RV Industry SHOCK: Dealers Dumping New RVs in Peak Season

Unknown Speaker (0:01): Hey, everybody. Welcome to the RV Lifestyle Podcast Monday news edition for July 6. I'm Mike Wendland winding up the fourth of July weekend by getting you caught up on everything moving in the RV world. Every story we cover on this show gets sourced and linked for you. I'm a journalist.

Unknown Speaker (0:19): That's the way I was trained, and, no guesswork for you. No vague reports. Just head over to rvpodcast.com. After you listen, you'll find the full show notes there with every link, every source organized by story so you can dig deeper on anything that catches your attention. Now before we get into it, if you're not already getting our newsletter, now is the time to fix that.

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Mike Wendland (1:01): Sign up. Takes about ten seconds, and you'll be glad you did. Alright. Let's get into the news. Story number one, RV industry dysfunction is on full display with inventory liquidation, a crisis that's hitting at, the peak buying season.

Mike Wendland (1:18): As if escalating quality issues, we'll have some more of those report in our recall notices a little later, escalating quality issues and a steady drumbeat of recalls, that that wasn't enough to make you think twice about this RV industry. Now we've got this. Dealers are liquidating brand new RVs in the middle of peak season. We're not talking about clearance leftovers from three years ago. We're talking about brand new units built this year getting dumped at fire sale prices while the industry keeps insisting everything is fine.

Mike Wendland (1:52): That phrase liquidating new RVs in peak season isn't me talking. That's from Ben Hirsch. He's the chief operating officer of Campers Inn RV, one of the largest dealer groups in the country, and he wrote a scathing opinion piece on the industry himself. Wrote it himself in black and white in a guest column for our friends at RV Business this past week. And I wanna unpack that a little bit for you because it explains something that we've been talking about and a lot of you've been asking me about.

Mike Wendland (2:22): Why does this industry keep doing this to itself? Well, right now, in the middle of what is supposed to be the best selling season of the year, summertime, dealers are sitting on new RVs that never should have been built in the first place. And the numbers back Ben Hirsch up. April wholesale shipments were down 17.4. Retail registrations off about 17% that same month.

Mike Wendland (2:45): And if you go back to the first quarter of this year when the inventory was actually getting built, you see the real problem. Shipments slid around 12% while retail demand fell closer to 20%. That gap between what factories built and what actually sold, that's the pile of unsold RV sitting on lots right now. The industry's own forecast just got cut again from 349,000 units down to 314,000, the first real cut after quarters of everybody pretending that things were just fine. Hirsch has a name for what's happening.

Mike Wendland (3:23): He calls it the bullwhip effect, and it is a supply chain turf. A small wobble in real customer demand turns into a violet swing the further back up the chain you go from the customer to the dealer to the factory. And here's the part that really got me. He says this keeps repeating for the same boring, predictable reasons every single time. Factories build to dealer purchase orders that were guest at months in advance.

Mike Wendland (3:52): Shipments count as revenue the day they roll off the line, so there's always pressure to keep building on the manufacturers. And dealers guard their own sales numbers like state secrets, so the one thing that could actually fix this real current demand data never gets shared with the people doing the building. Nobody in that chain is doing anything crazy on their own. Every decision makes sense if you look at them in isolation. But if you stack them all together and you get exactly what we're watching right now, you see there's a crisis, a dealer lot full of brand new units getting fire sold in July.

Mike Wendland (4:32): Now here's what makes Hirsch's piece worth your five minutes. He's not just complaining. He's put his own company on the record. Campers Inn already sends real retail sales numbers straight to their manufacturing partners. He's asked other dealers, do the same thing.

Mike Wendland (4:49): He's saying to manufacturers, actually act on that data instead of just holding to a purchase order that was written for a market that doesn't exist anymore. Now Walmart figured this out in the retail chain decades ago with suppliers. Dell Computer figured it out with build to order. So Hirsch is basically saying, hey. RV industry.

Mike Wendland (5:12): Catch up. I wrote about the same slowdown on the blog this week from the buyer's side of the counter, and here's my take for whatever it's worth after fifteen years of watching this industry cycle up and down. The mess on the manufacturing and dealer side is exactly why patient buyers are sitting in the driver's seat right now. Dealers facing slower traffic with lots that are too full are a lot more willing to negotiate than they were two or three years ago. Factory incentives slowly starting to creep back in.

Mike Wendland (5:43): If you've been holding off on a purchase, this isn't a bad time to start shopping, and it's a terrible time to feel rushed. But don't mistake a slowdown in sales for a slowdown in RVing. Jennifer and I have been out there all summer long, and the campgrounds are full. National parks are packed. We'll talk about that in a minute.

Mike Wendland (6:02): People are still traveling. They're just not signing loan paperwork as fast as they were during the pandemic gold rush. That's not the industry dying. That's the industry finally getting a dose of reality that it has needed for a long time. The fix that Hirsch is proposing is not complicated.

