From our Sellers And Buyers, Happy Birthday Zamboni! This week we are taking a moment to recognize a piece of specialty equipment that made its way through an IronPlanet auction recently in Edmonton, Alberta.
It's like driving on black ice when you've got a specialized piece of used equipment you want to sell. Take, for instance, the Zamboni, the classically clumsy but ingeniously efficient ice resurfacer, which made its NHL debut 62 years ago. If you happened to own one, sure you could try to sell it yourself through a local newspaper, Craigslist, Kijiji or other buy and sell venues. Another option is to utilize an online marketplace like IronPlanet, which exposes your machine to a potential audience of 1.4 million buyers around the globe.
According to our quick unscientific analysis, just two Zambonis have been sold online recently through auction - both machines, as you might expect, were consigned to IronPlanet from an Edmonton, Alberta-area municipality. Sue McGregor, managing Director of Canada, IronPlanet helped stickhandle the most recent Zamboni sale, ironically when temperatures were soaring last August. "I'd met the fleet manager from the county at ConExpo in Las Vegas last year," Sue, IronPlanet's managing director in Canada, recalls. "I was the only Canadian at our booth, so of course the team introduced us. Turns out we lived just a few minutes from each other just outside of Edmonton. He told me he had a range of equipment he wanted to consign."
Sue says with a laugh: "I was envisioning graders and skid-steers, but what he had were busses and a Zamboni!" Despite the unorthodox equipment assortment, it was a win-win in the end. The busses sold like hot cakes well over the target price. And the Zamboni? It attracted a bidding war between a customer in Manitoba and the eventual winning bidder in Iowa. Again, the price was substantially above what Sue and the seller had expected.
Sue's seen a lot of these outside-the-box, eye-opening successes - the $2 million Yukon-based asphalt plant that attracted interest even before IronPlanet had a chance to inspect it, the dual lane heavy haul trailer worth about $1,00,000 sold to a happy customer in Indiana, and a Spokane-based Gomaco concrete paver, priced at $1.3 million, that was snapped up for a Mexican airport project.
As Sue says, "I tell customers who are thinking of consigning specialty equipment that it could take just two weeks to sell or it could take six months. The important thing to know is that all of our customers, Zamboni-owners and otherwise, have a range of options when they deal with IronPlanet and Cat Auction Services. We design a program that meets both their timing, risk and price objectives."
IronPlanet has sold more than $4 billion of equipment to customers around the globe. It's a given that the formula works well in the "mainstream" market of tractors, excavators and trucks. But in the lonelier specialty market, it makes transactions glide like a puck on freshly Zambonied ice.
Your turn: While we’re on the topic, we’re taking a moment to celebrate the Zamboni, pictured here hard at work at the home of Spruce Grove Saints, defending AJHL champions. As the AJHL play-offs begin, we welcome your Zamboni stories, pictures and thoughts on the unsung heroes who keep the ice smooth. Send yours to our Zamboni captain in Alberta, Jeff Howard at jhowa@shaw.ca. We’ll feature your contributions on all of our social media feeds.
