At a Glance
- 48% of equipment dealers report losing at least one sale in the prior 12 months because their finance partner could not structure a usage-based or metered option (Secured Research)
- 61% of dealers report that customer requests for consumption-based or rental-to-own terms rose over the prior 24 months — and the steepest increase came from prime credits, not marginal ones (Secured Research)
- The shift is driven by standard telematics, the rental industry’s conditioning of buyers, and private-equity-owned operators managing to return on invested capital
- At the dealer, the equipment margin is the smallest number in the deal; the multi-year service, parts, and trade-cycle annuity is the prize
- The funder who can own the asset, bill the meter, and take the residual becomes the dealer’s first call on every deal — not just the metered ones
The Demand Shift
Walk the floor at any large equipment dealer and you will hear a conversation that barely existed a decade ago: the customer does not want to own the machine. They want the work the machine does, priced to how much of it they actually need. The request used to come from the margins — a seasonal contractor, a startup conserving cash. It now comes from the center of the market, including sophisticated operators with strong balance sheets who have simply decided that carrying a depreciating asset at full utilization risk is not how they want to deploy capital.
This is the part most funders underprice. The demand is not a financing preference that a good rate can talk a buyer out of. It is an operating-model preference, and the financing is downstream of it. A customer who has decided to pay for output will simply find a dealer, and a funder, who can quote it — and 61% of dealers now report that these requests are rising, with the sharpest growth among customers the dealer would classify as their best credits.
