The challenge for contractors and agencies on the hunt for a good used iron buy is do their “homework” first, says Caterpillar’s Tisdale. “There’s a tremendous amount of data and information out there in the marketplace. Most of it’s on the Internet in the form of pricing. You can find all sorts of sites where you can see what a machine with certain model year and age brought at auction or is being marketed at by a broker, but you really can’t tell what that machine is like without thorough inspection, history of service, history of repairs, etc.” He lists some key questions for which answers are needed:

• “Was the piece repaired with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) parts and service capabilities?” In other words, “Is that undercarriage going to be living like the original one did?”

• “Are the hours correct?”

• “Is the machine designed to meet the requirements for the area in which the customer plans to use it?”

“There are many machines that have been sold across regions of the world that may look like they’re the same model, but were really designed for specific regions that have unique customer specification needs and regulatory requirements,” explains Tisdale. “When you throw in the things like the emissions changes and unique configurations around the world, you really have to do your homework. You can’t just look at the age, the hours and the price, and say, ‘It’s worth this.’ You’ve got to have more knowledge and information.” Again, questions that require answers:

• “What region of the world was the machine originally delivered to?”

• “What was the original configuration?”

• “Does any component replacement, repair or maintenance history exist?”

• “What was the original emissions level?”

“Really study the machine closer,” advises Tisdale, “because I see more variability in quality than I ever had, since a lot of the late-model equipment is just not available. The past three years, especially in North America, the dealers really have not put many new machines into the rental fleet. The rental fleets are a third smaller than they were three years ago and they’re nearly twice as old. When you add in what machines were on the market the past couple of years, a lot of those migrated to other parts of the world via auctions or brokers,” he says. “And now that the North American market is picking up, the customers’ choices are more limited and there’s just a lot more older equipment than before. With older equipment, you have to start asking even more questions including, ‘Do we know how many times this machine has changed ownership?’”

Good Times, Bad Times

So, we ask, is it a good time to be a buyer or seller of used equipment?

It’s a good time to be a seller, says Alastair Robertson, president and founder of Universal Equipment, which buys predominately lifting equipment in the United States and sells it overseas. “If you’ve got equipment to sell, I would say, ‘Go to the auctions, NOW!’ There are fewer and fewer machines at the auctions and the prices are definitely going up. It’s a good time to sell stuff, if you’ve got it and don’t need it.”

Chuck Yengst, president of machinery market research analyst for Yengst Associates, admits he’s often on the opposite side of prevailing consensus on issues related to the equipment industry. “Oh yeah, it’s a buyer’s market,” he says. “It’s like the housing market. Ask yourself if it’s a good time to be a seller of a house or a buyer of a house. It’s the same damned thing.

“A lot of people would like to say things are just turning around like crazy,” Yengst continues. “In this country and in North America period, there are some little bright spots here and there, but if you also study it, you see there’s no real market for construction machinery. You know they’re not putting in super new buildings and highways. We’re at a hiatus, you might say, in construction, because housing is going nowhere.”