Sector guide · Earthmoving, plant & civil
What buyers pull apart first in an earthmoving sale
Buyers for earthmoving and civil businesses are mostly trade buyers, larger contractors buying capacity, and investors backing an operator. They ask.
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Buyers for earthmoving and civil businesses are mostly trade buyers, larger contractors buying capacity, and investors backing an operator. They ask different questions and they all end up at the same short list of numbers. Know these numbers cold before they ask, and you change the whole negotiation.
The due diligence dashboard
| What a buyer asks for | What it has to show |
|---|---|
| The plant and equipment register, in full | Every machine and truck with year, model, hours or kilometres, condition, service history, finance status and realistic market value. This document does more work in an earthmoving sale than any other, and buyers can smell a padded one immediately. |
| Work in hand and the forward book | Contracted work, panel and standing arrangements, and realistic pipeline. A business sold with six months of contracted work ahead of it is a different proposition from one sold with an empty board. |
| Revenue mix by work type | Wet hire, dry hire and contract works carry different margins, different risk and different owner involvement. Buyers want to see the split and the margin on each, not one blended number. |
| Client concentration | Revenue share by client across three years. One builder or one council at 60 per cent of turnover is the first risk a buyer prices, and the first question their financier asks. |
| Plant utilisation | Hours worked against hours available across the fleet. Idle gear is capital earning nothing, and buyers adjust for it. Strong utilisation with a waiting list is a premium story. |
| Who wins the work | Where the last two years of jobs actually came from: tenders, relationships, repeat clients, word of mouth. If every answer traces back to the owner's phone, that is the number one thing to fix before sale. |
| The team and their tickets | Operators, supervisors and their competencies, licences and tenure. In a market where good operators are gold, a stable, ticketed crew that stays through settlement is a genuine asset on the table. |
| Safety and compliance record | Incident history, SWMS and safety systems, insurances, and the prequalifications held with councils and head contractors. These transfer trust to a buyer before they meet a single client. |
This is the list, in roughly the order a buyer works through it. The plant register is where the conversation starts and the forward work is where the price is decided.
Two searches, every machine, and what taking clear title actually requires
The Personal Property Securities Register is the official government register of security interests in personal property, being debts or other obligations secured by personal property. It is established under the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) and searched at ppsr.gov.au. A secured party holds an interest in the personal property of a grantor as security for a loan or other obligation. In an earthmoving deal the grantor is your trading entity and the secured parties are your financiers.
Serial number searching alone does not clear an earthmoving fleet. PPSR treats motor vehicles, aircraft, watercraft and some intellectual property rights as serial numbered property. A motor vehicle is anything designed to be propelled on land, capable of travelling more than 10km/h with power over 200W, or something that can be towed at that speed. PPSR states that some motorised equipment, such as a bobcat, may not be regarded as a motor vehicle, while an excavator, harvester or backhoe might be, depending on speed and power. Machines that fail the test are non-serial-numbered collateral.
That is the single most important practical point in a plant-heavy deal. A skid steer, a tracked dozer, a crusher, a screening plant, attachments and any low speed machine may be registered only against the ABN or ACN of the selling entity. A buyer searching by serial number alone will miss those registrations entirely. Both search types are required.
PPSR offers vehicle searches by serial number, organisational searches using an organisation’s identifier, and individual searches using a name and date of birth. Watercraft, aircraft and intellectual property searches are also available. So are point-in-time searches, registration number searches using the 15-digit PPSR registration number, and ordinal searches comparing registration events chronologically. Every search produces a certificate you can keep as proof of whether a security interest was registered at that time. The certificate is the evidentiary artefact, so date it as close to settlement as you can and keep it.
Purchase money security interests reorder the queue. A PMSI arises where the money lent or the credit given funded all or part of the purchase price of the property. Common forms are secured loans for specific goods, supply of goods on credit with retention of title, PPS leases and commercial consignments. PPSR states that if your security interest is a PMSI it is likely to go to the front of the queue even if you registered last. Registration is due before the grantor takes possession for inventory, and within 15 days of possession for non-inventory. PPSR also warns that failing to claim PMSI status when eligible loses priority, while incorrectly claiming it renders the entire registration ineffective.
The practical effect in an earthmoving business is direct. The financier holding a PMSI over one specific dozer outranks an earlier general security agreement over all present and after-acquired property. Map every machine to its own financier and its own facility. Do not assume the bank holding the general security agreement controls the fleet.
Taking clear title is a sequence, not a clause. Run both searches and keep the certificates. Reconcile the results against the plant register, machine by machine, matching every registration to a financier and a facility. Obtain a payout figure from each financier, with its daily accrual rate and its expiry date. At settlement direct funds to each financier out of the purchase price rather than to the seller, in exchange for that financier’s undertaking to release its security interest and remove or amend the registration. Then run a post-settlement search, because an undertaking is not an executed discharge. Any residual registration that cannot be explained is resolved before completion, not after.
Because payout figures expire and interest accrues daily, the settlement date is a hard commercial variable in a plant-heavy deal in a way it never is in a services business. Sections 43 and 44 of the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) deal with taking personal property free of certain security interests, and section 14 defines a purchase money security interest. The sequence set out above is assembled from the register’s own published guidance rather than from the statutory text, so have your solicitor read those sections against your facts.
Ask what it is worth
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