Sellers of used racks/pvc are taking advantage of excess shipping times and a thin used market right now in order to justify their prices. It’s not really about the product quality or integrity…
If it WERE based off those factors (and i believe it should be) pvc and racks would average more around 65% of MSRP. 45-50% for ones with clear damage, 75-80% for new & no damage. Let’s say you buy one and it’s delivered to your house in a box. The moment that you, a consumer, put that product together, tack off 20% of it’s value for depreciation. Kinda like ‘off the lot’ depreciation for cars, but instead it’s ‘consumer assembly’ deprecation. From that point, after 2 years drop another 10%.
10% accounts for normal wear and tear a product accumulates after being used long enough to no longer be considered a ‘new’ item.
20% covers the potential for assembly mistakes that may raise likelihood of premature failure, and covers the fact that as a private seller, no guarantees can be made about any part of the products integrity, potential disease/parasite exposure history, possible damage, so on so forth.
It’s the biggest value detractor because a private seller has no established professional reputation to back up claims, little to no incentive to tell the truth, and everything is final sale.
For other products, that percentage would be higher, but because PVC/Racks are built to be robust, the quality of the product itself makes up for some of this risk. For example a TV stand would depreciate 10-15% more. Leading to overall deprecation of 40-45% after 2 years of good use, or 30-35% if still within the timeline of relatively ‘new.’
Any damage beyond that depends. Small damage? Maybe mention it, but wear and tear covers that. If it doesn’t effect functionality then don’t lower price. Noticable but not vital? Haggle with them and see if they’ll take it. Anything big or missing or that actually compromises aspects of functionality? That should definitely reduce the price depending on how bad it is/what’s missing.
This is how i sell my used enclosures and yeah, it’s a loss overall. But it’s not supposed to comp or come close to comping the price of new. It’s supposed to mitigate loss by getting paid to give it to someone instead having to pay someone to dump or store it. I understand that the value in our eyes is high because we paid a lot, these things are super nice, and it hurts to have to sell it when we’d probably sooner keep it if only it wouldn’t take up so much space/cost so much to put in storage. I mean, what if we end up getting another animal down the road that it would be perfect for? Right? Then it’s easy to try to get as much as possible for it to either put into the next one or invest back into your collection.
By my logic, say my rack system was $600 heat tape pre-installed, it’s now 5 years old, well loved with some stained bins, scuffs, and an annoying wheel, but nothing broken, i would sell it for like $420.
Now if the same rack was only a year old, it would be like $480.
What i actually see (in my area at least) 9 x out of 10 is a 600$ enclosure/rack system being sold dirty as all heck with years of use, (did they even try to remove the substrate? No.) and in some cases, missing equipment, going for like $500
(plus accessories that are mandatorily included for just 100! It’s a ’ ‘$300 value’ ’ but you can and have to take it for only $100!) It’s usually just a bunch of junk. (No one wants your spare micro sized heat mats, various too-tiny-for-anything-other-than-a-hatchling-corn-snake water bowls/hides or that one heat rock you got from way back when you were dumb and just started keeping, lol.) But more importantly, it’s junk that bumps the price right back up to $600!
You’d think it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that’s a rip off, but somehow they sell. Not to me lol, but they do.
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