When he’s not on the clock as a director of remarketing services at Ally Financial, Rawlin Mallet enjoys traveling with family.

In fact, the fam recently ventured to Spain and Portugal, and they regularly visit Napa Valley in California.

A Texan, hunting is “just in my blood,” said Mallet, who’s looking forward to white-tailed deer season this fall.

But Mallet didn’t have to travel very far or do much hunting to find his professional calling.

He has spent nearly 39 years with what is now Ally, including the last 22 on the remarketing side of the business.

“The day I landed in this, I am telling you, I found my happy place,” Mallet said of his role in remarketing. “My best days are my days at the auction.”

That much is clear in talking with Mallet, who is Cherokee Media Group’s 2025 Remarketing Executive of the Year, an award presented by the Independent Auction Group.

Mallet will be recognized during an award ceremony the afternoon of Nov. 19 at Used Car Week, which is Nov. 17-20 at Red Rock in Las Vegas.

Auto Remarketing caught up with Mallet in October to talk about his career journey, what he loves about sale day, the industry’s evolution and much more.

‘Sale day is just amazing’

In his role, Mallet manages a team that’s responsible for representing Ally vehicles for sale at auctions in the Western U.S.

His team is out at the auctions on a day-to-day basis, and Mallet will rotate between traveling to each sale in the West, usually going on the road three weeks of each of month and typically being at auction two or three days a week.

“And those are my best days,” Mallet said. “I absolutely love the buildup. Sale day is just amazing.”

He enjoys “the energy, the excitement” of sale day, the “sensory overload” and the interaction between buyers and sellers.

“And it’s capitalism at its best,” Mallet said.

But for most, if not all, of the auction industry, sale day came to a “grinding halt” during COVID. Tough as that was, Mallet was proud to see the remarketing industry’s “resiliency and the tenacity” as auctions, consignors and dealers adapted.

Sale day, basically, stopped on a dime in 2020, Mallet said, and “that was a huge deal” to lose that.

“We turned it from not being able to be at the auctions (to) still be able to run sales remotely. That was a really big deal,” he said. “It really highlighted the relationships that we had with the auctions, because when the merry-go-round stopped, we had all these vehicles still sitting at dealerships and ORCs.”

Being able to secure those vehicles at auctions at a time when there was limited space to do so, Mallet said, “highlighted the kind of relationships that we have with our auction partners.”

‘Landed in the right place’

And for Mallet, those are relationships that go back decades. Shortly after graduating from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio in 1986, Mallet began working at what was then General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC), but is now Ally Financial.

Several years later, Mallet was the manager of a GMAC administrative center in the Dallas-Fort Worth area when a job came open at the company in remarketing.

That was 2002 and he’s never looked back, spending close to a quarter-century (and counting) in the auction business.

“I tell you, I absolutely have enjoyed my career. Number one, I enjoy being with Ally. I worked in a small branch in Waco, Texas, and basically did everything under the sun that GMAC at that time did, except the remarketing piece … it has been such a blessing. I landed in the right place.

“I’ve always been extremely engaged in our business and have been blessed to work for a really tremendous company,” he said. “And then when I landed into the remarketing piece, this has been my happy place ever since I got here …

“I’ve found my niche,” he said. “I think that being awarded this has been such an honor to me because it’s a testament that I am in the right place and it has worked really, really well for me.”

One of the areas of the auction business that fascinates him is the auctioneers. And Mallet counts it as a blessing that coming out of COVID, he was asked to be a judge at the World Automobile Auctioneers Championship and was grateful to see those folks honored after much of the in-person auctioneering went on pause during the pandemic.

“And it was really cool because it was a lot of my peers that were judging, and just to be asked to do it (was meaningful),” he said. “I enjoy watching auctioneers work so much. That was a really long day, but a really enjoyable day.”

A quarter century of innovation

Another point of pride for Mallet has been seeing the adoption of technology.

When Mallet moved to the remarketing side of the business in 2002, he said, there was just one auction in his territory using OnlineRingman and Simulcast. And dealers in lane were a little suspicious of remote buyers.

“I remember them teasing, saying, ‘Oh yeah, there’s nobody really behind that screen in that bid, y’all are just running us up.’  But, you know, just watching the beginning of it and how that evolved and how they gained confidence in that,  as well as then all the online venues.

“ And also another very proud moment was being a part of SmartAuction when it first hit the ground and being one of the true online venues,” he said, referring to Ally’s online auction platform, “to where we are now, you can buy a car 24 hours a day, basically seven days a week online,  whether you’re participating in buying online in the in-lane venue or totally online.

“Just that evolution from where it started with just a couple of auctions, using OnLine Ringman and Simulcast to purchase a few cars in-lane to where we are now,  that’s by far the biggest evolution that I’ve seen so far in this industry.”