November 7, 2023
L-R: Bryan Riedemann, Russ Knapp, Zach Reis
Wet, rainy conditions in downtown Sioux City, Iowa, ensures that little in-store traffic interrupts a late summer morning’s rental counter conversation with Bryan Riedemann, manager of Midwest Construction Rentals, about the business and its rental specialties.
“We mostly work with contractors, but we do quite a bit of small equipment, too, so we get a lot of the homeowners who are doing yard work and stuff like that,” Riedemann says of the business’s target clientele.
The major product lines Midwest Construction Rentals carries — including Genie, Vermeer, Gehl, Bluebird, Haulotte, Hilti, BilJax, Yanmar and Xtreme — are well-suited for the kind of contractor work that currently is booming in Sioux City. “Industrial is growing pretty strong,” Riedemann says. “The revamping of old, historic buildings is a big thing they’re doing a lot of here in town.”
A town defined by the lore of Native American settlements and a once-thriving railroad-based meat packing/stockyard industry, Sioux City sits at the junction of Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota and remains a regional hub of commerce and tourism.
The restoration work on Sioux City’s Fourth Street Historic District — the commercial heart of the city in the late nineteenth century and marked by several Romanesque Revival-style buildings — is on full display as one explores the city’s center. Today, building façades are being beautified to accommodate coffee shops, upscale bars, retail stores and more. In the middle of it all stands a Genie MEWP (mobile elevating work platform) affixed with a prominent Midwest Construction Rentals logo.
Midwest Construction Rentals was established in 2014 when Dave Reis purchased an existing construction business that had been operating in the downtown area since the 1970s. The rental business’s building and lot covers an approximately 2-acre space conveniently located to dispatch equipment in any direction across the Sioux City region.
Nearly 10 years into its existence, Reis remains the owner of the business and his son, Zach, co-manages the day-to-day affairs of the operation.
Riedemann has been with Midwest Construction Rentals since its inception and brings a strong construction pedigree to the enterprise. “I’ve been in the construction field my whole life,” he says. “My dad was in construction, so that’s how that started. I started out with this business as an outdoor salesman and then was brought into a role in the store in the office, and it’s just gone from there.”
While the commercial contractor market for rentals is strong in the area, Riedemann says the Midwest Construction Rentals team continues to wrestle with one nagging uncertainty year after year: predicting what piece of equipment will be the “hot,” in-demand item.
“It’s challenging to get diversified on every piece of equipment we need,” Riedemann says. “It changes from year to year. Last year, dump trailers were really hot and were going out every day. This year, it might be something else like core drills. When we first started a 1930 [19-ft. platform, 30-in. wide] was a popular lift. Now, a 2630 [26-ft. platform] and taller lifts are getting to be normal. Everything is starting to get bigger.”
Weather plays a big role in determining the equipment that goes out on rent across the extremes of northwestern Iowa’s four seasons.
“In the Midwest, it all depends on what time of year it is,” Riedemann says. “During the summer my stand-on skid loaders and mini exes are really hot. In the winter we switch gears, and it could go into scaffolding, core drills, ground heaters and the big propane and natural gas heaters. Sometimes tow-behinds are hot in the spring, especially when you have a storm move through. The weather decides.”
Midwest Construction Rentals’ equipment on the job in downtown Sioux City, Iowa
A big part of the business’s success, according to Riedemann, is making sure the staff knows all these products — regardless of the season in which they are needed — inside and out. “We’re knowledgeable about the equipment we have. If we’re renting something out to you, we strive to personally know how to run it or use it,” he says.
With Riedemann and Zach Reis heading up a small but dedicated team, Midwest Construction Rentals keeps moving forward by providing service highlighted by familiarity with its customers and their unique equipment needs.
“We’re a small company, so when somebody calls in, they normally talk to either me or Zach, so we know a lot of our customers face to face,” Riedemann says, adding that to them it’s all about “friendly, knowledgeable service. We have an idea of what they want or what they’ve had in the past. If somebody comes in and says, ‘I want the same lift or the same skid loader that I had last time,’ Zach and I are pretty good about knowing what they had and that helps move the process along.”
