Dealers may be competitors, but they still need a consistent equipment valuation tool to use across all brands, all colors.
“This industry is pretty small, and yes, we’re all competitors, ” said Don Aberle, Senior Evaluator and Used Equipment Manager, Titan Machinery. “but the dollars are so large, we need to start from the same place.”
More dealers are recognizing that taking a trade of an off-color brand may age in inventory longer than they would like. To alleviate this, dealers can wholesale an off-color unit to a dealer of that brand to speed up the flow of inventory and minimize the risk of aging inventory. Regarding this flow Aberle says, “The values are not so vastly different from one dealer to the next, ” Aberle said. “We just need a little bit better flow of equipment to limit our risk as far as aged inventory.”
A consistent valuation tool, that is brand agnostic, helps dealers and lenders have a common basis for used equipment valuations. This too can help dealer-to-dealer wholesale transactions where a dealer of a certain color may find a buyer at another color dealership.
For over 80 years, IronGuides has offered lenders, appraisers and dealers of all colors a consistent valuation tool and is the only online appraisal tool for agricultural equipment that adjusts for the machine’s unique region, options, and usage.
Other valuation tools have comparable data, but they don’t include options analysis. Dealers often name options differently and IronGuides resolve this by normalizing option data and option values on the most popular ag equipment types.
“There can be a $60K+ difference in machine’s pricing due to options,” said Jon Wommack, IronGuides Managing Editor. “The competition is not taking options into account because they don’t have pricing data.”IronGuides data also includes accurate and complete dealer sold reports. Each dealer report is reviewed individually, and incomplete reports are discarded, Wommack said.
“The detail and the volume of dealer sold reports makes our product more accurate with access to a cleaned and normalized dataset,” he said. “We go through a rigorous process to clean data to ensure the best data quality.”
Aberle understands the importance of accurate dealer sold reports and is working towards daily, rather than monthly, report submissions from his team to Iron Solutions. It’s important for red dealers across the country to submit their reports so there is more “red” data, he said, so data doesn’t skew toward one color over another. “Data swerves towards the most data points. One of the reasons we’re working so hard and why it’s important to me is so that you get those data points daily,” he said.
“Over the last few years, the valuations have been more and more accurate with Iron Solutions,” Aberle said. “I just can’t stress enough the willingness to take feedback from the dealers and not just take the feedback but to actually execute on it. It’s probably the most impressive thing that I’ve seen with Iron Solutions over the last few years.”“Whether it’s green, red, the yellow guys, the orange guys,” he said. “…you’ve got to have a consistent tool across all brands, all colors.”