A $500 Yanmar will always sell in an hour.
All you can do is grab all the cash you can find for a deposit and rush over. And hope you get there first.
Then - only after you get there, ask about condition etc to confirm its what you expected.
For two of my Yanmars, and the backhoe, all the questions I asked on the phone helped the seller make it sound more attractive to other callers. And I think made him realize he could have asked more for it. At any rate in two of those cases when I finally got there, the seller got calls while I was there asking him to hold the unit a little longer so they could make an offer. But he already had a couple of hundred dollar bills (mine) in his hand.
It also occurred to me after some transactions like this to take home some component worth less than the deposit I had made but sufficient to make the unit harder to sell, while I needed a couple of days to get to the bank and take out some savings in cash. For example the box blade and bucket forks, at the time of my $700 deposit on my last purchase.
