June sees bump in used truck searches

June is an important month as it’s the one before everyone disappears on their summer holidays. I’m sure you’ve all experienced the curse of trying to get something done on a Friday afternoon, only to be thwarted by a particular person being off. Well, June has those same Friday vibes. Get the business done now, or else you’ll be waiting until everyone comes back from their break.

That should mean that it’s a relatively productive month, but having had two consecutive months of declines and many other patchy performances throughout the year, the idea that all will be well in June on the commercialmotor.com classifieds is anything but a given.

Fortunately, the industry didn’t seem to be in Friday afternoon mode last month, and perhaps with the spectre of a looming general election and the inevitable shift in leadership that occurred, businesses wanted to get some spending done before the landscape changed. Whether or not we’ll see rises in taxes or changes to interest rates remains to be seen, but we certainly saw more activity in June in the classifieds than during May.

Overall views across the classified site were up a healthy 7.4%, with an increase in views of all types of listings except trailers (-2.4%). Traction, however, had a bumper month, with strong gains in the number of searches for rigids (+7.2%), tractor units (+15.3%), and specialist vehicles (+23.7%). But it was light commercial vehicles that stole the show, with a 24.7% increase month-on-month.

Naturally there were increases in the dominant van brands like Ford (+31.4%) and Mercedes-Benz Vans (+20.1%), but the big names in the heavy goods world pulled in even larger numbers to – in some cases – reverse several weeks of negative performance.

Scania kept its position as the most searched for manufacturer with a 40% boost to search volume, narrowly beating Volvo, which managed a 49.6% increase. DAF took third with a 31.8% increase, but it was MAN that registered the largest improvement – up 63.3%. Tipper trucks secured top position as the most searched for vehicle by body type, with a 28.7% increase compared with May. Tankers gained 18.8% in second place, while third went to tipper grabs with a 33.6% lift, stealing the spot from crane vehicles, which were up just 15.8%. The largest gains were for hook-loader vehicles (54.7%) and low-loaders (43.4%), but there were also good gains for skip wagons (36.8%) and temperature-controlled units (29.8%), showing that there’s interest and investment across a multitude of sectors.

Looking at individual models, the Volvo FH stormed into first position as the favourite truck of the month, with a 68.8% rise in views. Second went to the Mercedes-Benz Actros, which enjoyed a 25.5% lift in listing views, while third position saw the Scania S-series restore the losses of the previous two months with a 65.4% increase.

Impressive gains all round then, but there were even larger gains outside of the top 10, where the Scania P-series notched up 144.4% more listing views. The next highest performer was the MAN TGX, up 69.3%, followed by the Scania G-series, up 67.7%.

As sometimes happens after consecutive months of declines, we’re also in the curious position of there being no truck models with declining levels of views in June.

The Scania R-Series came closest to returning a negative, but instead managed to return just 0.2% more views than the previous month.

It will come as no surprise that the Volvo FH dominated the listing for the most viewed individual adverts. Its first position for total views and a 68.8% increase from the previous month means that there were nine FHs in the top 10, with a solitary DAF XF 480 SuperSpace being the only other model to break in.

With positive growth finally coming ahead of the summer break, it will be interesting to see if July and August maintain that momentum. These months are normally much quieter, but with a low base from which to see monthly uptrends, perhaps July will see a mixture of risers and fallers. Who knows? Maybe a new Labour government will inspire confidence in the sector and the much-delayed, but often mooted, drop in base interest rate from the Bank of England could further boost activity. As ever, we live in hope.

- This article was previoulsy published in Commercial Motor, to subscribe see the latest Commercial Motor subscription offer

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