RV Lifestyle RV Podcast

RV Lifestyle RV Podcast


8 Super Easy Tips on How to Sell Your RV

July 01, 2020

This week on the RV Podcast, we give you inside tips on how to sell your RV. Don't get low balled from a dealer that offers to buy it or take it in as a trade-in. Sell it yourself!
We did and the process couldn't have gone more smoothly. And in the process, we learned a lot that literally saved us tens of thousands of dollars when it came time to sell our RV so we could buy a new one.

This week in Episode 301 of the RV Podcast, we share our personal experience in selling our RV (we did so just last week), introduce you to the couple who bought it, hear from a dealer and learn from an expert at RV Trader how to sell your RV and get the most for your used RVs.

Here's a player to the audio version of this RV Podcast episode on how to sell your RV. You can also listen to the RV Podcast on your favorite podcast app.  A full article with links, transcripts, photos, and other resources follows:

BEFORE WE TALK ABOUT HOW TO SELL YOUR RV...TWO PROGRAMMING NOTES
First a couple of RV Podcast programming notes. I (MIKE) am doing this episode solo this week as Jennifer, my lifelong traveling and the bride of my youth, is feeling a bit under the weather this week and thus, won’t be able to handle her normal co-hosting duties. We’re hoping she’s back next week feeling much better.

Secondly, from popular demand, we’re rearranging the order of the various segments of the RV Podcast. We’ll move our Interview of the Week segment up towards the top of each episode, to more quickly get to the key theme of each podcast. The other regular sections will follow the interview.
RV PODCAST INTERVIEW OF THE WEEK - How to sell your RV
And this week, that theme is how to sell your RV... yourself, instead if trading it in or selling it outright to an RV dealer.

As regular listeners know, Jennifer and I bought a brand-new RV last week - a 2021 Wonder Rear Twin Model from Leisure Travel Vans. In the weeks ahead, we’ll be talking a lot about why we changed RVs, why we chose the Ford Transit vs the Mercedes Sprinter chassis and showing videos and photos and doing a full review and walkthrough on the RVLifestyle.com travel blog.

We have so much content about that new Wonder to show you that it will take lots of articles and videos.

But this week on the RV Podcast and in this article on the RVLifestyle.com travel blog, we talk about how to sell your RV yourself, which we just did with the 2019 Leisure Travel Vans Unity FXa that we have owned for the past year and a half.

We change RVs a lot. I want to know as much as possible how the different models handle. Their strengths and weaknesses, so I can speak from experience in our videos and blog articles. There were lots of reasons why we chose the Wonder on the Ford Transit chassis and I have a whole article coming out on that in a could of days.
Beware of being low-balled!
But obviously, to buy a new one, we had to sell our old one.

We thought of simply trading it in at a dealer or selling it to them outright. Many advertise that they are desperate for used RVs and are paying "premium rates" or "top dollar for your trade."

When I checked with a couple of dealers who advertise that, it didn’t take long to realize that top dollar to a dealer was not reflective of what our  RV is really worth.

The dealers quite simply low balled us. They offered wholesale prices. In our case, almost $30,000 LESS than what we actually sold it for ourselves. Dealers make big money on trade-ins. By low, sell high. You can’t blame them.

But you also can blame us in saying no way.
Tip #1 on how to sell your RV - Do your research
There is no Kelly Blue Book prices for RVs.

But there is something called the NADA RV Guide which stands for the National Automotive Dealers Association. But the NADA Guides – which cover automobiles, motorcycles, boats, classic cars, manufactured homes and RVs – is actually owned by JD Power. They just bought the use of the NADA logo and name for marketing purposes because NADA is well known.