Texas construction firms are buying the majority of construction equipment for earthmoving right now and it’s not even close

Marcia Doyle Headshot
Updated Sep 12, 2014
The number of firms buying earthmoving equipment in Texas is more than double that of the next closest state, Florida.The number of firms buying earthmoving equipment in Texas is more than double that of the next closest state, Florida.

At 645 buyers, Texas stomped No. 2 Florida (317 buyers) in the number of financed construction equipment buyers engaged in earthmoving through August.

The numbers are the result of an analysis of Equipment Data Associates data segmenting out companies* likely to be engaged in earthmoving and which bought new equipment in the past eight months.

The top 10 states in the number of buyers of new equipment in this segment were:

1.     Texas, 645 companies
2.     Florida, 317
3.     Pennsylvania, 314
4.     California, 276
5.     New York, 237
6.     Ohio, 225
7.     North Carolina, 211
8.     Minnesota, 198
9.     Wisconsin, 172
10. (tie) Georgia and Illinois, 166

The same pattern continues when looking at earthmoving used equipment buyers, with Texas once again dominating at 570 buyers, followed by Florida at 229 and Pennsylvania at 216.

Contractors who perform earthmoving bought 2,696 new excavators – or about 22.5 percent of the total number of new machines bought by this segment during the first eight months of the year. Other top new machines in the earthmoving segment include 1,783 compact track loaders (15 percent of total); 1,661 compact excavators (14 percent of total) and 1,036 wheel loaders (8.6 percent of total).

*Editor’s note: The earthmoving segment includes companies in 30 SIC codes determined to have earthmoving capability, buying a variety of earthmoving equipment, including dozers, excavators, wheel loaders, backhoes, skid steers, etc. Equipment Data Associates is a division of Randall-Reilly and tracks public Uniform Commercial Code-1 filings submitted by lenders in financed equipment transactions.