09-25-2019, 09:25 AM
Lessons Learned from Selling My RV - 2019
I recently sold my 2007 Newell P2000i Triple Slide RV (coach #800). I started the process in early April of this year and finally completed the sale at the end of August. This is a brief description of the process I used and some lessons learned along the way.
I first gathered as many pictures as I could and then wrote up a narrative about the coach which talked about how many miles, how it is equipped and I focused especially on all of the “add ons” that we installed along the way (TV systems, EasySteer, Road King Shocks, Batteries, etc) so as to highlight things that would separate our coach from other similar Newell Coaches.
The first ad placed was in the Newell GURUs website. One of the administrators, Michael Day, was extremely helpful in me getting the ad properly placed. I don’t think I’d have done it without him. The good news is that I got a few inquiries fairly quickly; nothing very serious, but inquires nevertheless. The only problem with this website is that when you get into the non-Newell world, not everybody knows about this website.
The next ad I placed was on RvTrader. If there was one mistake I made with them, it was that I selected the 8 week option which limits one to 20 pictures. So almost every time someone was interested, their very first question was “Can you send more pictures?” That became a pain. You can run a 52 week ad that allows for 50 pictures. I started getting inquiries almost immediately and by the time the process was over, I’m guessing I’d had over 50 inquiries with 7 or 8 being seriously interested. I started at a “too high” price and kept lowering. When I would go to their website and select all Newell coaches nationwide, and then sort by price, it became pretty obvious after time where my coach and price should be. When I got to that point, I started getting 4 to 6 inquiries per week. The eventual buyer came from the RvTrader website.
In May I was contacted by a company based in Las Vegas called Seller Networks. They will put an ad together based on information you provide, and then post on something like 15 other websites with whom they had partnerships. I paid somewhere around $350 for this service. I would go to some of these websites from time to time and look for my coach and I think I always found it, but something about those sites made me think that they weren’t that user friendly. Number of inquiries from this service? ZERO
In early July, I was contacted by a service called Vehicle Selling Solutions located in Omaha. They focus on Ebay. I am more familiar with Ebay. I know people who’ve bought cars there and I looked at advertised RVs and it looked like a decent number of coaches were advertised. They wanted to do a program where they did an auction for 10 days; I would establish my “buy” price that only I would know, and we’d see what happened. If the auction didn’t work, then they would place a classified ad on Ebay. By this point it had been over 3 months with very few SERIOUS looks. Which means I was beginning to get a little frustrated so I decided to give this a try even though the cost was around $900. The auction was a total bust. It lasted the 10 days. There were a total of around 40 bidders; but the final bid was exactly $100,000 less than the price I said I’d accept. The only people making out from this were Vehicle Selling Solutions who got to add another 40 bidders to their database. We then placed the classified ad, and ran it until it sold, lowering the asking price along the way with the other websites. Total number of inquiries from this service: ZERO
Along the way:
A wholesale dealer in Michigan offered me a full $100,000 less than I ultimately sold it for.
I had a full price offer in the first week from a lady in California who wanted to take delivery in front of my house; asked only one question about the coach (did it have rust; not much here in Oklahoma); and insisted on Paying via PayPal. Didn’t respond
A guy offered to trade his business with multi million dollar potential for my coach. I suggested he keep the business, hire someone to run it to earn the millions and he buy my coach
Another guy offered to trade his piece of property in British Columbia for my coach.
My first really serious inquiry was a couple from Arizona who drove all the way to Oklahoma to look at it. I discovered AFTER they had come and gone that on the drive here he had talked to the Newell salesman that had sold me the coach and ended the conversation by saying “I think I’m going to go buy that coach”. Well that didn’t happen. I’m pretty sure the reason is that I talk too much; told too many stories about when we bought the coach, things that happened which to me seemed funny but to him probably sounded like horror stories. I think I literally talked him out of buying the coach and left the impression that it was a darn good thing I only lived 206 miles from the Newell factory. Lesson learned: answer their questions; keep mouth shut otherwise.
Another thing I learned has to do with pricing. I knew going in that I was probably NOT going to sell for the amount I still owed on the loan. The question then became “how much lower than that number am I going to have to go?” At this point, it gets pretty difficult when you know that every time you lower the price, YOU are the one that is going to have to make up the difference out of your own pocket. Then one day something occurred to me, and here’s an example. Suppose I sold a coach and the selling price was $50,000 under the loan balance. Ouch! But hey. I could have put another $50,000 down when I bought it; then I would have been OK and maybe slightly lower payments. But I didn’t. So that money stayed in my savings account earning 10%. So over the 5 year period I owned the coach; I made back $25,000 on the money I didn’t spend up front. And given the array of expenses that go along with owning a coach (payments, insurance, storage, DirecTv, fuel, maintenance, travel costs, RV parks) in my case I’ll recover this difference in less than a year by NOT paying these costs. So my message here is that being “upside down” on your loan isn’t
much fun, but it might not be as bad as one thinks.
In conclusion, were I to go thru this again, I would still place an ad on Newell Guru’s website. Newell owners will always give you good feedback. Otherwise, I would advertise ONLY on RvTrader; forget these other services, and not let the price get stuck when it is too high. Look; compare to other coaches, and soon you’ll home in on the price you’re going to get.
