Most drivers assume a Ford dealership belongs, in some meaningful way, to Ford. It doesn’t. Ford owns the blue oval, builds the trucks and writes the franchise agreement. The building, the lot, the service bays and the business itself belong to somebody else. And in Minnesota, state law makes it surprisingly hard for Ford to decide who that somebody is.
Keep that in mind as three Twin Cities stores change hands this week.
On September 23, Walser Automotive Group announced it had completed its purchase of Freeway Ford in Bloomington, Metropolitan Ford in Eden Prairie and Suburban Chevrolet in Eden Prairie. All three were owned by the Grossman family, another longtime Minnesota dealer family. Walser calls it the largest acquisition in its history. The deal adds nearly 300 employees and brings the Bloomington-based group to 35 retail locations across Minnesota, Kansas and Illinois. No price was disclosed, and because both sides are privately held, there is no securities filing to tell us.
The detail Walser led with is sentimental. Ford was one of the company’s earliest franchises, starting with Towns Edge Ford in Hopkins in 1968. These two stores put Ford back in the Walser portfolio for the first time in 20 years. The announcement doesn’t say why Walser walked away from the brand two decades ago, or what changed its mind.
That homecoming makes for a nice headline. The more useful story is about who actually controls a deal like this, and the answer isn’t the automaker.
Under Minnesota Statutes section 80E.13, a manufacturer can’t block a dealer from selling its franchise to a qualified buyer without good cause. The dealer still needs the automaker’s consent, but the burden runs the other way from what most people would expect. It’s the manufacturer that has to prove the buyer lacks good moral character or fails to meet reasonable capital and business-experience standards. If the automaker wants to say no, it has to do so in writing within 60 days of receiving a completed application. If it misses that window, the law treats its silence as consent.
For a 35-store group with seven decades in the business, those standards aren’t much of a hurdle.
Here’s the part that surprises even people who follow the car business. Minnesota does allow an automaker to take over a deal through a right of first refusal, but the conditions are stacked high. The franchise agreement has to permit it. The sale has to involve more than half the dealership’s ownership or assets. The automaker has to give written notice within 60 days. The seller has to receive the same or better consideration on equivalent terms. And the manufacturer has to pay the jilted buyer’s reasonable expenses, including attorney fees. Sales to family members and to certain long-serving managers are off-limits entirely.
Put plainly: if an automaker wanted to snatch a Minnesota dealership away from the buyer the owner chose, it would have to at least match the offer and pick up the other side’s legal bill.
That is by design. Dealers put their own capital into land, buildings, equipment and staff, then sell a product whose design, supply and pricing they don’t control. Laws like Minnesota’s exist to keep the company that controls the product from also controlling the dealer’s exit. The name on the sign belongs to the automaker. The right to hang it there, and to sell that right to someone else, belongs to the dealer.
So why would a group like Walser want three more stores in a market where it already operates? Scale is part of it, and the size of these particular stores stands out. According to the National Automobile Dealers Association’s 2025 annual financial profile, America’s 16,990 franchised light-vehicle dealerships employed an average of 65 people each. Nearly 300 employees across three rooftops works out to roughly 100 per store. These are not small-town outlets. They are established, high-volume suburban dealerships.
The less visible reason is the service drive. NADA’s figures show service and parts made up only 13.3 percent of dealership sales dollars in 2025. That sounds modest until you see the volume behind it: $164.6 billion in service and parts sales and more than 276 million repair orders. A new truck is sold once. It comes back for oil changes, warranty work and recall repairs for years. Two long-running Ford stores in the southwest metro come with a customer base that already knows where to take its vehicles, and that recurring traffic is a large part of what a buyer is paying for.
We’ve written before about how the ground under many dealerships belongs to someone other than the dealer. This deal highlights the other half of that picture. Even the franchise itself is less the automaker’s to control than most shoppers assume. The relationship between dealers and manufacturers is a negotiated standoff, and it occasionally ends up in court.
For people who actually own a Ford or Chevrolet bought at one of these stores, the practical impact is limited. Factory warranties are the automaker’s obligation, and because the franchises transferred with the stores, warranty and recall work continues at the same addresses. What may change is the buying experience. Walser’s own company history says it moved away from haggling in the 2000s toward a one-price model. Walser says it intends to bring what it calls “the customer experience we are known for” to the new stores. Shoppers there should expect Walser’s process, whatever the old one was.
Employees are the other group to watch. Walser says its goal is to take care of the people it inherited, and its history notes it rolled out a four-day work week in 2024. Whether that reaches the newly acquired staff is something the announcement doesn’t address.
The Grossman family, meanwhile, is doing what a lot of family dealers eventually do. When the next generation isn’t taking over, the most valuable thing a dealer family owns is a franchise it can sell to a buyer of its choosing, with the law standing between that deal and the automaker’s second thoughts.
That’s the idea to hold onto. When a dealership changes hands, the company whose logo is on the building is often the party with the least say over who ends up owning it.
Should automakers have more control over who buys their dealerships, or do state franchise laws strike the right balance? Share your take in the comments.