Who keeps the resale upside, and why it changes the whole quote

A hall of five-year-old equipment and a hall of two-year-old equipment produce completely different economics on exit, and the contract model that suits one is wrong for the other. Four models exist, and the difference between them is who takes the upside and who takes the risk.

Model 1: fee for service, you keep the proceeds

You pay for the work, and any resale revenue comes back to you, usually net of a selling commission. Most transparent, and the model where the vendor has no incentive to classify a device one way or the other.

It requires you to accept that resale takes time: proceeds arrive over months, not on the day the hall empties. How the selling and the recycling are actually done is on the resale and recycling page.

Model 2: revenue share

The vendor performs the work and splits resale proceeds with you against an agreed schedule. Common, workable, and entirely dependent on how the split is calculated and on who sets the resale price. The question to ask is what happens to an asset the vendor values at zero.

Model 3: the vendor buys the estate

A single price for everything, paid up front, and the vendor keeps whatever they realise. Fast and certain, and the model where you have the least visibility into what happened to which asset unless the certificate pack is specified tightly in the contract. What that pack has to contain is in what ITAD actually covers.

It is also the model where a vendor has the strongest reason to prefer erasure over destruction, because a working device is worth more than a shredded one. That is not sinister, but it means the destruction policy has to be yours rather than theirs.

Model 4: zero-cost, funded by resale

Marketed as free. The resale value of your estate pays for the labour, and the vendor keeps the balance. It can be genuinely good value on a recent estate, and it is a bad deal on an old one, because there is nothing to fund the work and the scope quietly narrows to what is worth carrying away. The same arithmetic seen from the destruction side is in what pays for free destruction.

The test for this model is what the quote says about the assets with no value: who pays to recycle them, and to what standard.

What actually determines resale value

• Age and generation, which matters more than condition.
• Configuration, particularly memory and drives, which are often worth more than the chassis.
• Whether the device still has a functional storage device in it, which is where destruction policy collides with value.
• Volume of identical units, which makes a lot easier to sell.
• Documentation and provenance, which sounds soft and moves the price.

The decision that has to be yours, whatever the model

Which assets are destroyed and which are erased. That is a data classification decision, and delegating it to whoever profits from the answer is the one mistake worth avoiding in this entire subject. The trade-off is in destruction or erasure.