8 Super Easy Tips on How to Sell Your RV

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. JD Power runs the sites. The NADA guides give you low, high and average valuations on RVs. In our case, when we entered the data for our Unity, we found that, on average, units like ours were selling for about $34,000 more than what we were offered by those low-balling RV dealers. And with all the extra gadgets and gizmos we added to that Unity FX, we were sure we could get even a bit more. We also checked RVTrader.com, a well-respected online classified website that 160,000 new and pre-owned units for sale by dealers and private sellers across the country. I did a search on RVTrader.com for a model similar to ours to see what they were selling for. The information coincided pretty much spot on with what we found in the NADA Guide. So we set our asking price….which was $38,000 above the low ball wholesale offers from the RV dealers we checked with. Tip #2 on how to sell your RV privately - Listing it We were going to spend $34.95 and send in some photos and list our Unity FX on the RV Trader website. I’ve heard great things about the results private sellers get there, But I didn’t have to. I didn’t because I have a bit of an advantage: I have a large online audience that listens to our RV Podcast show and watches our RV Lifestyle Channel Videos on YouTube. In a YouTube discussion at the end of May, I mentioned that we had decided to get a new RV and would be selling our old one. Literally as soon as our YouTube Livestream that night ended, my e-mail dinged from Bipi and Frank, a recently retired couple from Missouri. They were interested in buying our Unity. We sent several emails back and forth. I gave my asking price, they countered, and we agreed to a price about $3,000 less than what I was asking… but still $35K more than the best offer I had from dealers. Bipi and Frank felt they knew our RV after watching so many of our videos and after a few more questions, the deal was set. By the way, I heard from at least five other people who expressed an interest in buying our old rig. How to sell your RV: Our new buyers, Frank and Bipi next to the Unity RV we sold them On the day we handed Bipi and Frank the keys, I asked them to explain how it all came about. Here’s what they had to say: “We were actually coming home from Florida and we pulled into a tiny little campground because we were tired,” said Bipi. “And we turned on your YouTube, Ask Us Anything show on Sunday night and you mentioned that you're going to be selling it. So, I just typed out a quick little email and you responded. Frank, the next morning said, ‘You do realize that you have written about buying their entity’ and I said, ‘Yes and I slept on it. And I think we're going to buy it’. He said, ‘Okay.’ Frank retired back in January from a long career in medicine as a general surgeon. He says he and Bipi were so busy working that they just didn’t have time for much else. “We've always wanted to see the United States,” he told us. “And so we got started watching y'all.” Bipi says the videos did the trick. “It's because of y'all,” she told us “He always thought he wanted one, but I never really saw us going through it until we started watching your videos. And we couldn't resist.” We loved meeting them. As we waved goodbye, they headed out to Michigan’s Upper peninsula for a nice road trip vacation to get used to their new RV. Now, most of you don’t have a huge Internet audience as we do so you need to find some other ways to sell. Here’s some more tips. Tip #3 on how to sell your RV - Guard Against Fraud My first recommendation is RV Trader. You may also want to place a sign on the RV and park it in a prominent spot. Print up flyers and drop by RV parks and ask to put it up on their bulletin boards Also try Facebook Marketplace, Craigs List and even e-Bay I interviewed Paige Bouma of RV Trader for some advice about selling your RV yourself and she was very helpful, especially in telling us how not to get ripped off. Here’s a transcript of our extended interview with Paige that goes over several more steps on how to sell your RV: Paige Bouma of RV Trader talks about how to sell your RV on the RV Podcast Mike Wendland: The first question I get from so many of our listeners and viewers on our YouTube channel about how to sell your RV is how do I not get ripped off? They advertise like on Facebook Marketplace or Craig's List or eBay and they get all these weird responses. Give us some advice there if you will. Paige Bourma: Okay. The biggest thing in how to sell your RV is making sure you're listed in the right spot and that you are using common sense. If somebody is texting you and they're saying hey, can you send me a PIN or can I just give you money in another way, can I put it online, can you send me the unit ahead of time, like, use common sense. If something doesn't feel right it's probably not. Mike Wendland: People get really overwhelmed by this. There seems to be almost more fraud on some of the online marketplace type sites than there is in the real world of face-to-face, so people are leery of selling it themselves and many of them say well, I 'll just go to a dealer. Talk to our audience, if you will, about why that may not be a good idea on how to sell your RV. You may be shortchanging yourself if you turn it in as a trade-in or if you take a buyout, have an outright buy from a dealer. Paige Bourma: I think it all goes down to research, right? Know what you're trying to get out of the unit, know what makes the most sense, again if you're going to be trading in or not trading in, if you're trading up. You just have to go through and do the research to figure out where is the best place for you to sell this unit and what's your best price. You may also have to determine like how much... If you owe on it still, how much do you still owe on it. A lot of that information in how to sell your RV just goes into the research before you put it up.