Yellow Edge: pricing intelligence for used construction equipment
An investigation into hardware pricing intelligence across the global used construction equipment market.
There is a market hiding in plain sight. Every day, across construction sites, rental yards, dealer lots, and auction rings from Rotterdam to Houston, heavy machinery changes hands. Excavators, cranes, bulldozers, wheel loaders, articulated haulers. The yellow iron that builds the world's roads, bridges, ports, and cities. It is unglamorous, industrial, and largely invisible to the financial press.
It is also enormous.
The global secondary market for used construction equipment is valued at over $130 billion annually and is projected to grow steadily through the next decade. Far from a niche, it is one of the largest traded asset classes in the world that most people have never thought about.
And almost none of it is priced with any real intelligence.
A market that moves on instinct
Ask a dealer in the Netherlands what a 2019 Caterpillar 320 excavator with 4,500 hours is worth. He will give you a number. Ask a dealer in the same city the same question and you will get a different number. Ask a lender underwriting an asset-backed loan against a fleet of the same machines and they will consult a valuation report that may be months old, based on methodology that has not materially changed in years.
Nobody is being dishonest. They are simply operating in a market where reliable, current, condition-adjusted pricing intelligence does not exist at scale. Asking prices are listed on platforms across Europe and North America. Auction clearing prices are recorded by the major houses. But the gap between those two numbers, the spread between what sellers hope for and what the market actually pays, is the number that matters most, and it is the number that nobody systematically tracks, models, or publishes.
That gap is where the opportunity lives.
The players
The market has a dominant force. RB Global, the parent company of Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, reported gross transaction value of $15.9 billion across its full year 2024 operations, making it by some distance the largest commercial asset marketplace in the world. Its platforms span Ritchie Bros. live auctions, IronPlanet online auctions, Marketplace-E, and Mascus, the European equipment listing service.
Rouse Services, acquired by Ritchie Bros. for approximately $275 million in 2020, is the market's leading provider of equipment valuations, rental analytics, and used equipment sales intelligence. It serves dealers, rental companies, and lenders across North America and the UK, and conducts appraisals on tens of billions of dollars of equipment annually.
Together these platforms represent the closest thing the heavy equipment market currently has to a pricing intelligence infrastructure.
Why now
The heavy equipment market has digitised substantially over the past decade. Listings are online. Auction results are recorded. Telematics data, including engine hours, utilisation rates, and maintenance histories, is increasingly available from the machines themselves. The raw material for a genuinely data-driven valuation model exists. It has simply never been assembled, structured, and modelled with the rigour that the market deserves.
The tools to do that are now available to a focused team at a cost that was not possible five years ago. The data trails are there. The demand from the market is real and largely unmet: dealers who want to price with confidence, lenders who want to underwrite with accuracy, fleet managers who want to know what their assets are genuinely worth.
What we are doing
We are calling this investigation Yellow Edge.
Over the coming months we will go directly into this market, speaking to the dealers, brokers, and specialists who live inside it every day, to understand the demand for better pricing intelligence from the ground up. We are listening first. Nothing is being built yet.
That is how we work. Every investigation begins with a question, not an answer. The market tells us whether to proceed.
If you work in heavy equipment as a dealer, rental company, fleet manager, surveyor, or lender, we would like to hear from you. The aim is not a sales call. We want to understand what reliable pricing intelligence would actually be worth to the people who need it most.
The contact page is open.
Questions we are often asked
How large is the global used construction equipment market?
The global secondary market for used construction equipment is valued at over $130 billion annually and is projected to grow steadily through the next decade.
Who are the largest players in heavy equipment auctions and valuations?
RB Global, parent of Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, reported $15.9 billion in gross transaction value across full year 2024. Its subsidiary Rouse Services, acquired in 2020 for about $275 million, is the leading provider of equipment valuations and used equipment sales intelligence to dealers, rental companies, and lenders in North America and the UK.
Why is pricing intelligence for used construction equipment still weak?
Asking prices and auction clearing prices are recorded, but the spread between them, condition-adjusted and tracked in real time, is not systematically modelled or published at scale. Reliable, current valuation data therefore does not exist across most of Europe and large parts of North America.
What is Yellow Edge?
Yellow Edge is the Try Ventures investigation into pricing intelligence for the global used construction equipment market. We are talking directly with dealers, brokers, rental companies, fleet managers, surveyors, and lenders to understand what reliable valuation data would be worth.