Compact Excavator Auction Bid Ceiling

Paste a compact-excavator auction lot. Add your transport, repair, fees, and target margin. Get the maximum price you can bid without destroying your economics.

This Actor turns one used compact-excavator lot into a transparent bid ceiling. It shows the lot facts it could substantiate, the assumptions you supplied, every cost in the waterfall, three resale/bid scenarios, a recommended maximum bid, and the first bid increment at which you should walk away.

Run the free synthetic example first. It takes no source access and makes no billable event call.

Who it is for

• Small equipment resellers and refurbishers
• Contractors buying used compact excavators
• Equipment-rental operators
• Active auction buyers who need a repeatable bid discipline

The Actor is intentionally narrow: one used compact excavator per run. It is not a general auction-valuation platform.

What you get

One stable JSON decision packet in the default dataset and the OUTPUT key-value-store record:

• normalized lot facts and per-fact provenance;
• missing, uncertain, and conflicting facts;
• buyer-supplied assumptions separated from defaults;
• buyer-supplied or comparable-derived resale range;
• repair, transport, loading/removal, inspection, holding, financing, tax, fee, margin, and risk-reserve calculations;
• conservative, base, and aggressive bid ceilings;
• a confidence-selected maximum bid rounded down to your auction increment;
• the next bid increment as the hard walk-away price;
• one-way sensitivity for resale, repairs, transport, and required margin;
• input, source-content, and comparable-set hashes for reproducibility.

This is buyer decision support, not a certified appraisal, inspection, guaranteed profit, or certified market value.

Five-minute free example

Use this input in Apify Console:

{
  "mode": "free_example"
}

The fixed synthetic Kubota KX040-4 example produces:

Result	USD
Conservative ceiling	16,475.29
Base ceiling	20,680.94
Aggressive ceiling	24,026.04
Recommended maximum bid	20,600.00
Walk-away price	20,700.00

The example's base resale value is $36,600. At the exact $20,680.94 base ceiling, the waterfall consumes the full resale value after a $5,490 required margin and $1,830 risk reserve. The operational recommendation rounds down to the configured $100 bid increment.

Private valuation input

For mode: "valuation", provide exactly one lot source:

1. lotData: canonical buyer-supplied JSON (most reliable);
2. uploadedHtml: buyer-exported/copied HTML, at most 2 MB; or
3. lotUrl: one permitted HTTPS page using the restrictive opt-in policy below.

Then provide your buyer economics and either comparables, comparablesCsv, or resaleEstimate.

{
  "mode": "valuation",
  "sourceReference": "buyer-export://lot-8421",
  "lotData": {
    "assetType": "compact_excavator",
    "manufacturer": "Takeuchi",
    "model": "TB240",
    "year": 2020,
    "hours": 2350,
    "condition": "fair",
    "location": "Columbus, Ohio, US",
    "knownMissingFacts": ["serviceHistory", "undercarriageWearMeasurement"]
  },
  "buyer": {
    "currency": "USD",
    "auctionFee": {
      "fixed": 75,
      "tiers": [
        { "upTo": 10000, "percent": 12 },
        { "upTo": 30000, "percent": 8 },
        { "upTo": null, "percent": 5 }
      ]
    },
    "transportCost": 1450,
    "loadingRemovalCost": 250,
    "repairAllowance": { "low": 1800, "base": 4200, "high": 8500 },
    "inspectionCost": 450,
    "holdingMonths": 4,
    "monthlyHoldingCost": 225,
    "annualCapitalRatePercent": 14,
    "marginPercentOfResale": 16,
    "minimumMarginAmount": 3500,
    "riskBufferPercentOfResale": 7,
    "minimumRiskBufferAmount": 1800,
    "purchaseTaxPercent": 0,
    "taxAppliesToFees": false,
    "expectedResaleChannel": "dealer retail",
    "bidIncrement": 100
  },
  "resaleEstimate": {
    "low": 30000,
    "base": 35500,
    "high": 40500,
    "basis": "Buyer-owned transaction history for three recent TB240 units."
  }
}

Replace defaults with real costs. Any default used is listed in defaultAssumptions.appliedFields and important cost defaults produce warnings.

Comparable interface

Comparable records are deliberately source-neutral so a licensed or permitted provider can be added later without changing the valuation engine.

