Load posts are up year over year across all three major equipment types, while truck posts are way down. That’s a sign of how much tighter capacity has gotten. Routing guides that held in March are breaking now, mini-bid activity has spiked, and the freight falling out of those guides lands with brokers.
With peak produce season fading to the background, now’s the time to shore up your carrier sourcing and take a look at your pricing strategies.
What changes in a supply-driven recovery
The truckload market recovery feels different this time around. Retail, housing, and automotive are all soft, and rates climbed anyway because carriers left the market while stricter qualification standards kept new capacity from backfilling.
Produce season showed it plainly. Reefer rates ran about 50 cents a mile higher from mid-April to July 4, roughly twice the 10-year average increase for that stretch, while produce volumes fell about 10%.
Price a lane on spring data and you can be 40% light
Spot rates are up close to 40% year over year, and DAT expects them to hold near these levels through August rather than climb much further. Contract rates are the ones to watch, still ticking up as they catch up to the spot surge.
A national average tells you the climate, not the price of your lane. Freight is hundreds of thousands of lane-level markets moving in different directions, and LA to Dallas can run hot while Dallas to Chicago cools off.
DAT and Transfix walk through auditing an RFP while it’s still running, including how to tell whether a lane drifted because the market moved or because your own lead times slipped. One of those is a conversation with your shipper. The other you fix yourself.
Another source of capacity. Not another board to search.
Truck posts are down about a quarter year over year, so the pool you’re searching is smaller than it was. DAT Convoy reaches a different pool of carriers than the one your team already works, all of which book through an app. Automation handles the rest of the transaction. Your team spends its hours on the freight that actually needs them. We just added Tai TMS integration along with all of our other major TMS integrations.
Check out what’s new from DAT
Keep up to date with all the latest features added to DAT products, including intermodal rate data, carrier profiles information, fraud alerts from Trucker Tools, and more. Bookmark the link below to stay current on all the new capabilities in the tools you’re using.
Catch us at these events
Come meet the DAT team at one of these events. Click the link for any event to schedule time with one of our reps while you’re there.
- McLeod User Conference
- Tai User Conference
- Engage Chicago
