Rows of 18-wheelers, cranes, flatbeds and other oilfield equipment filled a lot off Business 20 on a recent day, assets that organizers at Machinery Auctioneers said came from struggling oil and gas companies who needed quick cash.

Nearly 400 items at the Machinery Auctioneers event this month sold in about six hours at a total of more than $3 million. In terms of sales volume, it was relatively modest auction — one around Christmas turned about $4.5 million worth of inventory in a day.

The San Antonio-based company once held auctions every couple months in the Permian Basin. As the bust deepens, they are hosting them just about every month, sometime more than once.

“I feel like a funeral director right now,” said Terry Dickerson, the founder and owner of Machinery Auctioneers. “I’m not out to see a man go under, because that’s one less customer that I have down the road. I want to help everybody that I can, but at the same time, I want to make a living.”

As oil remains at about $30 per barrel — and lower for producers who rely on a regional price — observers and oilmen say the wave of asset sales, write-offs and forfeitures may soon begin. Already, some are positioning themselves to take advantage.

A billboard on Interstate 20 offers a clear example. “Sell us your wireline trucks & tools!” it advertises to distressed service companies, followed by an offer of “Cash in 48 hours.”

The billboard offers only a number with a Houston area code. Calls to that number lead directly to a voicemail box, and requests for comment about the terms that the group was offering went unreturned.

But the sign also caught the eye Joseph Triepke, the managing director of Oilpro.com and a financial analyst, during a recent trip to Odessa. Triepke said he figured whatever group was behind the advertisement is buying equipment for pennies on the dollar.

“If they are offering you cash in 48 hours, they are going after strapped assets” Triepke said. “It’s like a pawn shop. A pawn shop is not going to give you the full value of your wedding ring. They are going to give you a fraction of that in cash and then sell it.”

Indeed, for as long as the Permian Basin has seen booms and busts, there existed the businessmen who thrived during the lows of that cycle. But the major asset sales that historically follow an oil bust have yet to arrive en masse.

Still, there are some notable examples, such as the case of Trican Well Service. In March, the company, which was a later entry into the booming Permian Basin, laid off 137 workers and left 128 in hopes of continuing to seek work in the region.

On Jan. 16, officials of the Canadian company announced plans to sell Trican’s United States pressure pumping business to a private company, marking their exit from the United States market. The price totaled about $247 million — including $200 million of cash and a 10 percent stake in the buyer, Keane Group. Per Triepke’s calculation, that means the Trican agreed to sell the equipment for about 38 cents on the dollar.

Triepke expects a wave of such deals later in the year, as low oil prices prove too much stress on companies’ ledgers.

“People are still kind of holding on, but I think activity is just going to dry out in the next three or four months, and I think the extent of the fall is going to kind of push people over the brink that have been trying to hold on,” Triepke said. This far into the downturn is when “the real damage gets done,” he said. “Now that we are at these levels, as you grind across the bottom, companies just get kind of torn up.”

On Thursday, Terry Dickerson said he spent $500,000 scooping oil equipment at a fraction of its original value from another local auction. An example he offered was a frack sand trailer that sold new for up to $200,000.

“It’s been used twice,” said Terry Dickerson. “I bought it for $17,000, and I’m just going to sit on it.”

Actually, he bought three more of those trailers, equally new, in the same auction for the same price. Terry Dickerson founded the company in 2010, when Machinery Auctioneers held just one auction that turned some $500,000 worth of sales.

In 2014, he said the company hit $27 million in sales. Last year, as the oil price crash began to set in, they moved $48 million in equipment sales, and Terry Dickerson said they are on track to at least match that amount this year. Still, he said the company would fare well if oil and gas activity picked up, with enough equipment to fuel their business.

On March 1, Machinery Auctioneers will have an auction in Rankin to sell inventory of TMR Services LLC, a big rig and truck service center that went bankrupt as oilfield work dried up.

Jonathan Bunting, whose title is “The Marketing Guy” with Machinery Auctioneers, said the company has had opportunity to grow, along with an “overabundance of consignments” in the market today.

“It’s everything you need to run a business out there, and it’s unfortunate that it’s going that way,” Bunting said.

But some distressed assets the crew at Machinery Auctioneers have so-far avoided.

“How do you sell a $10 million drilling rig on site?” Bunting said. “You don’t. That’s like a brokered deal.”

Machinery Auctioneers share of the sales include 10 percent from buyers and 7 percent from sellers. This auction, in terms of attendees, was especially busy. Machinery Auctioneers officials attributed that to a national CBS News report on Jan. 31 called “The downsides of cheap oil.”

In the segment, reporter Martha Teichner spoke in front of the Helmerich and Payne yard off Business 20, where some 40 oil and gas rigs still sit idle after more than a year. The CBS report cited the yard as an example of “the collateral damage caused by low-price oil.”

A Machinery Auctioneers sign appeared during the broadcast.

“You got folks selling off the stuff they got paid up, trying to get a little cash flow,” said Louie Dickerson, a senior logistics manager at Machinery Auctioneers and brother of Terry Dickerson. “They’re culling.”

At the Feb. 10 auction, about 370 attended in person and about 400 participated online.

Some came from as far away Minnesota and New York. But, Terry Dickerson said, other buyers have hailed from as far away as Asia and South America.

Mark Harrell, the president of the Odessa propane company Fuel Mark, said he bought a flat-bed trailer for $1,500.

“I know what it would cost me if I went and bought one new,” Harrell said. That was about $5,000, per his estimate, but Harrell stressed that he was not attending an auction to flip equipment for a profit. “I’m buying stuff that I can use tomorrow.”

Another buyer was James Farmer, the owner of Texas Truck and Equipment Sales in Lubbock, who said he attends just about every Machinery Auctioneers auction in the area. This time, one of his purchases was a $3,000 “bucket truck” that Farmer estimated he could sell for $7,500.

“I’ll just sell it like it is to a tree trimmer or someone like that,” Farmer said.

He also kept an eye on bigger 18-wheelers and hot oil trucks used for servicing wells.

Sometimes, like in January, Farmer will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at the auction.

“If you look at this equipment, a lot of it is rough,” Farmer said. “They are trying to keep people on the payroll, get cash and clean up ... The ones that are going to survive this are the ones that need to.”

During the February auction, he bid $220,000 on a 2015 Kenworth hot oiler. But it sold for $265,000. New, it cost $400,000.

There was also Leslie Gill, the owner of Stealth Oilfield Services attending with his son, Cody Gill, in search of a deal, or as Leslie Gill put it “mainly to see if we can get something cheap.”

Leslie Gill said Stealth’s business is down maybe 25 percent — a decline he viewed as not so bad given the more than 70 percent drop in oil prices. The roughly six-year-old Odessa company also hasn’t laid off any of its 67 employees, he said.

“Everything we buy, we put to work,” Leslie Gill said. “Half of these guys will buy it cheap and then resell it.”

He said buying equipment to use it meant approaching deals with caution, while still seeing the bust as a time of opportunity, when a pulling unit that cost $1 million or more new can sell for $400,000.

“Especially now, if we get a good deal, we are going to buy it,” Leslie Gill said. “But, we are also trying to save cash so we don’t have to lay anybody off.”

For strapped companies facing that prospect, the workers at Machinery Auctioneers and the family behind it see their work as offering a form of relief, said JB Dickerson, who works in sales for the company and is the son of Terry Dickerson.

“The auction business is what we do, but where we stand is we want to help,” JB Dickerson said. “And now West Texas is in a hole, because it was a major boom. Now oil is down, and we don’t how and when it is going to come back.”