With the help of Jim Tennant of The Tennant Group and Michael Meyer of Rate-Highway Inc., we are conducting rate surveys on a weekly basis and providing analysis and comments where appropriate. We publish this monthly recap in our electronic edition and more comprehensive looks in the print editions.

As we saw last month, August rate quotes were up $2.81 after a year of mixed results, but this is now overshadowed by the September results, which are up $5.48 over September 2015. This is  the largest year-over-year increase since the recall-induced, one-month spike of July 2014. This seems to bode well for rates in the last quarter of 2016 and hopefully early 2017.

Caution is called for, however, because the weekly trend is not as promising.

The unbroken upward weekly trend started in late July and peaked in the third week of September at $8.04 over the same week in 2015. It then dropped to $2.92, and last week was only $0.45 over the previous year.

Two weeks does not constitute a trend, but we need to see October results before being confident that rates are on a long-term upward trend. Revenue managers will have their fingers crossed!

All regions were up over last year in August and September, with the Northeast and Northwest seeing the highest rates while the Southeast had the lowest rates.