Who you contract with
The rental agreement is between you and the supplier. They own the machine, they deliver and collect it, they maintain it, and they carry the equipment obligations. We arrange the match and stay involved until the machine is on site.
That means the supplier is who you call about a breakdown, and their terms are the ones that govern the hire. We will always tell you who they are before you commit, and a quote from us names them.
How suppliers get on the list
They have to actually cover the area, carry the class of machine in question, hold current insurance, and respond to quote requests within a working day. Suppliers who stop meeting that last one stop receiving requests, because a slow supplier makes our only promise impossible to keep.
How we are paid
Suppliers pay us a commission on business we introduce. You do not pay us anything.
The obvious question is whether that biases the recommendation. The honest answer is that it could, and the structural protection is that commission does not vary enough between suppliers to be worth steering for, while sending someone the wrong machine costs us the relationship and the repeat business. We would rather tell you a cheaper machine will do the job.
What this arrangement is good at, and what it is not
It is good at breadth: one request priced across a local market instead of a phone call to one yard, and a view of where a class is genuinely scarce.
It is not good at same-hour delivery. If you need a machine in the next two hours, call a yard directly. A broker adds a step, and we would rather say so than waste your afternoon.