, the number a board sees. Once at the median repo ratio among reporters, 0.122%, the number most boards do not. Four cells:

Chart 1 · Next-year charge-offs by prior delinquency and prior repo inventory

March 2025 cohort, n=2,284, vehicle NCO dollar-weighted within cell, year to March 2026. Non-reporters counted as low repo; the reporters-only version is given below the chart.

Splits at the cohort medians: prior vehicle delinquency 0.576%, repo ratio among reporters 0.122%. Reporters only, same construction: low-DQ low-repo 0.752% against low-DQ high-repo 1.200%, a gap of +0.45pp, so the result is not an artifact of bucketing non-reporters as low. Across all eleven annual cohorts the low-DQ gap is positive eleven times, median +0.37pp, median ratio 1.67x.

The top-right cell is the finding. One hundred ninety-six institutions whose delinquency sits below the cohort median, the profile a board reads as healthy, and whose lots are full. They charged off 1.11% over the following year against 0.67% for their clean-lot peers. Two thirds more loss, from a group the standard measure cannot separate. That gap is positive in all eleven cohorts.

**Inference**
Delinquency can be quiet while the lot fills, because extensions and modifications reset the past-due clock without touching the car. Issue 8 documented that mechanic in the securitized market. Here it is in a depository filing: the payment record says current, the yard says otherwise.

## III · Eleven cohorts, one ordering

Chart 2 · Top-quartile and non-reporter charge-offs, every available annual pair

Same construction repeated on each annual pair from September 2022–23 through March 2025–26. Top line is quartile 4, bottom line is non-reporters.

Q4 exceeds non-reporters in 11 of 11 pairs; the spread runs 0.71 to 1.15 percentage points, median 1.04. Quartile 2 beats non-reporters, quartile 3 beats quartile 2, and quartile 4 beats quartile 3 in all eleven. Spearman correlation sits between +0.358 and +0.393 in every pair. The eleven cohorts share most of their member institutions, so this is stability of one population through time, not eleven independent experiments.

One honest wrinkle, stated rather than smoothed: the bottom quartile of reporters is indistinguishable from the non-reporters. Q1 lands below the non-reporter group in seven of the eleven pairs, median difference minus 0.03 points. A little repo inventory means nothing. The gradient begins at quartile 2, which in the current cohort means a repo ratio around 0.09% of the vehicle book and up.

The ordering also survives the obvious confound. Big institutions report more and charge off more, so the gradient could have been a size effect wearing a costume. Within each of four asset bands separately, under $200 million, $200 to $500 million, $500 million to $1 billion, and over $1 billion, the high-repo half of reporters exceeds the non-reporters by 0.5 to 0.7 points. The spread lives inside every size class.

## IV · A correction, and what concentration turned out to do

An earlier version of this analysis tested indirect-lending concentration against contemporaneous delinquency, found almost nothing, and said so. That test was wrong, and the error was mine: it compared the two measures on different clocks and different outcomes. On identical terms, concentration measured in March 2025 against vehicle charge-offs in the year to March 2026, concentration is monotonic in all eleven cohorts, with a median spread of 0.45 points from the lowest band to the highest and a standalone correlation of +0.372 against repo inventory's +0.387. Essentially tied. Under full controls, concentration retains slightly more independent signal, +0.182 against +0.156.

**Inference**
The lesson generalizes past this dataset: two measures can only be compared on the same clock against the same outcome. The corrected result does not weaken the repo finding, but it does mean the field is one of two useful early lines on the filing rather than the only one, and an examiner who wants a two-variable screen should take both.

## V · Seven in ten lots are dark

Now the part that turns a statistical note into a supervisory question. Among credit unions with at least $5 million of vehicle loans in March 2026:

Chart 3 · Who fills the field in

Share of credit unions with $5M+ vehicle loans reporting any repossessed vehicle inventory, March 2026, by asset band. The delinquency of each band is printed beside its bar.

Reporting counts: 443 of 1,664 under $200M; 255 of 499 at $200–500M; 185 of 282 at $500M–$1B; 367 of 466 above $1B. Delinquency is dollar-weighted within band.

