June 1, 2017, was the day John Deere unveiled its new S700 Series combines. I posted a video from the event at lunch time that day. I suspected there would be a lot of interest out there in farm country. By the next morning the video had 7,385 views.

In the video the new S780 model was featured:

The video and news release also generated a ton of interest and feedback on our Machinery Pete social media outlets, including our Facebook page. You can imagine the volume of farmer comments. One jumped out at me: “Wonder what my S680 is worth now?”

Here’s what our Machinery Pete auction sale price shows on S680 values going back over the past 4 years:

It’s interesting to note how very little the average auction prices on S680s dropped last year. They were down just 1.6% after a much larger 11.7% drop in value in 2015 and an 18.4% drop in value in 2014.

A key behind the scenes stat here of course is “Number Sold at Auction” over the past few years. What I saw back in 2015, during the worst of the industry’s sales downturn, was a huge 125% increase in the number of S680 combines sold at auction vs. 2014. Of course we know what that was … lots of dealers were taking lots of excess S680s to auction to pare down inventory. It’s not surprising at all that values were dropping significantly at that point.

Last year, as the average auction price on S680s stabilized, the number sold at auction, not surprisingly, dropped 14.8%. So far through the first 5 months of 2017, the number of S680s sold at auction is down another 21.7%.

Here’s a look at recent auction sale prices from 2017 on John Deere S680 combines:

One of our big pushes with our growing Machinery Pete business is to provide deeper business data intelligence to our dealers, and we’re adding information beyond the auction sale price data I’ve been compiling now for 27.5 years. If we dive into our dashboard analytics on John Deere S680 combines, here’s what we show for current average dealer list price by model year:

It’s interesting and insightful to track the number of items both sold at auction and available for sale on dealer lots throughout a given period. So we find it very insightful to supply our dealers with the ever-changing raw number of particular Category/Make/Model/Year units. Presently, our dashboard analytics show the number of S680s available for sale by dealers is slightly up for all model years, from 2012 to 2016, during the past 30 days.

The rest of 2017 should be interesting. Stay tuned.