The next few months could be a tough stretch for the used truck market.
Confirming sentiments presented during prior sessions at the 2022 Used Truck Association (UTA) Convention, ACT Research Vice President Steve Tam reported Friday his company is anticipating used truck volumes will finish 2022 down six percent from last year and is predicting the market contracts by 10 percent year over year in 2023.
Tam adds retail pricing won’t fare any better. After two years of strong year over year growth, ACT Research is predicting price to fall by nearly 40 percent overall in 2023.
Tam is hopeful the downswing won’t feel as bad as those numbers might indicate — used truck pricing has been in decline for six months so continuing slippage isn’t a sudden shift — but says with the economy and spot market continuing to shrink, there simply isn’t enough used demand out there to sway the current trend.
“We’re a little more bearish about next year than others,” says Tam. “We are anticipating a shallow recession with GDP contraction in Q1 and a weak freight environment in the first half of the year.”
Tam attributes the spot market for most of the change. He says the trucking industry received a huge influx of new carriers, mostly owner-operators, in 2021 when the market was hot and now those operations are struggling to secure loads and maintain capacity. He says thus far most appear to still be in business, repossession rates are low and the carrier population has not contracted much despite ongoing softening over the latter half of this year. But Tam says after buying a ton of trucks in late 2021 and earlier this year, very few of those small operations are expanding their fleets these days.
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