The institutions least likely to fill the field in are the small ones, and the small band carries the highest vehicle delinquency of the four. Whatever sits on those lots is invisible to anyone reading the filings, including, at one remove, the examiners who set the exam calendar from them. A zero in this field means either an empty lot or an unanswered question, and the filing does not say which.

**Inference**
The non-reporter group in every table above is a blend of clean books and books that do not answer. That blend charged off 0.877% in the current cohort, higher than the bottom two reporter quartiles in several pairs, which is what a mixture of clean and unmeasured would look like. The one-line version for a supervisor: the field is cheap, it is already on the form, and the pattern above is an argument for making it non-optional.

## VI · What this does not show

Five things, so nobody has to find them for me.

1

**Repo inventory is the weaker standalone measure.** Prior charge-offs and prior delinquency both outrank it. Anyone running a single-variable screen should not pick this variable. Its use is conditional: the low-delinquency, high-repo cell, and the reporting gap.

2

**The eleven cohorts overlap.** The same institutions appear in most pairs, so eleven repetitions demonstrate persistence, not independence. There is no way around this with public data; the honest claim is stability, not eleven separate confirmations.

3

**Survivorship is present and disclosed.** Of 2,409 eligible institutions in the headline pair, 56 dropped out before the outcome year, 2.3%. The dropped group had weaker capital and earnings but lower vehicle delinquency than the survivors, so the direction of the bias is not obvious, and at 2.3% its size is small.

4

**The gradient starts at quartile 2.** A small positive repo number is noise. Any screen built on this field needs a floor, not a flag on any nonzero value.

5

**Nothing here identifies cause.** A full lot can mean aggressive repossession policy, slow disposal, a weak local auction market, or genuinely worse paper. The filing cannot distinguish these. What it can say is that whichever mix is present, the following year's charge-offs are higher, and that is the property a monitoring signal needs.

One outside data point, for corroboration rather than support: Depository360, which runs charter-departure work on the same filings, found that delinquency separates ceased from continuing credit unions in all thirteen of its cohorts, but by margins around 0.12 points. Our own March cohorts reproduce that scale: +0.12, +0.09, +0.09. The headline credit measure separates reliably and thinly. That is the gap this field, and concentration beside it, exist to fill.

Falsifiable
The claim fails if the quartile-4 group stops exceeding the non-reporter group in the next two annual cohorts, March 2027 and March 2028, or if the low-delinquency high-repo cell stops carrying a positive gap. Both tests are mechanical, the construction is fully specified above, and the data is public. **Anyone with the raw files can run it.**

## Proof: every figure, traced

All figures were recomputed from the raw NCUA call report archives for this publication. Recomputed means the number was independently rebuilt from the raw quarterly zip files and matched. Derived means calculated from recomputed figures, arithmetic shown.

