I think they are only worth what the market will bear, and that is a changing number. Right now if you rated the older snowcats (1985 or OLDER) on a quality scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being amazing condition, and 4 being a basically working canditate for restoration, I think there are a lot of deals to be had on the snowcats that would fall in the range between 3 to 5.
There are a lot of fairly rough, but still running older snowcats out on the market. Most of those can be good candidates for a restoration. And many of those are available at moderate prices.
But I think we will begin to see that change. I see 3 basic types of buyers out there looking at snowcats and most of them are looking at older snowcats.
Buyer Type 1: People who NEED a snowcat. These would include a wide range of folks like Pixie who uses them for trail grooming and woodlot management to Brad (Mountain Home Lodge) or Larry (Roughwoods Inn) who use them for tourists. Then there are guys like Bjorn (OscarInn) and Villi who use them for rescue and actually for real transportation issues. All have a variety of uses, but all can justify a NEED for a basic snowcat.
Buyer Type 2: People who use snowcats to achieve OTHER GOALS. I'm going to guess on a few of our members, but ALLEN PARSONS probably falls into this category as he uses his Tucker to access a cabin for winter get aways. "byoung" and dseymour use snowcats to access back county skiing. These folks don't need a snowcat other than to accomplish other things. Now you can access a back bowl for skiing by helicopter, but a snowcat is cheaper and easier to own! Or you can access a cabin by maintianing a roadway every time it snows, but that is not always easy.
Buyer Type 3: Hobbiests, collectors, restorers who have no need but like to tinker. This is where I fall, and I suspect Teeoster, Tommo, Ice Queen, Gordon Robertson and quite a few others fit in too. We may use our snowcats for some recreational activities, but if we can't get a snowcat we'll find something else. Some probably picked up an old snowcat becasue it was cheaper to mess with than a similar age semi-classic car (have you priced a '67 Camaro lately?) or because antique tractors are becoming a business and finding good restoration candidates are harder to find.
To each type of buyer there are different thresholds of price that can be justified. The NEED people will probably pay the most, the people who use them to achieve something else will probably pay a pretty good amount too. Type 3/hobbiest~collectors are the hardest to figure out because they probably buy on emotion more than logic.
But the fact of the matter is that all 3 buyers are actively buying old units. So the demand exists. And parts are also getting harder to find as all the buyers are relying on stripping other units for parts so we are canibilizing our supply to keep our units running. My feeling is that prices are going up but there are many deals to be had and the supply is going to be good for several more years. However, 10 years from today that may well change. I don't think we will get rich on the price appreciation, but I think we will see a slow climb in prices as the old units get rarer and rarer.
The newer units are often $100,000++ each and will never be affordable to many of us, unless they get junked. And then they won't be desireable to many of us. Also consider that newer units are often TASK SPECIFIC and a trailer groomer is not easily adapted for use to take the family up to the weekend cabin. So new snowcats are often less suitable for our needs than the older units.