There is no argument Construction Equipment can be a huge time saver for contractors and landowners. Buying right and doing your homework may save you a lot of grief and expensive problems in the future. 

1. Buy Name Brand Equipment

With Real Estate there are three very important items you need to be successful. Location, Location and Location. Funny but very true, yet with Equipment purchases new and used there are three things that if you follow will also make you successful and eliminate a lot of problems for you or your company in the future. The three things are:

 1.) Brand     2.)Age and Hours     3.)Maintenance 

Brand awareness is probably in my 40 years of experience the most important thing you can be focused on. Think of it like buying a car. Should you buy a Hyundai or Toyota if they are the same price for the same size car? Well first Hyundai has come a long way and their quality may be close to the Toyota but until the market believes that you will find that more people will want to buy the Toyota for perceived quality and value and that alone raises your resale values. Equipment is no different, who has been building equipment the longest, has a good dealer network and parts availability and very high quality scores. Should you buy an IHI Excavator when you can get a KUBOTA or Bobcat for close to the same cost? Think of it this way if you went up to 100 people in the trades and asked them to rank brands in order of quality and value, they would almost surely start with the top brands such as KUBOTA and Bobcat not IHI. Now there are people that will tell me IHI is the best piece of equipment ever made and that maybe true, but their dealer network and parts availability will never reach the level of Bobcat and KUBOTA, not to mention resale values. BUY NAME BRAND EQUIPMENT

2. Age and Hours

Age in my experience isn't as important as hours. Like the make up commercials always say, age is just a number. That's not 100% true especially when you start talking about a machine that is more than 5 years old, it could have other drawbacks like parts availability etc. A five year old piece of equipment may have 900 hours (low) or 3500 hours (high). These two pieces should be priced drastically different because the 900 hour machine has many more useful hours of work available to the owner, but ther 3500 hour piece is at the point where things will most likely in my experience start wearing out and needing replaced. 

Most pieces of Construction Equipment have hour meters. This is like the Odometer on your car, that is it measures how much use a piece has had in terms of hours instead of miles. A rule of thumb used in the used Construction Equipment market is 500 hours is equivalent to approximately 10000 miles on a car. So when a piece gets 5000 or more hours that is usually when you will start seeing major and costly repairs occur, just like a car with 100,000 miles which can be expected to have a higher repair cost than say a car with 30000 miles. Its no mystery, more use causes more things to wear and thereby need repaired. 

^{3.) Maintenance}

This is a biggie and possibly the most difficult one to verify when shopping for a machine. Two machines, both 2500 hours run time on the meters, one owned by a small contractor one owned by a Rental Dealer. Which has had better maintenance and will probably give you more years of trouble free use? Most people probably think the individual owner, but they would be wrong in most cases. Individual owners keep loose records on services such as oil and filter changes and checking oil in final drives (my experience has been most owners never check oil in final drives which can cost you $3000 or more each when they fail.) and greasing us not every use as it is in a dealership it's when they get around to it.  A dealer has a computer which records hours out and in and flags them when services are due. A dealer also knows that oil and grease are the least expensive things to buy for a piece of equipment. Also, a dealer has a reputation to uphold and wants that piece of equipment to be in good condition so that when they do sell it to an end user it gives them years of trouble free income producing use.  When we sell a used machine we are happy to give out the hour meter history (it will show if the hour meter has ever been changed, they do break occasionally) and maintenance record history, this shows all maintenance and repairs history on the individual unit. Very important information to have, because it shows that it was maintained and if something was repaired it goes over that and gives you as accurate of a history of that machine that you could have. If a private owner replaces the hour meter, is he going to tell you? Maybe, maybe not but a dealer has more on the line that just selling one machine and a reputable dealer can make all the difference in the world. 

If you’re interested in purchasing or renting construction  for your work site, contact ABC Equipment Rental and Sales in Brunswick, OH. The KUBOTA® dealer offers a wide range of construction equipment from top manufacturers like Stihl®, Honda®, and Genie®. The team also provides friendly service to help customers find the exact items their project needs. Visit the website to learn more about rentals or call (330) 220-4545 to speak with a team member.