| Claim as stated | Source | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 4,250 federally insured credit unions filing March 2026; $585.0M repossessed consumer vehicle assets; 1,304 reporting a nonzero value (31%, so 69% report zero or nothing); $479.6B total vehicle loans | NCUA 5300 call report, cycle 2026-03: FOICU.txt (CU_TYPE 1 and 2), FS220P.txt field ACCT_AS0024, FS220A.txt fields ACCT_370 + ACCT_385. Matches NCUA's published Q1 2026 institution count exactly | Recomputed |
| Headline cohort: 2,284 institutions with $10M+ vehicle loans in both 2025-03 and 2026-03, complete cases; group sizes 1,159 / 282 / 281 / 281 / 281 | Same files, both cycles, joined on CU_NUMBER | Recomputed |
| Group charge-offs 0.877 / 0.959 / 1.349 / 1.394 / 1.753%, dollar-weighted; median repo ratios 0.000 / 0.027 / 0.086 / 0.173 / 0.438% | Net charge-offs from FS220I (ACCT_550C1 + 550C2 less 551C1 + 551C2), annualized, over vehicle loans | Recomputed |
| 2.0x top quartile versus non-reporters | 1.753 / 0.877 = 2.00 | Derived |
| Correlations with next-year vehicle NCO: prior NCO +0.691, prior DQ +0.480, repo +0.387, concentration +0.372; repo partials +0.337 and +0.156; concentration partial +0.182 | Spearman on the headline cohort; partials by rank regression residuals. Full-controls values | Recomputed |
| 2x2 cells: 0.668 / 1.111 / 1.432 / 1.834%, n = 946 / 196 / 776 / 366; splits at DQ 0.576% and repo 0.122% | Headline cohort, splits at cohort medians | Recomputed |
| Reporters-only check: 0.752% versus 1.200%, gap +0.45pp | Same construction restricted to the 1,125 reporters | Recomputed |
| Eleven annual pairs, 2022-09 through 2025-03 starts: Q4 above non-reporters 11/11, Q2 above non-reporters 11/11, Q3 above Q2 11/11, Q4 above Q3 11/11; spread 0.71–1.15pp, median 1.04; rho +0.358 to +0.393; low-DQ gap positive 11/11, median +0.37pp | All fifteen cached quarterly archives, 2022-09 through 2026-03; replication table in the working files (repo_replication_FICU.csv) | Recomputed |
| Q1 below non-reporters in 7 of 11 pairs, median −0.03pp | Same replication table | Recomputed |
| Within asset bands, high-repo half exceeds non-reporters by 0.5–0.7pp in all four bands | Headline cohort split at $200M / $500M / $1B; recomputed spreads +0.69 / +0.60 / +0.67 / +0.53 | Recomputed |
| Concentration on identical terms: monotonic 11/11, median spread +0.45pp, rho +0.372 standalone in the headline pair, +0.246 median across pairs | 2025-03 indirect share of vehicle book against 2026-03 vehicle NCO; concentration_fair_test.csv in the working files | Recomputed |
| Reporting by band: 443/1,664 (27%), 255/499 (51%), 185/282 (66%), 367/466 (79%); band delinquency 0.86 / 0.77 / 0.76 / 0.79% | Cycle 2026-03, institutions with $5M+ vehicle loans | Recomputed |
| Survivorship: 56 of 2,409 dropped (2.3%); dropped group weaker capital and earnings, lower vehicle DQ | Eligible set at 2025-03 against filers at 2026-03 | Recomputed |
| Ceased-versus-continuing delinquency gaps +0.12 / +0.09 / +0.09pp in our March 2023–2025 cohorts | Computed in-house from the same archives. Depository360's independent charter-departure work (thirteen cohorts, ~0.12pp) cited as corroboration only, not as a source for any figure here | Recomputed |
| Field definition: ACCT_AS0024, "Consumer Vehicle Foreclosed and Repossessed Assets," schedule FS220P | AcctDesc.txt inside each NCUA quarterly archive | Recomputed |

**Sources & notes**
**Data.** NCUA 5300 call report quarterly archives, cycles 2022-09 through 2026-03, fifteen quarters, downloaded from ncua.gov. Files used: FOICU.txt for charter type (federally insured only, CU_TYPE 1 and 2; 86 privately insured charters excluded), FS220A.txt for vehicle loan balances, FS220P.txt for repossessed vehicle assets, FS220I.txt for vehicle charge-offs and recoveries, FS220C.txt for indirect balances, AcctDesc.txt for field definitions.

**Method.** Annual pairs join each start quarter to the same quarter one year later on charter number. Cohort floor $10 million of vehicle loans at both ends. Charge-offs are net of recoveries and annualized by cycle month. Group rates are dollar-weighted. Quartiles are set among reporters only; non-reporters are their own group. Correlations are Spearman. Every figure in the body was recomputed from the raw archives immediately before publication.

**Corroboration.** Depository360, "Why Credit Union Charters Disappear," on delinquency separation at charter departure; referenced as independent corroboration of the thinness of the headline measure, with the equivalent figures computed in-house from our own archives.

**Companion issues.** Issue 8 covers extension mechanics and the reported-versus-actual gap in securitized subprime. Issue 10 covers the credit union funding turn. Issue 11 covers the past-due arithmetic.

Where this brief reasons beyond what the filings state, it is labeled as an inference. The concentration correction in Section IV is stated in the body, not hidden in a footnote. Point-in-time reading of public filings through August 31, 2026. LendRisk Analytics is an independent research publication with no position in, and no affiliation with, any institution mentioned. This is not investment, legal or accounting advice.

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