Golden oldies: Why 2007-built excavators are selling in the UK for record sums

Ritchie Bros UK headquarters in Maltby, South Yorkshire. Photo: Ritchie Bros

Rupert Craven, UK and Ireland sales director at construction machinery auctions specialist Ritchie Bros scrolls through the results of the company’s February auction in Maltby, South Yorkshire.

Completed sales included a 13t 2007 Volvo EC135BLC tracked excavator with 9,104 hours on the clock which sold for £9,750; a 2006 Cat 320CL tracked excavator which sold for £20,500; and a Takeuchi TB125 mini excavator with 7,376 hours on the clock which sold for £8,500.

In fact, he points out that some of the machines sold that day which were nearing the end of their second decade and clocked up thousands of hours of work had retained their value so well that they were going for prices well over 50% of what was paid for them when they were bought new in 2007.

“Older machines with higher hours were getting amazing money,” he tells International Rental News. “It was really phenomenal.”

A report published in March 2025 by rental metrics specialist Rouse, which is part of Ritchie Bros’ parent, RB Global, and collates Ritchie Bros auction data, found that forced liquidation value – the estimated gross amount fetched by equipment at a public auction within a specific period – tracked up sharply in February 2025 to 17.5% above the benchmark.

Low sales volumes

The report showed that one of the key reasons for older machines fetching such high prices is that a general shortage of second hand stock on the market means buyers have fewer affordable choices at present.

It said the total amount raised by RB UK auctions in February 2025 fell to around £2.5 million, down from over £5 million the month before.

It’s a phenomenon fuelled by supply chain issues, price hikes for raw materials and rising energy bills which Craven says have forced OEMs to increase prices in the new machinery market – and are having a knock-on effect on second hand sales.

“To be selling nearly 20-year-old machines for great money indicates that new machinery is still very expensive,” Craven says. “People are looking at ways of saving money and reducing their costs.”

Photo: Ritchie Bros

Craven says that one of the key reasons for this is that rental firms, worried about low levels of activity in European markets, coupled with higher interest rates, are opting not to invest heavily in new equipment and are holding on to their fleets for longer.

“It requires a lot of confidence to go out and invest hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds in machinery that you have to have a five-year payback on before you have cleared the finance,” he says. “Here in the UK, that isn’t around at the moment. Hire companies have been quite conservative, which means they won’t sell as much.”

Craven says that rental firms which normally hold fleets on a three to five year selling cycle are extending their ownership period and also themselves buying more used machines, rather than new, than they have in the past.

“That has a knock-on effect. So this year could be quite tight on new machinery bought and used machinery sold. And that will mean that the price goes up,” he says.

Meanwhile, buyers have been trying to wait out the market, hoping for better deals to come along. The first quarter of 2025 has seen a sharp uptick in sales as compared to the same period the year before, suggesting that some buyers have decided they can’t wait any longer.

Nonetheless, Ritchie Bros figures show that despite record prices fetched by some older machines, the used construction equipment market is currently experiencing a complex set of dynamics which actually seems to translate into more of a downward trend.

According to the company’s latest European Used Machinery Market Trends Report, median prices for used crawler excavators in Q4 2024 fell by nearly 21% to €27,910 as compared to Q4 2023. Median prices for mini excavators fell 3% over the same period to €11,145 in Q4 of 2024.

UK market affects Europe

The UK has traditionally been one of the most affordable markets in Europe for used construction machinery, Craven says, due to the large volume of machines sold and to the high penetration of rental firms which means that 80-90% of new machines are bought by rental firms and then offloaded into the second-hand market.

Craven says that high auction prices in the UK are therefore reducing the number of sales the company is doing elsewhere on the continent.

“Ritchie Bros has a fantastic business in Spain and Italy, with huge numbers of bidders. There are lots of people looking for machines but you have the complexity of getting those machines over there. We need to have the ability to move machinery around freely and cheaply”, he says.

“If the complexity is too high, then the costs can outweigh the benefits. We saw a lack of appetite from people buying and selling machines towards the end of Q4 2024. Customers need to bring machinery back home from the UK at a price that makes it worth doing.

“If you are going to move a machine from our site in Maltby in the UK to Serbia, for instance, it has to be a worthwhile machine to do that with. If it’s not at a price point that makes it desirable, it normally goes to a local market buyer,” says Craven.