selling used servers in bulk

I got a response to my CL ad from someone trying to sell a whole bunch of computer equipment (They have supposedly upgraded to new hardware). They are willing to sell the whole lot or in pieces. The total they are asking is more than 18 grand! Most pieces are servers, some with harddrives some without. Their prices are probably too high but before I start negotiations I want to figure out if it would be worth it.

I can post a detailed list of what they have separately but if I do decide to buy I will not want to sell the servers piece by piece. I will prefer to unload them all to a single buyer or maybe a couple. So my q is this: do you have experience selling used servers? What sort of person/business could be interested in a whole lot of used servers assuming they are not too old? Thx

Here are the servers they are offering with how much they want for them:

DELL PE 2650 MBEX01 100
DELL PE 1850 mbweb01 110
pe2850 - gen2 MBSIT03 250
pe2850 - gen2 MBSIT02 350
pe1800 300
PE2950 formerly MBSVIRTUAL02 350
PE 2850 GEN2 MBNAS-DR-HERA 250
PE 1850-GEN2 DR-AD-ATHENA 150

MD1000 2500
MD1000 1500

I don't think I can convince them to sell me those servers for scrap value which would be about 10-15 times lower than what they are asking for them now. I looked at a few old posts and they all talk about scrapping servers or selling individual parts. I am trying to avoid that if I can. That is, I want to buy these servers and, assuming that they are complete with their CPUs, RAM, power supplies, hard drives etc etc, I want to sell them all to someone -- or a small number of someones -- who would be using them as working equipment. So maybe a potential buyer would be a company similar in size/line of business to the one selling it. At the same time, I think now there is a trend to move from own server racks to the cloud in which case selling those servers might prove quite difficult. This is why I asked for (recent) experience of selling multiple server units. I did some searching on the forum but did not find any old posts addressing that. Maybe I wasn't searching correctly.

They want 18 grand for 8 servers and 2 powervaults? This thread should already be over.

You should walk away from this offer right away! They are asking top $ for old severs. Any server more than about 3 years old is a tough sell. No big business will buy those servers, and any small business who might be interested would only want one or a few. As olddude posted, scrap values for servers are all over the place, depending on make, model, options, etc. Sounds like they won't let these go for scrap value.
What you can do is check back with them in a few months.

Originally Posted by aurum

What you can do is check back with them in a few months.

That's a good point. My guess is that they just decided to get rid of those when they contacted me initially, so they thought they could get "big bucks" for them.

Originally Posted by olddude

The companies that can afford to pay thousands for a server do not buy from Joe Blow or Jane Doe.

Either that or moving all their data and software to the cloud like AWS...

Originally Posted by olddude

As I predicted last year it is approaching the point where you tube and the net is quickly creating a misinformed wanabe e scrapper on every block. This thread is proof.

Wait a minute! Which one of us on this thread is "a misinformed wanabe e scrapper"?

Originally Posted by miked

"a misinformed wanabe e scrapper"?

Me on many occasions, Still learning. Mike

I am very much in the same category

People see the prices of the equipment when it was new and think they can get most of that on used equipment. If you think a car loses value when you drive it off the lot then you would faint looking at what a used server is worth the second you power it up.

Quite a bit of the value of a server is the original warranty, not the hardware.

I would just come back and offer him scrap value for all of those servers. They are worthless for anything but scrap at this point.

If he doesn't want to take it don't budge. When he can't sell the servers then he will finally come back to you and say alright lets do it. That is when you tell him you will come pick them up for a fee.

If he wants to play that game, play hardball with him. You can't win this game by being mister nice guy.

Off topic, but I have a customer who every time he sees a car for sale by owner he immediately calls the number and offers the people 1/3 of Blue Book value. They ALWAYS balk. He tells them that is fine, just keep his number and if they change their mind the offer is always on the table. More often then not he gets the call back and he buys the car, puts it on the corner lot down the street from his house for blue book value and bam. Sold in less than 1 month.

Don't let these guys push you around. Do your homework. For Dells if you get the service tag you can go to support.dell.com and find the initial configuration of the device. Learning server hardware takes years of time and effort. It is not for the faint of heart. As Olddude stated he spend a ton of time and effort getting to where he is at and there is no better teacher than the school of hard knocks.

If anyone comes across any servers less than 3 years old feel free to hit me up. I am always looking for new equipment.

Just saying what I would do in this spot. They are WAY over-shooting their asking price. They are hoping that you would bite on a number. They know it's too high. if they have $30k wrapped up, they just more than likely want half out of it, shooting out 18k and hoping you would think you were getting a deal by negotiating down to 15. even at 15 you are getting smoked. the servers have value, but they depreciate like a korean car in a north dakota winter. Make an offer that you are comfortable with, not just breaking even, if you think you can turn it over to 10, offer 5 or 6. They will more than likely act like you insulted them, you will walk out. and they will keep trying to find a sucker. either they will, or they wont. Just dont let it be you. if they dont find one, 2-3 weeks from now, your phone might ring. Thats when your offer should go down another 10-20%. because you know they are just trying to dump at that point.