Sale prices high on Iowa farm machinery auction

Playing sports, especially growing up, teaches us many important lessons.

Think back to those prattle on speeches from your old coaches that caused us to roll our eyes. “Failing to prepare is preparing you to fail.” Corny yes, but so very true.

I think of an auctioneer friend of mine, Dean Eastman from northeast Iowa. Dean had a very nice farm auction last Saturday. I dropped him an email wondering how things sold. His response back really caught my attention.

“My phone has rung nonstop for two weeks asking about machinery. They called the morning of the sale, during the sale, and the day after the sale. I’m still getting calls wondering what stuff sold for from people that couldn’t make it to the sale. I feel we had a very good sale on Saturday! I do a low-high price estimate on everything when I have a sale with this many dollars. Low being a train wreck bad day, and high being almost a pie in the sky high price. We overshot the high number by 18%.”

Wow, 18% over his wildest pie in the sky high sale price projections is pretty impressive. Simply more proof of how very strong the used farm equipment market is currently. I’ve been telling folks that inquire that I think used equipment values are up at least 15% here in the last 6 to 8 weeks.

Guess I wasn’t too far off.

But Dean’s preparation before the auction was what impressed me. In theory, anyone bidding on any piece of equipment should do the same preparation before the sale. How much do I judge this item to be worth? How high will I bid? The same principles apply if you are working with an implement dealer on a trade or talking to a seller on a private piece of equipment.

It simply comes down to how do you assign an accurate value to that piece of equipment? You need the best source you can find, the most trusted source of information available.

Hello, Machinery Pete here to help you out.

Dean turned to our auction sale price data to help establish what he felt the equipment on his auction would/should sell for. The higher sale prices the equipment fetched on his sale will, in turn, now act to better inform others of the current state of used farm equipment values.

A couple of headliner items on Dean’s auction were a JD 9550 combine, a couple Brent 640 gravity wagons and JD 980 field cultivator. Click on the links below to see how these items have been selling at auctions around the country.