On Tuesday, July 27 Greg Peterson guest hosted AgriTalk and invited some machinery industry friends to join him. Their conversations highlighted key trends in the used equipment market:
COVID-19 forced the machinery market to change---particularly overnight.
Dan Sullivan with Sullivan Auctioneers shares the story from March 2020.
“We were fortunate–we started the online bidding over 20 years ago when it first came out,” Sullivan says. “So we were proactive and got onboard immediately so we’ve been acquiring all that data, and that Firebase, that we’ve accumulated over 20 years when we were forced on St. Patrick’s Day of 2020 to go to an online sale the very next morning. This was with a husband and wife retiring and had all their eggs in one basket. It was emotional for them, and they came to us and said ‘ what should we do?’ and we’re like, ‘we can go right ahead to this thing tomorrow morning at 9:30, we won’t miss a beat.’ And we did and we’ve never looked back from then.”
Online auctions are here to stay.
Peterson thinks the COVID-19 pandemic pulled the machinery industry ahead into the future by seven to 10 years with its increased rate of adoption in using online auctions. This has meant adaptation for auctioneers, sellers and buyers.
“It’s different,” Sullivan says. “But, you know, if you don’t change and adapt to the changes, you don’t see when they’re changes for the better.”
Farmers have adapted to buying machinery in new ways.
Allen Henslin of Henslin auctions highlights how online auctions open up a lot more opportunities for buyers across all geographies.
“When you’re selling a tractor, you can either sell it five miles down the road or you can sell it 500 miles away,” Henslin says.
Condition and quality drive buyer interest.
One example is a July 8, Sleepy Eye, MN, farm auction which resulted in “the hottest line of tractors I’ve ever seen,” Peterson says.
Henslin said when he saw the owner’s shed, he knew the buyer interest was going to be high. The quality of the equipment in addition to the top notch condition it was maintained in, all added up.
“It was like Thanksgiving, the Super Bowl, and Christmas all in one,” Henslin said.
Watch video of 2003 JD 8420 with 1760 hours selling for a new record high price--by a mile.
It’s more common for dealers to participate in the auction market.
“It used to be that, when the dealer would have a sale it was kind of a last resort and now it’s done a 360. A lot more dealers are doing it,” says Sullivan. Sullivan Auctioneers just wrapped a sale for AgPro and is putting on an auction for AHW coming up.
You can also hear more from Machinery Pete here:
