Open for bids
Auctions not only offer lucrative tools for asset management, but also perhaps even professional partnership in conducting your equipment business
By Mike Anderson
It may be April Fool’s Day, but the movement of construction equipment on this day is certainly no joke.
April 1, 2010 is, after all, a Thursday … and that means iron users, sellers, buyers and speculators from Lima, Ohio to Lima, Peru, from Dubuque to Dubai, are watching their computer screens flash back at them every time a member of their industry brethren clicks a new bid on a ripper-equipped chunk of earthmoving beef otherwise known as a 2002 Caterpillar D8R II dozer. The granddaddy of Internet equipment auction companies, IronPlanet hosts a live “Featured Auction” at least each Thursday, when hundreds of excavators, wheel loaders, pavers, dump trucks and other types of construction equipment, attachments and parts are up for bids. For mainline pieces of equipment, generally anywhere from seven to 10 are opened for bids at once, every six minutes, and each machine will stay on the board at a minimum until the next group goes live. Popular equipment will stay up for 15-20 minutes. The Texas-based Cat D8R II, requiring an opening bid of $110,000, stays open for bids for 24 minutes, drawing 39 bids, topped off by one for $174,000 by a bidder in Mexico.
“What we generally like to tell our customers, large and small, is that because IronPlanet does auctions every week, we can tailor the time of asset disposal to their needs, instead of forcing them to do it on our timetable,” says Paul Hendrix, IronPlanet equipment pricing analyst. “If a guy has a job completion on April 1, and the local traditional auction company doesn’t have another sale for 90 days, why would you want to have those assets sitting idle for 90 days? Or, as a job completion is progressing, with IronPlanet you could even sell three or four pieces this week, and five or six pieces in two weeks.”
