Auction first, retail three months later

Ask what a 2019 sleeper with half a million miles is worth and you will get at least two honest answers. One is what it brings at auction, where it must sell this week to whoever is in the room. The other is retail, what a dealer gets from a buyer with time to shop and a bank behind him. Both are correct. Neither can be derived from the other by multiplying, because the gap between them moves with the market.

In the glut of 2019, retail ran close to double auction. At the peak in late 2021, J.D. Power reported that trucks were "regularly bringing higher pricing at auction than retail", which is not supposed to happen and did. By 2023 the gap on a three-to-five-year-old sleeper was about 15,000 dollars, which the same analysts called tighter than typical. A valuation that applied one fixed ratio across those years would have been wrong by tens of thousands of dollars in each of them.

Two populations, not two prices

The gap exists because dealers sort their trades. The clean, low-mileage trade-in with records goes on the lot at retail. The worn one, the one with the aftertreatment light on, goes to auction. So the auction lane and the retail lot are not the same trucks at two prices. They are two different populations of truck, and a comparable from one is only evidence about the other after an adjustment for which population it came from.

Auction moves first

When the market turned in 2022, J.D. Power projected that retail prices would take two to three months to begin following auction values down. ACT Research's Steve Tam put it plainly: used truck pricing "moved sooner and to a greater degree in the auction and wholesale markets, giving those who live in the retail world a sneak peek." In June 2022 retail prices for late-model trucks slipped 2 to 3 percent on the month while four-to-six-year-old sleepers were losing 6.9 percent a month at auction. In the 2016 downturn, auction fell 30 percent for the year against 13 percent at retail.

The auction lane is the retail lot's weather forecast, about a quarter ahead.

The price you think you saw

An auction result is a hammer price, the number the auctioneer calls. The buyer pays more. Ritchie Bros' United States schedule, in force for events opening on or after 1 August 2026, adds 10 percent on winning bids of 30,000 dollars or less, 5.5 percent between 30,000 and 75,000 with a minimum fee of 3,000 dollars, and a flat 4,125 dollars above 75,000. Document and title fees come on top. Because of the 3,000 dollar minimum, every truck between 30,000 and about 54,500 dollars pays the same 3,000. The fee is regressive: it distorts a cheap medium-duty truck far more than an expensive sleeper, and a schedule that changed this summer means last year's hammer prices and this year's are not on the same footing.