Low budget 80 class excavator, bobcat 442 or stick with major brands

So i have been looking for a excavator in the 16k-19k pound range for about 6-8 months now. My dad and I are going in together on the purchase so he can have an excavator on the farm and I can have one for a new house I am getting ready to build. With that being said our budget is low at around 25k-27k at the absolute max and it needs to have a hydraulic thumb or be cheap enough I can add it and stay in budget. The machine won't get more than 150-200 hours a year put on it. Mainly doing light clearing, clean up, digging ditches and maybe an occasion old farm building tear down. I have been bidding on machines at auctions and I keep seeming to miss out by a few thousand dollars. I have been looking at takeuchi and komatsu machines mostly because that is what seems to be available anywhere close to my price range. I work in the utility and grading business so I have run CAT, kubota, takeuchi machines in this size and a lot of bigger komatsu machines. I am at the point now where auctions aren't working for me because most of the machines seem to need a lot of repairs which is making me keep my max bid lower. I need to purchase something soon so I am starting to focus more on machines being sold by private parties rather than auctions. There is a 04 model bobcat 442 with hydraulic thumb with 2700 hrs for sale about three hours away that tempting, but I have never run a bobcat/Terex machine and I have heard good and bad things about them such as parts are really expensive and that the cabs are not comfortable. I am also looking at a couple of takeuchi tb175s and tb070 that are for sale online that have 5k-6k hours for roughly the same price or 2k-3k more than the bobcat. So if you guys were in my shoes would you pursue the bobcat with 2700 hrs or a takeuchi/komatsu with 5k-6k hours. I know the takeuchi and komatsus can take some high hours. I have seen plenty that have 7k-9k hours. I have never really seen many high hour bobcat 442 or terex machines. The only other thing that concerns me about the bobcat is that the owner says that the gauge reads its overheating all the time even when it has been sitting all night and you first crank it. That didn't seem like anything more than a sensor to me, but my local bobcat dealer said it could be a bad gauge cluster,wiring harness or computer. I guess I am just hesitant of the bobcat because I don't know much about it and it is not one of the major name brand machines like komatsu, takeuchi, Cat, etc. Thoughts? I am just trying to find something that I am not going to end up having to put 5k-10k dollars in for repairs just to keep using it occasionally over the next few years.

Low budget 80 class excavator, bobcat 442 or stick with major brands