RV shipments continued to slide in June as they have every month so far this year.
(July 26, 2019) — The RV Industry Association’s June survey of manufacturers found that total RV shipments ended the month with 36,524 wholesale shipments, a decrease of 10.3% from the 40,738 units shipped last June.
Towable RVs, led by conventional travel trailers, totaled 33,171 units for the month, a decrease of 9.2% compared to last June’s total of 36,532 units. Motorhomes finished the month with 3,353 units, down 20.3% from last June’s total of 4,206 units.
Down 20% for the year is nice but 3 times that would give more hope.
What happens when you build something that customers don’t want to buy? What happens when the only innovations are bigger, heavier and more expensive? What happens when potential customers see the products they want to buy are falling apart in less than five years.Every RV dealership lot is full of unsold RV’s. Houses appreciate, RV’s do not.
Apple’s and oranges my friend. Real estate is mutually exclusive of RVs as a place of abode. Housing has generally always increased as time goes on. Exceptions like, CA with their crazy supply demand, economy fluctuations. NOT the same thing. Vehicles, albeit, cars trucks, RVs always decrease in value on a timeline.
Building things customers don’t want means deeper discounts to existing units, until supply demand come back into balance.
More luxurious units are balanced out by all the minis, micro trailer, type sales. We live in a great time of choice. The biggest factor I believe, is cost of fuel. We RVers sure like to burn it up. So, since we are now the biggest producer, of crude, and refined products in the world, due to less regulations and restrictions on drilling locations, no real adjustment in that area is in the forceable future either.
So tank up and go RVing.
The quality is so bad it’s finally catching up to the manufacturers!
Quality will improve as the push subsides a bit. Those skilled workers who are most needed by the companies, will be retained, having the marginally skilled workers furloughed until the next demand cycle. As a result, quality will increase, as better labor is employed to produce fewer units.
We spent June in the Elkhart IN. area. The manufacturer’s parking lots are not full of workers cars. The storage lots in the area appear to be filling up with all kinds of rigs. Since we have no comparable base line it is hard to tell if builders are slowing down. July is the traditional month for layoffs while the plants retool for the next year’s production. The employees we talked with were optimistic but realists about the cyclic nature of the industry.