How We Actually Price

Minimum data threshold

Evidence gates

A verified market range appears only when the evidence behind it clears the bar. Below it, the page may carry specs or an explicitly modelled estimate, but never a sample-sized market claim.

Asking and sold are never blended. Asking is what sellers advertise; sold replaces it only when the verified-sales gate clears.

From observation to page

Gather. Filter. Compute. Publish.

1. 01

   Gather

   We collect licensed or source-authorised Australian listings, permitted published operator rates, direct quotes, verified sales, checked owner submissions and reusable government procurement records.

2. 02

   Filter

   We reject wrong-model results, attachments, stale listings and observations that cannot be checked against the market.

3. 03

   Compute

   Price ranges use the 25th percentile, median and 75th percentile. Hire rates use the median of independent sources.

4. 04

   Publish

   Only data that clears its gate becomes a page, with the sample size, price basis and verified date shown beside it.

Same standard, different data

Price guides and hire rates

Individual sellers and transactions are never identifiable; the published dataset is the aggregate. Where data arrives under a licensing partnership, the partner is credited where the data appears.

Three further provenance rules. Indicative new prices come from published dealer new-unit listings and public government procurement records — council minutes, tender registers and agency disclosure logs of the kind published under access-to-information law such as NSW's GIPA Act. Manufacturer specifications are read from the manufacturer's own published documents, using the CE/Australia figures where a machine is specified differently by market. And every published figure is ex-GST — GST-inclusive observations are converted before computation, consistent with the ATO's GST guidance.

Where guides state a regulatory fact, it is read from the primary government source and linked here rather than repeated second-hand: high-risk work licence classes from Safe Work Australia; oversize machinery transport from the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator; conditional registration of plant from state schemes such as Transport for NSW's vehicle sheets and Queensland's conditional registration scheme; asset effective lives from the ATO's effective-life determinations and off-road diesel credits from the ATO's fuel tax credit rates; encumbrance checks on used machinery from the Personal Property Securities Register; machinery import statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics; and product recalls from the ACCC's recalls database and vehiclerecalls.gov.au for registered trucks.

A model, not market evidence

Indicative used-price estimates

When a model has a sourced indicative new price but no verified used-market range, HeavyBook may show a broad low, typical and high reference. It is designed to be more useful than a blank page without pretending we observed transactions we do not hold.

The Australian Taxation Office’s effective-life classes inform only the relative durability ordering between categories. The rates below are HeavyBook modelling assumptions tuned to plausible machinery residuals; they are not ATO tax depreciation rates and they are not observed sold prices.

These estimates never feed HeavyBook’s fair-price checker, finance prefill, buy-vs-hire calculator, verified-range counts or search-engine Offer data. A verified market range replaces the modelled estimate as soon as the evidence clears its gate.

Visible and editable

Calculator assumptions

The running-cost and buy-vs-hire tools combine live market figures with a documented compact-excavator cost model. These are defaults, not hidden inputs: every one can be changed in the tools.