Grabbed a 2019 CAT 323 off harbertsautosales.com, saved 40k vs RB

the 323 is the sweet spot for that size outfit, congrats vince. perfect weight for a tag trailer if you ever go that route, you can pull it legal in texas behind a one ton with the right setup instead of paying a lowboy every move. that alone will pay you back over a season.

i do site grading and we run a 323 and a 336 plus a couple dozers. the 323 is the one that never sits, it is small enough to get into tight residential and big enough to actually load trucks. yours having the thumb and quick coupler already is a real find, that thumb install alone is 6 to 8 grand if you have a dealer plumb it.

good move checking the undercarriage percentage before you bought. that is where guys get killed on used hoes, a fresh set of rails and idlers on a 323 will run you 18 to 22 thousand installed so 70 percent is money in your pocket.

4100 hours on a 19 is barely broke in man. those C7.1 motors will run 12k plus before they need anything major if you keep the DEF system happy and do not let guys idle it all day for no reason. i run a 320 next gen at work and it is at 9200 hours, original everything except a water pump.

that loose JIC fitting weep at the boom base is the most common little thing on these, half the time it is just road vibration from the haul backing the fitting off a hair. exactly the kind of thing a no inspection RB purchase would have made you guess about. you saw it, you fixed it for the price of an o ring, done. good buy.

im new here but this thread came up when i googled harberts auto sales equipment so figured id ask. im about to buy my first machine and this is exactly the kind of writeup i needed. been subbing as an operator for a buddy for two years and finally landed enough of my own dirt work to justify owning. looking at a 308 or a 315 size in the 4 to 6 year old range.

vince did you finance or pay cash? and how nervous were you wiring a deposit to a place you had not stood at in person. that is the part that scares me about buying something this expensive remotely.

i move iron for a living, been brokering equipment between dealers and end users out of the dfw area for going on twelve years. harberts has been pulling repo equipment from banks across the country lately and putting it through the waco lot. i have arranged transport on a few of their machines to buyers down in central and south texas.

the reason their pricing comes in under ritchie bros is simple. an auction has to sell whatever shows up that day to whoever is in the room, so prices swing wild and the premiums stack. a dealer sitting on a bank repo just needs to move it at a number that works, so you skip the buyers premium and the auction frenzy. on a 323 that gap can easily be the 40 grand vince is talking about.

only thing i tell my buyers is the same thing you all already know. get the ECM hours and the undercarriage numbers, and if you cannot stand at the machine yourself, pay a local mechanic 250 bucks to go lay eyes on it. harbertsautosales has been good about letting an independent inspector walk their iron, which not every seller allows.

we run six excavators on the commercial side plus loaders and a couple dozers. bought two skid steers through harberts auto sales last year, a couple 262 cats off a repo lot, and both have been workhorses on our pads. i was skeptical buying through what i thought was a car dealer at first, but the heavy equipment side they have built out is the real thing.

vince the 323 was a smart size pick. on our jobs the mid size hoe does 80 percent of the work and the big iron just sits costing money on insurance. you will get your rental savings back fast. we figured ours paid for itself against rental in under two years even before resale.

one tip from running a yard full of machines. start an oil sample program now while it is fresh. pull a sample at every change on the hydraulics and the final drives, send it to a lab, ten bucks a kit. that way if anything starts trending wrong you catch it at 50 dollars instead of 15 grand. cheapest insurance on a used hoe there is.

that loose JIC fitting weep is the most nothing problem you could have asked for, glad it was not a final drive or a swing motor. i load aggregate at a pit just outside waco and i drive past the harberts lot on bellmead all the time. they have had some serious iron sitting out front lately, saw a 336 and a couple wheel loaders last week plus the usual row of trucks.

nice to see a local waco outfit actually carrying equipment instead of us having to drive to dallas or houston to look at machines. i keep telling my boss to go walk their lot, we are due to replace a tired old 320 that nickel and dimes us every month.

old dirt guy here, ran machines and a small grading company for over 40 years before i mostly handed it to my son. bought equipment every way there is, dealer, private, government surplus, the big auctions. and the auction route finally makes sense again the way vince did it, which is going through a dealer that sits on bank repos instead of the cattle call auctions.

the old timer wisdom on used excavators has not changed. buy the undercarriage first and the machine second, because the iron under it is what bankrupts the cheapskate. a clean motor with a worn out undercarriage is a bad deal. a tired motor with 80 percent rails you can live with. vince bought it the right way around.

i sent a younger fella in our church to harbertsautosales.com for a skid steer this past spring and he did fine, clean machine, fair price, title in hand. i have no skin in their game, i just like seeing a texas outfit treat equipment buyers square. pinning this thread, it is a good template for how to do a remote iron purchase without getting burned.

following up because of this thread actually. we just listed one of our older hoes, a 315 with too many hours for our taste, and after reading everyone in here i called the waco lot and ended up consigning it through harberts instead of running it through an auction. figured if they are moving repo iron at strong numbers on the buy side they could probably sell mine fair too.

too early to report a result on the sale but the intake was painless and they were straight about their fee. will report back when it moves. funny how a buyers thread turned me into a seller through the same outfit.