How Equipment Resale Value Impacts Your Bottom Line

JLG® engine-powered scissor lifts and articulating boom lifts were first-time winners of the EquipmentWatch Highest Retained Value Award this year. Can you tell me a little bit about what characteristics and what features made them stand out?

Both the RT scissors and the articulating booms had pretty strong market share and market penetration in 2016, and they also maintained pretty significant resale value across all the model years that we tracked. It’s just a natural byproduct of those two features that ensure that they’re going to be in the top finalist category and help get them to the win.

For each of those products, what was that compelling piece of data that threw them over the edge?

That was absolutely resale value. How do consumers—people who are buying and selling this equipment—feel about it? That’s all in your price. When your resale prices are high, that’s a great sign of consumer confidence.

When you’re choosing these winners, what’s the process—the methodology—that you go through?

At EquipmentWatch, we track millions of observations on transactions from the resale channel every year. About five months before the end of the year, we sat back and started mining that data. We narrowed it down to about 12,500 models across our entire system. From there, we looked at the most popular and most relevant models for each category. Then, we used a complex estimation process to look at and estimate the five-year predicted value for each of these models. Here we obviously had two JLG models that won.