Over four days in the first week of August 2022, a whopping 5,000 lots – including 769 excavators – went under the hammer at the Euro Auctions flagship sale site in Leeds.

The sale totalled more than £42m, representing a 25% increase on the same sale in August 2021. The number of lots on sale was 10% up on the same sale in August 2021

The floor total for the sale was just over £12m, with online sales bringing in £30m. Registered vendors for the sale numbered 531, from 22 countries, with 11% of buyers being first-timers.

Euro Auctions sales manager Chris Osborne says: “Leeds has now firmly established itself as the premiere auction site in Europe for construction plant, agricultural machinery, and industrial equipment. Repeatedly Euro Auctions is able to and bring to market over 5,500 lots at each Leeds sale and we continue to consign good fresh, late, low hours equipment, and multiple compliments of 'new to 48-month-old' machines. The equipment is out there, and the sales managers at Euro Auctions are finding it. With high demand from the market, prices were strong at this August 2022 sale, and over the same auction 12 months ago demand was higher, prices were better, the levels of stock for sale were greater and demand from around the world was more evident."

He continues: “Very fresh low hour machines, e.g. less than two years old and up to 2,000 hours are achieving particularly strong prices right now and are the closest alternative to new equipment, as certain models are still unavailable. This is a great opportunity for Euro Auctions customers globally to buy really good kit that normally they would not have access to.

“Articulated dump trucks are also in particularly high demand right now. There is a shortage of trucks globally, with very long lead times for new models, particularly from Cat and Volvo, so again, prices are strong now for fresh low hours models. We saw that with the 2019 Cat 730s and the 2019 Volvo A30G that made fantastic money for the sellers. The theme was the same with older trucks throughout the range still achieving higher prices than we had anticipated. Excavators of all models were also in high demand, and we had good stock across all makes and models.”

“Looking at the market as a whole there were reasons for the results of this sale. With the market starved of new stock over the last 24 months, production from OEMs is moving again with brand new machines now coming out of the dealerships fulfilling orders. We had 769 excavators at this sale, which is an all-time record. Many of these machines will have been entered into the auction by a consignor taking delivery of new stock, or dealers that took these machines in as part exchange.

“Talking to a number of plant hire customers, we are hearing that fleet utilisation figures, which have been particularly high over the last two years, are starting to reduce a little; this is nothing excessive but just dropping back to pre-pandemic kind of numbers. Many large national fleets have been running at 95% utilisation for the last couple of years and are now seeing this drop back to perhaps 80-85%, which historically was more normal. Now with prices strong in the market, and auctions selling well, operators are turning to Euro Auctions, taking off-hired machines, putting them over the ramp and converting dead stock into cash.”

 Listed below are what Chris Osborne considers his ‘top picks’ from some of the best performing lots in the sale: