dry van trailer leases?

Leasing is a 100% expense write off vs buying and depreciating, depending if your business model and customers it may or may not make sense to do it one way over the other, generally maintenance is on whoever you are leasing it from

Personally I’d still rather own it, you can find 3-4 year old dry vans pretty cheap right now,

 

Dish out the popcorn...

 

A ten year old dry van is about 6years late for the landfill.

I got a 2022 GD van that’s now becoming a money pit. Buy new and run it until it needs new tires and trade it in on another new one.

Tires alone are 10% the cost of a new trailer..think about that for a minute.

 

I can describe a scenario against leasing old stuff.

In the container side; steamship lines used to provide the chassis from fleets of owned or leased chassis the pooled on-site.

When they decided to stop 'giving' the chassis the carriers were left with now paying to rent a chassis -or- provide their own.

The daily cost was a gut-kick to the carriers who had to re-work customer agreements in order to pass this sudden cost along.

Meanwhile the rental pool was the same old junk they were giving away before with mega 'refurbishment' program as the carriers looked to reduce their costs they started leasing their own fleets with re-furb and newly built units for long term rental and the more you took the lower the cost.

I remember initial daily pier costs around $25.00 a day and our leased 'groups' were around $4.00 - $5.00 a day, little more for newly built.

There was a large number of Chinese built new chassis along with US manufactured and the re-furbs and i kept pushing my boss to stick with the new builds and as the initial leases expired was able to show that the re-furbs using the original antique running gear was costing much more in maintenance costs compared to the new.

To make it worse, the steamship lines puppet companies always wanted the value on their books which included the re-furb costs and our insurance would only pay based on the value of a 10 - 20 year old chassis requiring the carrier to eat the difference after a total loss.

The steamship lines shut you out if you don't pay up!

That 'NEW' unit has some added value as, damage aside, minimal preventative maintenance is all you need.

We benefited from the latest brake systems, LED lights, some with on-board inflation compared to the chassis with older style brakes N stuff but thankfully changed over to radial tires....

 

If you can deal with roll up door and spring ride depending on your market you should be in the neighborhood of $500- $800 a month plus some formula for the tires.
If you want air ride and barn doors you’ll look at around $1000-1500ish a month plus some tire formula. Penske and Ryder will be the most expensive.
Laredo, TX will have the most competitive lease rates followed by Chicago/Atlanta/Memphis.

Take good pictures of everything. People are horrible and like to lease out beat up equipment and then make up damage charges against your deposit when you bring the trailer back.

Some smaller truck companies will rent their trailers too, you just have to call and talk to the correct people.

 

probably about $0.60 a pound I haven’t checked in a while

 

Buying my new reefer is going to come in about 1500 a month that seems a bit high for a dry van…..