SAN ANTONIO -- The court order that Greg Castro sees before he repossesses a car does not explain why a person lost the vehicle.

This San Antonio repo man doesn’t necessarily want to know. But Castro often finds out after a shocked car or truck owner runs outside as he’s loading the defaulted vehicle onto a wrecker with the lighting speed of a pit crew boss.

“Eighty percent of them are people whose life got the better hand of them, and they just can’t pay their bills,” Castro said as he prepared to repossess a Honda SUV from an upscale neighborhood near Stone Oak.

In this battered economy—with unemployment at a 14-year high, a rate that threatens to climb even higher—car repossessions are on the rise.

“Job loss is the No. 1 reason for repossession,” said Tom Webb, chief economist for Atlanta-based Manheim, an auto auctioneer of repossessed vehicles.

While economists predict companies will continue to lay off employees next year, the automobile industry and banks are taking steps to curb repossessions, as they ultimately cost businesses more while simultaneously hurting consumers, experts said.

San Antonio’s economy is in better condition than other parts of the country—local unemployment was 4.9 percent for the quarter that ended in September, while the national rate was 6.1 percent— but some local repo men say car seizures are increasing.

“I’d say we’ve seen a 10 (percent) to 15 percent increase,” said Gary Amezcua, owner of San Antonio Recovery Inc.

Nationally, more than 1.5 million cars were repossessed last year, up 10 percent from 2006, Webb said. There has been another 10 percent increase to date this year. Such a change isn’t unusual, but the rise is significant because many of the cars repossessed recently involved “good loans” to people with high credit scores, Webb said.

“The economic times just caught up with people,” Webb said.

In previous economic cycles, seizures increased, in part, because of subprime loans to people with poor credit and unstable employment.

“We saw people with two or three repos on their records that could get a car with a big down payment,” said Michael Waldron, owner of Prime Time Adjusters Inc., which employs Castro.

As subprime credit dried up, underwriting practices changed in recent years to make it harder to lend to people who could not truly afford vehicles.

“There really aren’t subprime lenders extending credit to people with credit issues now,” Waldron said.

Banks now are further limiting auto loans to people by insisting on higher credit scores and bigger down payments, Webb said, and so repossessions could drop off. And banks are trying to work with borrowers, experts said, because lenders lose money when they seize and auction vehicles to used car dealerships.

“If you’ve got a $20,000 balance on a car that’s worth only $10,000, you’re taking a serious loss by repossessing it,” Amezcua said.

In many cases, the banks will renegotiate loans after vehicles have been repossessed. Once a car has been repossessed, car buyers have 10 days to pay off the past due balance or work out a deal with the bank.

Three years ago, 10 percent of people with repossessed vehicles would get their cars back from Prime Time Adjusters. Now, Waldron said, 65 percent of repossessed vehicles are being redeemed.

“The banks would rather them redeem them on good faith than take an average loss of $8,500 to $10,000 at auction,” said Waldron, a 20-year veteran of San Antonio’s repo business.

Many repossession companies include the word “adjuster” in their names because it refers to service of adjusting a loan, which was the practice banks preferred before repossession became popular in the 1980s, experts said.

The debt-strapped people who walk into the office of Rick Flume, a San Antonio bankruptcy lawyer, often are expecting a car to be repossessed at any moment.

“You need your car to keep your job so you can pay your bills,” he said. “Filing (Chapter 13) bankruptcy may be the only way to avoid a repossession.”

In some situations, filing bankruptcy is the only way to stop repossession while renegotiating a loan with lower payments, Flume said.

Waldron’s company works with the country’s biggest auto lenders.  In previous years, he would receive court orders to seize a vehicle after a buyer had fallen behind two months on a loan.

“Now we’re seeing cars that are four months behind,” he said.

One major reason for repossession is that people don’t keep in contact with lenders. Flume said car buyers have a better chance at renegotiating a loan if they show good faith to the lender.

In the weakening economy, Waldron has repossessed everything from airplanes to speedboats and the entire pickup fleet of a small business.

“This is the worst I’ve seen it in 20 years of doing business,” he said.

Waldron worries the people he encounters in the field—often in the early morning hours—will only become more hostile. It’s not uncommon for repo men to be confronted with guns and baseball bats.

While seizing a Cadillac in 1996, Waldron was shot by the car owner’s neighbor. The shooter was convicted in the incident and remains jailed.

In Texas, a state that gives property owners, and even their neighbors, much latitude in using deadly force to protect property, repo men have the law on their side. The Uniform Commercial Code permits repossession so long as it “is peaceful.”

Waldron and his employee Castro say they’re often called the most vile and filthy things, but they try to keep the peace by explaining to car owners that they’re just doing a job. He says the daily surprises and threats he encounters keep the job interesting.

“Things get pretty freaky,” said Castro, who has had guns drawn on him. “I like the thrill of the hunt. I do want to go home at the end of the night, but then I do like the chase.”