I recently sold my 2007 Newell P2000i Triple Slide RV (coach #800). I started the process in early April of this year and finally completed the sale at the end of August. This is a brief description of the process I used and some lessons learned along the way.
I first gathered as many pictures as I could and then wrote up a narrative about the coach which talked about how many miles, how it is equipped and I focused especially on all of the “add ons” that we installed along the way (TV systems, EasySteer, Road King Shocks, Batteries, etc) so as to highlight things that would separate our coach from other similar Newell Coaches.
The first ad placed was in the Newell GURUs website. One of the administrators, Michael Day, was extremely helpful in me getting the ad properly placed. I don’t think I’d have done it without him. The good news is that I got a few inquiries fairly quickly; nothing very serious, but inquires nevertheless. The only problem with this website is that when you get into the non-Newell world, not everybody knows about this website.
The next ad I placed was on RvTrader. If there was one mistake I made with them, it was that I selected the 8 week option which limits one to 20 pictures. So almost every time someone was interested, their very first question was “Can you send more pictures?” That became a pain. You can run a 52 week ad that allows for 50 pictures. I started getting inquiries almost immediately and by the time the process was over, I’m guessing I’d had over 50 inquiries with 7 or 8 being seriously interested. I started at a “too high” price and kept lowering. When I would go to their website and select all Newell coaches nationwide, and then sort by price, it became pretty obvious after time where my coach and price should be. When I got to that point, I started getting 4 to 6 inquiries per week. The eventual buyer came from the RvTrader website.
In May I was contacted by a company based in Las Vegas called Seller Networks. They will put an ad together based on information you provide, and then post on something like 15 other websites with whom they had partnerships. I paid somewhere around $350 for this service. I would go to some of these websites from time to time and look for my coach and I think I always found it, but something about those sites made me think that they weren’t that user friendly. Number of inquiries from this service? ZERO
In early July, I was contacted by a service called Vehicle Selling Solutions located in Omaha. They focus on Ebay. I am more familiar with Ebay. I know people who’ve bought cars there and I looked at advertised RVs and it looked like a decent number of coaches were advertised. They wanted to do a program where they did an auction for 10 days; I would establish my “buy” price that only I would know, and we’d see what happened. If the auction didn’t work, then they would place a classified ad on Ebay. By this point it had been over 3 months with very few SERIOUS looks. Which means I was beginning to get a little frustrated so I decided to give this a try even though the cost was around $900. The auction was a total bust. It lasted the 10 days. There were a total of around 40 bidders; but the final bid was exactly $100,000 less than the price I said I’d accept. The only people making out from this were Vehicle Selling Solutions who got to add another 40 bidders to their database. We then placed the classified ad, and ran it until it sold, lowering the asking price along the way with the other websites. Total number of inquiries from this service: ZERO
Along the way:
A wholesale dealer in Michigan offered me a full $100,000 less than I ultimately sold it for.
I had a full price offer in the first week from a lady in California who wanted to take delivery in front of my house; asked only one question about the coach (did it have rust; not much here in Oklahoma); and insisted on Paying via PayPal. Didn’t respond
A guy offered to trade his business with multi million dollar potential for my coach. I suggested he keep the business, hire someone to run it to earn the millions and he buy my coach
Another guy offered to trade his piece of property in British Columbia for my coach.
My first really serious inquiry was a couple from Arizona who drove all the way to Oklahoma to look at it. I discovered AFTER they had come and gone that on the drive here he had talked to the Newell salesman that had sold me the coach and ended the conversation by saying “I think I’m going to go buy that coach”. Well that didn’t happen. I’m pretty sure the reason is that I talk too much; told too many stories about when we bought the coach, things that happened which to me seemed funny but to him probably sounded like horror stories. I think I literally talked him out of buying the coach and left the impression that it was a darn good thing I only lived 206 miles from the Newell factory. Lesson learned: answer their questions; keep mouth shut otherwise.
Another thing I learned has to do with pricing. I knew going in that I was probably NOT going to sell for the amount I still owed on the loan. The question then became “how much lower than that number am I going to have to go?” At this point, it gets pretty difficult when you know that every time you lower the price, YOU are the one that is going to have to make up the difference out of your own pocket. Then one day something occurred to me, and here’s an example. Suppose I sold a coach and the selling price was $50,000 under the loan balance. Ouch! But hey. I could have put another $50,000 down when I bought it; then I would have been OK and maybe slightly lower payments. But I didn’t. So that money stayed in my savings account earning 10%. So over the 5 year period I owned the coach; I made back $25,000 on the money I didn’t spend up front. And given the array of expenses that go along with owning a coach (payments, insurance, storage, DirecTv, fuel, maintenance, travel costs, RV parks) in my case I’ll recover this difference in less than a year by NOT paying these costs. So my message here is that being “upside down” on your loan isn’t
much fun, but it might not be as bad as one thinks.
In conclusion, were I to go thru this again, I would still place an ad on Newell Guru’s website. Newell owners will always give you good feedback. Otherwise, I would advertise ONLY on RvTrader; forget these other services, and not let the price get stuck when it is too high. Look; compare to other coaches, and soon you’ll home in on the price you’re going to get.