Mitch Helman of Sandhills Global discusses values of sleeper trucks, and what he’s seeing during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
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: November 17, 2020
Segment transcript
Gonna talk with Mitch Helman from Sandhills Publishing. I want to talk today about sleeper trucks. Since the beginning of the year this inventory turnover is just extraordinary. Can you talk about that? Yeah no, absolutely, the truck market is about as predictable as any market out there because it’s all based on new truck orders and due to the fact with Covid and everything and production cuts, manufacturing basically coming to a halt for a couple months. New truck orders got pushed out so far that it decided trucks were in high need and there was a fast decline. Faster than really we have ever seen in the used truck market, with the recent demand. And you look at the slope on this turnover and going into 2020 it was falling off a cliff, and then it just shot right back up again. It’s an extraordinary curve, typically it’s typically a year cycle or a little bit longer you know as it as inventory slides down but you know due to you know we’ve never seen you know such a long stretch of you know the manufacturers as a whole just stop production which then accelerated the fast decline in the used inventory out there. Which takes me to the next slide and if you look at the green line on this the inventory it is just falling off the cliff and your prices are going up is that simple supply and demand? Absolutely yeah. I’m curious if you have an opinion of how long that trend is going to catch up. Do you have any insight or any any speculation as to when the OEMs are going to catch up to their backlog of production? Well production as a whole it’s been full steam ahead the last several months with new counts coming out and so it’s gonna take well into next year before you know things get caught up but when you look at overall pricing and the amount of inventory that’s came off the market the last couple months, prices have started to slope up because as inventory goes down prices are eventually going to go up and you’re going to see a pretty steep incline here in the next couple months of pricing getting stronger. And it’s evidenced again even by the asking price per mile because all trucks are not created equal you can have a one-year-old truck with 10 miles on it and you can have a one-year old truck with a million miles on it, and that could be worn out, right? So the the next slide indicates that it’s a negative six percent over 15 month decline, but that trend is upwards, when you’re talking about asking price per mile, so even that trend is going in a positive direction from where it had bottomed out in the in the Covid era. Absolutely yeah. All good all good news for our clients at Blackbird. We work with secured creditors, so this is strong pricing and strong inventory trending. I’ll ask you the question, can they have confidence in their collateral, Mitch? Absolutely. Right now, if you do have trucks that you’re sitting on that you’re looking to move you’re probably in the best position possible out there, just because prices are gonna go up, they’re starting to show positive signs. I’m a full believer, it’s gonna go up fast and right now you look at it, whether being a creditor or a potential buyer, it’s a buyer’s market right now if you can buy right now you’re going to be able to sell higher in the next several months. Hey, it’s not all bad news. Mitch, thanks for your insight, thanks for your statistics, have a great day. Thank you, David.