For most carriers, growth follows a familiar script: buy a truck, then buy or lease a trailer to go behind it. Repeat. The script is simple, but it ties up scarce capital in depreciating equipment over its life, or locks in a long-term contract, often before a carrier knows whether the freight to support it will last.
Matt Harb, Chief Product Officer at REPOWR, spends much of his day talking with carriers who are living that tradeoff. Speaking with The Long Haul at F3 in Chattanooga, Harb said his goal in those conversations is to understand what carriers need from the trailer on their back, though the discussion rarely stays there. “They’re feeling the heat from every different part of the industry,” he said, pointing to fuel costs, broker relationships, and the hunt for good loads as constant pressures.
REPOWR’s answer is a trailer-sharing marketplace that lets fleets access trailer capacity short-term instead of committing to long-term capex, now backed by software built for the fleets that supply the trailers.
How the marketplace works
REPOWR works with large and mid-sized fleets to reduce repositioning costs, giving small fleets short-term access to equipment. Harb said the platform carries about 3,500 trailers nationwide at any moment, including flatbeds, reefers, and dry vans, with rentals ranging from three days to 90 days. Roughly 75 fleets list equipment in a given month.
Rates are daily, with no hidden fees, and carriers pick up and return trailers with inspection forms at both ends. In many cases, Harb said, another trailer is waiting at the drop location. He acknowledged that the Airbnb comparison is not universally loved inside the company, but conceded it fits. “We’re Airbnb or Turvo for trailers,” he said.
The model also works both ways. Carriers that need repositioning or have idle trailers can list them for others to use, which Harb said can offset payments or generate extra revenue during slow stretches or while a carrier is committed to power-only work for the holidays.
The hidden price of power-only
Power-only has grown because it removes the capital commitment of owning a trailer. Harb argued that it also removes something carriers rarely price in. “They give up control mostly,” he said. Filtering a load board for power-only freight, he noted, typically leaves a fraction of the available loads. “You’re giving up lanes. You’re giving up better rates,” he said.
Control, in his view, is what carriers trade away, and it quickly becomes a flexibility problem. “Control is the biggest piece, and control really kind of boils over into flexibility,” Harb said.
To help carriers who need a trailer for a limited stretch, REPOWER recently launched short-run pricing. For most trailers on the marketplace, rentals shorter than 14 days run at nearly half the usual cost. Suppliers benefit because their equipment gets repositioned faster, which is how the company can offer the lower rate. The same logic applies to repositioning generally: Harb said a trailer owner who relies on a loadout broker may pay $500 to $600 for a move that REPOWR’s platform can handle at little or no cost.
Renting as a way to test the market
Harb said the most common mistake he sees is not about equipment type. It is about business structure: attaching long-term capital to a decision before it has been tested.
He described a 15-truck fleet that regularly rents 10 to 15 trailers a month on the platform and was preparing to buy three trucks and long-term lease reefers because shippers had promised good lanes. His advice was to rent first. The economics of buying are steep. “A trailer is not eight grand anymore. I mean, a new dry van trailer is $45,000, and a used one needs to be under 10 years old for many shippers,” Harb said.
What rental does, he said, is let carriers experiment: “It’s the flexibility to change quickly, to add quickly, to reduce quickly, and to do all that without any sunk costs.” Buying or signing a long-term lease, by contrast, means “you’ve just hitched your wagon to a depreciating asset.”
That approach also applies to adapting to shippers. Harb said he often hears from carriers whose customers change specifications, such as a move from roll-door equipment to swing-door trailers, leaving them stuck with a trailer they committed to for 12 months. Some carriers use REPOWR on both sides, listing the equipment they cannot use and renting what the shipper now wants. “You can stay agile as those shippers’ needs change,” Harb said.
Drop-and-hook without owning the trailers
Harb said he believes the vast majority of freight now moves through drop-and-hook, and he argued that some carriers assume they are locked out because they cannot meet the trailer-to-tractor ratios shippers want, commonly three-to-one or more. REPOWR changes that, because a carrier can match a trailer commitment to the length of the project. “You’re not matching a short-term commitment to a long-term commitment,” he said.
Quality, accountability and onboarding
REPOWR takes safety and security seriously. Pickup and return inspection forms categorize trailer issues, and the company scores fleet quality, which affects how listings rank and are priced. Harb said REPOWR has stopped working with suppliers whose equipment repeatedly was not there when carriers arrived.
Accountability runs both ways. Carriers’ insurance is on file, and every listing details equipment such as air-ride or spring-ride suspension and swing or roll doors. “It’s our job to hold both accountable,” Harb said.
To join, carriers need at least six months of active authority and must clear a Persona identity verification, Highway authority check, and a safety-screen phone call that Harb said filters out applicants. Signing up is free and takes about six minutes using DOT number and identity verification. Booking a trailer takes about seven minutes and requires two certificates of insurance, one naming the supplier as additionally insured. Harb said 85% of pickups happen the same day or the next day. Rentals are charged in 30-day increments, with no extensive credit check.
The supply side: automating trailer repositioning with TOP
The marketplace only works if trailers are available where carriers need them, which is the challenge REPOWR’s Trailer Optimization Platform, or TOP, is built to solve. In the interview, Harb described the logic behind the low rental rates: “We’re stopping them from having to have all this idle equipment or pay for these repositions.”
According to REPOWR, TOP is an automated capacity planning platform designed to execute trailer repositioning, not just analyze it. The company says fleets typically pay to reposition about 3% of their trailers each month, usually through phone calls, spreadsheets, and brokers at $400 or more per move. Harb puts the going rate for a loadout broker at $500 to $600, but this number increases when capacity is tight.
Here is how the platform works:
- Import the network. Fleets share trailers and locations by CSV, data feed, or TMS integration.
- Set targets. Locations roll up into markets, each with a target trailer range.
- Balance automatically. When a market runs long, TOP lists surplus trailers on the REPOWR marketplace. Carriers reserve and move them as part of normal activity.
The result, REPOWR says, is that a repositioning move earns revenue for the trailer owner instead of costing money. For carriers renting on the platform, it also means a steadier supply of equipment in more markets.
REPOWR’s illustrative model for a 2,500-trailer fleet puts annual repositioning costs at $225,000 without TOP and $135,000 with it. Adding coordination costs and marketplace revenue, the company projects total savings of about $197,000 a year. Those are the company’s projections, not independent results. REPOWR says a 6,000-trailer fleet was onboarded in two days, and that the platform is built for fleets of 150 or more trailers.
Fleets can send 90 days of repositioning data, and REPOWR says it will return a projected savings analysis with no commitment required.
A warning on rental fraud
Harb closed with a caution for the whole industry as trailer rental scams target owner-operators. His rule is blunt. “Nobody is doing trailer rentals with Zelle or Cash App,” he said. Carriers should talk to a person, verify that the provider owns the equipment, and treat unrealistic prices as a warning sign. “I saw one that was $180 for three months of a trailer, like maybe rethink that,” he said. He added that scammers are copying branding and websites. “People are spoofing websites now.”
His message to carriers weighing their next equipment move was simple: “You don’t have to be stuck.”
Click here to learn more about the Trailer Optimization Platform.
