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Records were in abundance at a recent Ritchie Bros. auction in Polk County, where construction and agriculture equipment changed hands rapidly.
The auction, held Feb. 18-23 on the company’s 220-acre site off Interstate 4 in Davenport, between Orlando and Tampa, closed deals on 13,350 lots, say company officials, for a total of $297 million. The latter is up 6.8% over last year’s $278 million tally, and both those marks set company records.
Equipment sales, according to a statement, included more than 800 excavators; 640 compactors; 430 loaders; 395 skid-steer loaders; 385 dozers; 210 articulated dump trucks; 240 dump trucks; 465 aerial work platforms; and 465 truck tractors. Items were sold without minimum bids or reserve prices.
Ritchie Bros. CEO Ravi Saligram called the six-day event the “Super Bowl” of auctions. Day Five, for example, was the largest single auction day in the company’s history, with 2,300 items sold for more than $82 million. Burnaby, Canada-based Ritchie Bros., with a U.S. headquarters in Lincoln, Neb., has been doing auctions for more than 60 years.
The auction event was also a global affair, drawing nearly16,000 people from 88 countries, with some 11,000 bidders participating online. Officials report 84% of the sales were closed from buyers outside Florida, and international clients came from Australia, China, Colombia, Germany, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates.
"We had a great week,” Saligram says in a statement, “helping more than 1,150 companies sell their surplus equipment to buyers from nearly every corner of the world.”
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