GaryS said:
Unless I can find a good used tractor, I'm going to buy a new Kubota GR2100.
Is there a best time to buy? It's almost the end of the season and if I buy it now, it'll just sit over the winter. Kubota does have nice financing options available now - it's hard to beat 0% for 36 months. Will I have a btter shoot at a better price if I wait until October or November?
I also wonder if there's any rumors of a new model coming out over the winter. I'd hate to spend $7k to have a new model arrive before I really got a chance to use the thing!
Hi Gary there are far more experienced people than me on these forums so I hope they will chime in but I can address a few things:
1) When I was doing research for my first tractor years ago, the internet wasn't anywhere near as useful or powerful as it is today so I did a lot of driving around. ALL the places like (don't laugh) TS, Sears, Lowes, etc had tractors at sometimes deeply discounted prices in the Fall (got my last one 25% off what I would have paid in July.)
2) The dealerships also had LOTS of used tractors on their lots. Unfortunately most salesmen (across brands) were either on the level of the used car salesman (sleezeball-type) which really turns me off, or they were playing hardball with fairly high prices for used machines, while claiming that they had no room to work with at all on prices for new machines. I didn't believe that for a minute and sure enough, come late October when I went back for the last time, most had sold nary a tractor, which you can be sure didn't please their owners much.
3) Search these forums and the net about new Kubs, I'm pretty darn sure I've read severral times there's a slew of new models being announced by the co I think next month.
4) MY MISTAKE
I one instance at least, I was treated flat out rudely by the salesman (the same kind of idiot who has email on his business card but "never reads his email", this is the kind of stuff that I was shocked to read on these forums still happens TODAY, in 2006, even when a fellow walks into a dealership to buy a 50K tractor CASH!) in another instance two floor guys were jibberjabbering and let me walk around their lot for almost an hour without ever evn acknowledging my presence. The big mistake I made was not taking 15 minutes to just lay down the facts on paper and address that in a letter to the local dealership's owner, cc'd to the brand's headquarters. I really liked their machines and who knows, maybe they would have contacted me back with an apology and a good offer as any deecnt company would do? But my main point is that 99% of the time, you can be sure that the boss and the brand are completely unaware of the crap SOME salespeople get away with (please do not hear me wrong, there ARE some decent and competent sales people out there.) It hurts the business (in my case, one dealership lost out on an extra 45K or so when a farmer neighbor casually asked me how my tractor hunt was going and I told him) it hurts the brand and frankly, what reasonable dealer would want say, 200K of dead money sitting on their sales floor throughout 6-8 months of the year when they could get rid of that for say, 160-180K that would grow interest in the bank!
Hey Gary you're a lucky guy to have enough dough to even look at a new GR2100, it sure looks like a wonderful machine!