Mitch Helman of Sandhills Global joins us to discuss bulldozer values in the face of a global pandemic.
About this segment of Blackbird TV
Guest: Mitch Helman, Sales Manager, Sandhills Global. To learn more about our guest, visit Sandhills.com, or call 402-458-4506.
Recorded: October 13, 2020
Published: December 17, 2020
Segment transcript
Here with Mitch Helman. Mitch is from Sandhills Global in Lincoln Nebraska, and Mitch is here to talk about some bulldozer values today. Mitchm real quick, tell us a little bit about Sandhills and and how you come up with all this fabulous data you share with me. Absolutely David, thank you for bringing me out here today, yeah Sandhills as a whole you know we we live in the retail space and the wholesale in the auction with Machinery Trader with regards to construction equipment which many of you probably are familiar with, it’s based up of mostly dealer inventory out there every Cat dealer Deere dealer, pretty much everyone ever does business with us so from a retail standpoint we collect all the the retail and uh dealer inventory out there uh we also got products on the auction side that for end of life for auctioneers to utilize along with dealers so as a whole we have our kind of our feet in both the dealer and the auctioneer market. I love these reports that you send we do a lot of appraisals at Blackbird and I’m looking at this report on bulldozers in the US market and the inventory trend. Let’s talk about this there seems to be a lack of inventory right now it’s decreasing how can that be we’re in a pandemic where where what’s happening to these bulldozers it’s been interesting you know this pandemic you know you go back you know six months ago there’s production cuts may and june a lot of the production across any industry was pretty much shut down for 60 days sometimes a little longer depending on the different oems that kind of has accelerated what’s kind of happening i would say in today’s market with production shut down new orders got pushed out there was a need for late model used this was a year there was going to be some inventory sold when you look at the total inventory trends and we do this with dozers in in general you kind of got to look at the different not just the inventory as a whole but you got to look at the different metric tons because metric tons will break out the different uses of of dozers and what you know what kind of job site is what you know that they’re being used on so what do you see right now as being a hot commodity relative to weight class in the dozer market you know as a whole those dozers you know what’s getting sold off is a lot of the the smaller dozers you get into the four to five metric tons a little bit smaller there’s there’s a decrease in all in really all dozer class as a whole but you know that four to five metric ton the smaller dozer is is getting sold off a lot of that you know that we see is is coming there’s been a drive and a selloff from rental companies uh from older older units out there you know with with them you know with some of these massive rental companies that you know are selling off some machinery you know there was a big production uh boom in 2012 you know some of these units are getting to close to middleton to life and some of those units are moving out interesting let’s look at the next graph shows average price by age you’re talking about age instead of instead of size obviously the the black line there are the the late model dozers and newer machines have a nice price spike in this covet space and the older machines are flat and some have some increases depending is there a reason that these late model machines have had such an increase is it simply the lack of brand new machines that is out there because of the the lack of production yeah you’ll see you know as new machines in production got pushed back you know when when manufacturing was came to a halt in general uh you know there’s going to be a demand for late model high quality new you know lightly used machines and you know we see that um we see that in auction pricing and it’s so fascinating to see it supported in the data and graphically as we have here um fabulous fabulous how does this impact blackbird asset services clients our bank clients that are that are lending money against this equipment to buy it or or they’ve already got a they’ve got a contractor who’s got a fleet if you had a crystal ball are those values in in the bulldozer market are they safe in their collateral are these are these values going to hold up or or do you see that that once we catch up to the production ring that that something’s going to fall off the cliff do you have any opinion you know i i think a lot of it you know depends on you know that right now we’re living in a world where there’s big demand you know well i look at you know just the infrastructure bill that was passed you know and where you know all the new road construction and you know when you’re when you’re looking at road construction and uh all the jobs that are you know have gotten going are really in the you know the beginning middle phases of you know these long-term projects dirt moving dozer you know dozer equipment is is going to be sought after with the production cut as we talked about there’s going to be a demand for that late model stuff because they can’t wait another year for that equipment to hit the job site they need it now so when you when you look into the smaller stuff uh you know there’s there’s been a sell-off but you know as as equipment goes out the door you know typically retail prices will rebound later on because auction will always lead it on the front side but values will go up so i would assume you know it’s things are going to be okay for the next several years fascinating insight mitch thanks for your time today mitchell have a great day thanks Mitch yep