Statewide Iowa – For decades, Iowa law has required the title and registration for a newly-purchased or leased vehicle to be filed in the county where the owner of the vehicle lives. A new law going into effect July 1st will let Iowa auto dealers file that paperwork in the county where the dealership is located. Bruce Anderson, president of the Iowa Automobile Dealers Association, says it’s an adjustment to the way people buy vehicles today.
Anderson says this gives auto dealers a familiar, local point of entry to file the vehicle’s title, register a lien if the customer took out a loan to buy the vehicle and get license plates ordered.
Anderson credits county treasurers and the Iowa DOT for working with automobile dealers to address bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the system for registering vehicle after they’re purchased or lease. The new law will raise various vehicle registration fees by 10 dollars on January 1st of next year. The fees — one of which is just a dollar — were set decades ago when the average price of a new vehicle was 10-thousand dollars.
