When calling on a load or bidding on RFPs, you need to have reliable pricing information at your fingertips. If you run the same lanes every day, that’s no problem. But if you’re running on a less familiar lane, or if the market conditions are up-and-down, you need to know what the going rates are so you can get the best price for your trucks.
More on Freight Rates
To help make negotiations easier, this month DAT Solutions launched a new version of DAT RateView™. Here are some of the improvements:
- Faster – Auto Complete helps fill in the origin and destination as you type.
- More options – Rates can be displayed per mile or total per trip.
- More visual – Shows maps of geographies used to calculate rates.
- Customized tools – The rate calculator is customized for carriers, shippers, and brokers and can be moved anywhere on your screen.
- Key info on a single screen – Graphs can show either spot market rates or contract rates, with options to compare the two with or without the current fuel surcharge.
- Works seamlessly with DAT Power Load Board – The new version of RateView looks similar to, and works seamlessly with, the new version of DAT Power.
What is RateView?
DAT RateView is an online tool that puts real-time freight rates at your fingertips. It shows you spot market rates based on $24 billion of actual transactions—what brokers and shippers are actually paying to carriers. It’s integrated into many DAT load board packages and is also available as a standalone software service.
Depending on the subscription you choose, DAT RateView enables you to see:
- Real-time truckload rates on 65,000 lane pairs.
- Broker-to-carrier spot market AND shipper-to-carrier contract rates.
- Multi-lane lookup to help with bids and RFPs.
- 13-month lane rate histories.
- Rates as recent as the past 7 days.
- Origin/destination geographies as precise as a 3-digit ZIP code.
- The number of reports and number of companies used to calculate each rate report.
- Rail intermodal rates.
- Rates from your own company, to compare side-by-side with market rates.
How Rates Are Made
Many load boards nowadays include some sort of rate tool, but not all rates are created equal. Most DAT Load Board packages include rate information that comes from DAT RateView, which are based only on actual transactions between carriers and load providers. The process is automated and immediate, so that the numbers submitted to DAT reflect changes in the spot market as they happen.
The rates in DAT RateView and DAT Load boards do not include bids or asking prices. Those start the negotiations and aren’t what the company actually paid or received.
Make More Money on the Way Home
Some DAT Load Board packages also include the TriHaul tool from DAT RateView. TriHaul offers suggestions for triangular routes – two shorter trips that might add up to a better rate than a simple out-and-back route.
In the example above, we searched for loads from Denver to Chicago. The average rate on that lane was just $1.09/mile, including fuel. If you didn’t want to settle for that low rate, you could use the TriHaul tool to see suggestions for alternative routes. In this example, you could take one load from Denver to Rapid City, SD, then pick up a second load from Rapid City to Chicago, for an average all-in rate of $1.66/mile.
Obviously there are other factors to consider, like pick-up and delivery time, detention, deadhead, and HOS. But if you can make it work, you could earn almost $1,100 more total revenue for driving 308 extra miles.
For more information on DAT RateView for carriers, or to see a demo of the product, send us an email, call your DAT account representative, or call DAT customer support at 800-547-5417.
