Things have definitely tightened up on the lease/finance front and it's going to be more of a
permanent change then a passing phase. Easy credit to poorly qualified candidates got our economy where it is today and it will take years & years for there to be much improvement. I look to see
many more truck mount makers to go out of business over the next 6-24 months. White magic, Steam action, and a bunch of small manufacturers that have been cranking out crap for years will be among those to disappear. Many others will consolidate their lines and / or merge with better financed companies. Not very many manufacturers of truck mounts can go through much more of a depressed market and survive, thus we will end up with a lot less choices .The day of the bigger and bigger new units hitting the market is over as there just isn't a market for them.
Easy credit created the illusion of a market for over priced and over engineered equipment that was really never there. Thus there is an enormous amount of used, low hour equipment on the market. Guys buying new are going with much smaller units now. Sales of units in the
Prochem Legend or Judson TNT class will dominate the market in coming years and PORTABLES will comeback strong. When I look at some of the portables like the Namco Beast & Mytee M-5 and compare them to the 55 PSI unit I started with nearly twenty years ago (when with lots of work & a rotary scrubber we could get great results) I have to laugh. I wouldn't hesitate to start a carpet cleaning business today with a Whittiker
CRB & a MYTEE M-5 and have no plans for larger equipment. That's the new competitor in this industry. The start up that for less then $5,000 can compete very well against anyone on this board regardless of the equipment they run. That guy can finance his operation with a severance check or his credit card, have little debt to service and clean the clocks of the over leveraged operators with huge payments to make.