When I was looking for a new tractor last fall, I only considered brands with a local presence.
If THAT wasn't an option, I'd buy used, and find the service manuals for the tractor. (Like I did with my 5600 and 1710).
I must agree with mrwhippy here, mostly.
I had dealers for Deere, Massey, Mahindra, Kubota, and Kioti, all within 10-15 miles of my home. After I bought my Kioti in 2009, Kioti USA fired my dealer (or vice versa). According to my former dealer (a very small business) Kioti USA required him to buy $350K of tractors and put them on his lot or they would revoke his dealership. Given the economic conditions and vanishing sales in 2010, the dealer just couldn't lay out all that cash. After that, he sold LS tractors (another Korean brand) for a while but now he's totally out of the tractor business. Maybe my dealer's version of events is BS but the bottom line is: no nearby Kioti dealer now. Kioti USA in Wendell is almost as close as the nearest dealer. All this makes me wonder about the "rest of the story" on Valley Tractor.
So much for history, but the fact is that I would never have considered Kioti without a nearby dealer. Maybe Kioti was actually purging "bad" dealers but my view is that they made the Kioti brand much less desirable when they thin their dealer network.
But I disagree on is the feasibility of just getting a service manual and doing your own maintenance. That's fine for small stuff but I can't see doing major work (like splitting a tractor for clutch repair) without real facilities.
In my case, I'm long out of warranty and there are two nearby businesses (Morton Sherman and Louisburg Tractor) who can fix anything, for a price, given parts. But if I were shopping today, Kioti would not make the short list simply because of dealer access.