{
  "reference": "YOUR-COMP-001",
  "manufacturer": "Kubota",
  "model": "KX040-4",
  "year": 2019,
  "hours": 3000,
  "condition": "fair",
  "price": 32750,
  "priceType": "sold",
  "date": "2026-05-19",
  "source": "buyer archive"
}

The Actor applies fixed, versioned adjustments:

• asking prices: 0.92 realization factor;
• year: 1.5% per year, capped at ±20%;
• hours: 4% per 1,000-hour difference, capped at ±20%;
• explicit condition factors;
• higher weights for same-model, same-manufacturer, and sold-price records.

One or two comparables are accepted, but the range is widened and flagged. Zero comparable records require an explicit buyer resale range; the Actor will not invent one.

Valuation waterfall

For each scenario, the maximum hammer bid is the greatest bid—resolved to one cent—that satisfies:

resale value
- hammer bid
- auction fee (fixed, percentage, or progressive tiers)
- purchase tax
- transport
- loading/removal
- repair allowance
- inspection
- holding cost
- simple capital cost over the holding period
- required buyer margin
- uncertainty/risk reserve
>= 0

The conservative case uses low resale, high repairs, and 1.25× risk reserve. The base case uses base values. The aggressive case uses high resale, low repairs, and 0.75× risk reserve. “Aggressive” is not a recommendation to exceed your economics.

URL and rights behavior

There is no built-in bypass and no auction site is silently enabled. For direct acquisition you must set all of:

{
  "lotUrl": "https://permitted.example/lot/8421",
  "sourcePolicy": {
    "enabled": true,
    "rightsConfirmed": true,
    "allowedHosts": ["permitted.example"]
  }
}

The URL adapter:

• accepts one HTTPS page only;
• requires an exact hostname (no wildcards), standard TLS port, and buyer confirmation of permission;
• rejects credentials, literal IPs, local/private/reserved DNS results, unsafe redirects, non-HTML responses, and oversized bodies;
• checks robots.txt and fails closed if it cannot verify it;
• rechecks the exact host and robots rules after every redirect;
• never uses a proxy, authentication, cookies, CAPTCHA solving, or anti-bot bypass.

If a page is gated, disallowed, ambiguous, or unavailable, use buyer-exported HTML or structured lot JSON. Do not submit listing photos, full catalogs, or full copyrighted descriptions. Output retains derived facts, minimal evidence excerpts, hashes, and source references—not photos or a listing replica.

API usage

Call the public Actor with the standard Apify API. This example runs the free synthetic valuation; replace the request body with a private valuation input like the one above when needed.

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/boundedtools~compact-excavator-bid-ceiling/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{"mode":"free_example"}'

Retrieve the run's default dataset or OUTPUT record using the URLs exposed by the Actor output schema. Apify also generates API examples and integrations from the input/output schemas.

Pricing

This Actor uses Apify pay per event.

• Free synthetic example: $0.00. mode=free_example does not trigger the paid private-valuation event.
• Private valuation: $13.50 per successful private valuation.
• Failed or invalid private runs: the private-valuation event is not charged.
• Platform usage: included. Users are not charged a separate platform-usage fee.

The paid event is attempted at most once per run and only after the valuation calculation succeeds. The result is saved and delivered immediately after a successful charge; if the run's charge limit does not permit the event, the private result is not delivered.

Privacy and security

• Inputs and results stay in the caller's per-run Apify storage; no shared cross-customer dataset is created.
• Logs contain valuation ID, one-way lot fingerprint, event class, error code, and warning count—not buyer costs, raw HTML, account identity, or full listing text.
• The Actor does not request secrets, credentials, names, emails, cookies, or outcome data.
• Input/HTML/CSV/body sizes and comparable counts are capped.
• HTML is treated as text; scripts are removed and never executed.
• Hashes make repeated calculations auditable without redistributing source material.

What it does not do

• It does not certify condition, title, ownership, emissions compliance, transport legality, or market value.
• It does not inspect photos or infer a precise undercarriage percentage.
• It does not access paid/restricted sold-price databases.
• It does not log in, solve CAPTCHA, evade bot controls, scrape catalogs in bulk, or fetch a URL unless the restrictive policy is explicitly enabled.
• It does not replace a physical inspection, tax advice, freight quote, or buyer judgment.

Limitations

The first model is intentionally spreadsheet-auditable. Comparable quality dominates resale quality. Asking prices may not transact; sparse evidence widens the range but cannot remove market uncertainty. Repairs, removal, taxes, fees, and resale velocity are buyer-specific. Unknown condition is explicitly inferred and never presented as observed.