HANOVER, Md. — With data from additional participants revealing trends about funding availability and more, the National Automotive Finance Association recently announced its 2011 Below-Prime Automotive Financing Survey has been published.

Officials highlighted the survey — conducted by outside consultant BenchMark Consulting International — presents aggregated data from 28 participants, up from last year. Of that group, NAF Association determined that 70 percent of the financing sources were repeat participants.

The companies were divided into small (up to 10,000 accounts), medium (10,001 to 80,000 accounts) and large (more than 80,000 accounts) for accurate comparisons.

Among the notable trends revealed in the survey are that funding availability issues are diminishing, collection effectiveness continues to deliver benefits, dealer application portals expand capabilities and automated credit decisioning is increasing while conditioned approvals are trending downwards.

The association indicated tables throughout the survey compare the 2011 data with previous results, and the appendix shows question-by-question results in aggregated format.

Officials stressed no results are attributed to individual participating companies.

The survey is distributed at no cost to most NAF Association members and companies that participated. For others, the cost is $400.

To order, visit https://nafassociation.com/order_survey_2011.php.

Editor's Note: A deeper look into the trends revealed in the annual NAF Association survey will be published in an upcoming issue of SubPrime Auto Finance News.