Rates, lanes on Labor Day weekend and beyond: A new resource

I’m putting together a feature on some of the tools and tactics out there for owner-operators with their own authority to capitalize on the rate dynamic we’ve seen over the last year or so. The load-to-truck metric in any given geographical area, available from most load-board services provided you’re a member, is a fairly good indicator of where you stand in terms of negotiating power, if you’re using brokers. Few trucks in an area + an overabundance of available loads = $.

That’s oversimplifying it, but you get the drift.

Line-haul averages for your segment are a good rate marker as well. But as Kentucky-based owner-operator and sometime independent O-O dispatcher Chad Boblett this week reminded the listeners of Rico Muhammad’s “Rates and Lanes” podcast, part of Kevin Rutherford Let’s Truck/AudioRoad Blog Talk Radio network, if you’re not doing any direct freight but are relying solely on the spot freight market and brokers, when you look at the per-mile averages in your particular segment (van, flat, reefer), you ought to be getting a fair amount more than the spot average if you want to truly thrive.

Figured into those averages are strategic “back hauls,” or moves that have functioned solely to get a carrier back to home base for his/her bread-and-butter direct-shipper run, often moving for a rate significantly lower than what should otherwise be possible, bringing down the average.

Here’s where spot linehaul rates (including fuel surcharge — early versions of the story stated the following rates didn’t reflect FSC; apologies for the error) stood earlier in the week, from DAT’s weekly Trendlines release, a snapshot of metrics from freight booked via its network (you can sign up to receive the company’s rate updates via email newsletter yourself at this link):

In the Rates and Lanes podcast (embedded at bottom), owner-operator Boblett, filling in for Muhammad (with whom Boblett occasionally cohosts), also talked a little about rate and volume dynamics over long weekends — such as the one we’re in right now. His strategy’s always been to get himself home for such slow-freight periods, but all the same, for those who didn’t have such a luxury, he offered some states up for van, reefer and flat haulers where the volume of outgoing loads was a good deal higher than the incoming loads, another good marker of rate-negotiating power. “Wherever you deliver Friday will be critical on how the next four days play out for you,” Boblett said. “If I had the option and there’s a holiday coming up, I want to be home … But if you’re in a state that doesn’t have a good ratio — the amount of loads coming in is higher than that amount of loads going out — a lot of people will just be going home early.”

Thursday or Friday, Boblett said, these states were good places to be for negotiating power to take you through the weekend, he said: