Yes, prices are coming down slowly on GP. Unfortunately, quality is dropping as well. In the meantime, the list of projects I need this machine for is growing.
I recently described buying a direct surplus SEE sight unseen as buying a lottery ticket. I "bought" one of those tickets and it turned out pretty well but I did a lot of homework. The seller was a poster on this site and had been posting about it for several months on his ongoing progress (this was before the big surge in government sales). Even my purchase wasn't flawless as while it was stored at his property in Texas a civilian rodent ate part of the harness and it had some of the normal storage issues. Some folks have scored some great rigs from GP and we on occasion get to hear about them but expect a lot of folks who bought bad ones don't talk about it. I have seen several SEE ebay auctions where the descriptions sure are suspicious and several auctions of the same piece of equipment which I suspect may be that the seller misrepresented the condition and the buyer backed out. Generally a dealer no reserve auction is something I would stay away from.
The main problem is there are few dealers and individuals who have a clue about SEEs. C&C seems to do enough volume that I expect that the ones he buys and ultimately sells are going to be "good" ones. Of course he is businessman, if he ends up with one with serious issues, is he going to "eat it", I don't know but the temptation might be to sell it. There is seller in VT that seems to always have a new one for sale and expect there are other private sellers that have figured out how to pick a good one and turn them around to make a profit. I find it interesting that Expedition Imports doesn't seem to deal in them, they are the logical firm to be running them through inventory since they have the parts inventory but very rarely has he listed any (I do remember a HMMH). Couch Off Road another logical dealer also has had few that he lists (the one exception was the HMMH that was discussed long ago in this thread).
The dealer I recently bought my 1300 from in NH has two SEEs that he recently purchased. One will be on sale at some point while the other is for his personal use. Both appear mint and expect both were some of the later rebuilds. He has been buying and selling Unimogs for quite awhile but he mostly imports them. He goes to the direct military auctions and has enough background that he can pick the "good ones" and is willing to head home if he doesn't like what he sees. He has been dealing with and working on Unimogs long enough that he knows their weak points and signs of trouble. The trade off is he knows what they are worth and in no rush to sell, thus his prices wont be the lowest. Unfortunately I expect he is the very rare exception and most buyers like myself went in without a clue and are learning as we go.
I expect the market for SEEs is going to be getting pretty rough once the military inventory is cleaned out. There are going to be a lot of junks that folks are going try to offload and they are going to pull down the market prices for the few rare good ones that folks care to sell. I expect those with good ones are going to hold onto them rather than compete with the junk.
The one thing I keep is mind is despite some design compromises when a SEE gets to the reliable point, its pretty amazing what they can do for the price. Folks with far more experience with crawler loaders who have used mine have commented that the hydraulics run like a brand new machine. When I look what I paid compared to similar units for sale in the area I had choice of a SEE or a 25 year old beat up second or third owner Case or Cat that was so worn out the owner couldn't justify spending any more money on it. I expect those rigs would be even more unreliable and require just as many expensive parts to keep running.
It does sound like you have the right background and attitude to ultimately deal with a SEE so keep trying and expect to possibly burn up a few miles driving to look at SEEs for sale.