Mike Wendland (6:20): It's just never been convenient because sharing real numbers means giving up a little bit of leverage, and giving up leverage is not exactly this industry's strong suit. Whether dealers and manufacturers actually do it or whether we're back here again in eighteen months talking about another liquidation cycle, That's the real story I'll be watching. Don't forget we source everything in the show notes, and you can actually there's a link to the opinion piece that Hirsch wrote. You'll find that in the show notes at rvpodcast.com. Alright.

Mike Wendland (6:49): Story number two, and this is one that's gonna get a lot of heat. The Patrick Lippert merger and what this really means. As if the industry didn't have enough dysfunction to cover this week, story two is one that's really got people talking. It's the Patrick Industries and LCI Industries merger, and LCI is lipper to most of you. It just went from rumor to official.

Mike Wendland (7:12): And we've been writing about this and talking about it, and now it's, it's there. Here's the timeline because it tells you everything. Back in April, you'll remember both companies confirmed they were in talks on a so called merger of equals. Well, by May 4, those talks blew up, terminated. No agreement on terms, both sides said.

Mike Wendland (7:32): So the case was closed or so you would think. But then in early June, on this very podcast, I told you something didn't add up because Jason Lippert, the longtime CEO who had run that company really well for years, abruptly retired at the age of 54. The same day, the chairman of the board resigned too. Two departures like that on the same day. That is not a coincidence.

Mike Wendland (7:57): It's a signal. I said at the time that smelled like boardroom friction over a stalled deal. And with Jason out of the way, that merger would be back on. And twenty six days later, I was right. June 30, Patrick and LCI announced a definitive agreement, all stock merger, enterprise value north of $7,000,000,000.

Mike Wendland (8:17): Patrick CEO Andy Nemeth will run the combined company. We may never know though exactly what happened behind those closed doors, but you don't lose a CEO and a chairman in the same day in the middle of merger talks unless somebody lost the power struggle. That's my theory, and I'm sticking with it until somebody proves me wrong. Now let's talk about why this matters to every single one of you and why I don't think this is a good deal at all. So whether you're towing a teardrop or driving a diesel pusher, let me tell you this affects you because Lippert and Patrick are not brands that you see necessarily on the front of your RV, but they're the companies behind the brand.

Mike Wendland (8:56): I'm talking about your chassis, your axles, the slide outs, the leveling systems, the cabinetry, the countertops, the water heaters, the electronics. Between them, they already account for more than $11,000 of content on the average towable. Put those two under one roof, and you get a supplier with a reach across this industry that nobody has ever had before. And I'm not the only one saying that's the problem. Senator Mike Lee, back when they were first talking about these merger talks, Mike Lee chairs the senate judiciary committee on antitrust, sent a formal letter to both companies raising some concerns, and he copied the Department of Justice antitrust division on it.

Mike Wendland (9:36): His argument was pretty straightforward. When you combine two suppliers of this scale across this many critical categories, you create a company with the power to set pricing, limit availability, and squeeze the manufacturers who have nowhere else to go. Think about the smaller suppliers still standing on the outside of this. Companies like Morride and Dometic, they compete hard in specific categories like suspension and climate systems and awnings, but now they're competing against a combined giant that touches nearly every single part of the build, not just one quarter of it. That is not a level playing field anymore, folks.

Mike Wendland (10:16): And I'm gonna be straight with you. My industry sources are not looking on this favorably at all, and my sources are in manufacturing and in retail, and I'll go one further. This week, I was personally contacted by a regulatory and antitrust specialist from a major financial services and investment advisory firm who is actively looking into the ramifications of this deal. Is not a blogger with an opinion. That's serious money asking serious questions about how big is to be.

Unknown Speaker (10:46): He wanted to know my assessment of this. What did this mean to the industry, to consumers? Well, I'll talk to them, and I'm happy to share what I'm sharing right here with you. This deal still has to clear shareholder votes on both sides and get through regulatory review under the Hart Scott Rudino Act before anything closes, and that isn't expected till sometime in the first half of next year, 2027. So that's a long runway for scrutiny to build, and believe me, it is going to.

Unknown Speaker (11:14): So don't be surprised if this becomes a genuine antitrust fight before it's over. Here, though, is the part that really gets me fired up, and it's bigger than just two supplier logos merging into one. This is not an isolated event. I've been talking about this all year long. This is a pattern that keeps growing.

Unknown Speaker (11:32): If you've been paying attention the last several years, you know it because it's happening to every single layer of this industry at once. Start with manufacturing. Thor Industries, Forest River, Keystone. Man, these are big companies. Winnebago, they've already swallowed up dozens of smaller brands over the past two decades.

Mike Wendland (11:53): Most of the different RV brands sitting side by side on a dealer lot roll off the assembly lines owned by the same handful of parent companies. You think you're choosing between brands. You're really choosing between paint schemes. Now stack the supplier side on top of that with this Patrick and Lippert combining perhaps into one house that touches nearly every component that goes into the box, and then look what's happening to the ground you actually park on. Sun Communities through Sun Outdoors, Equity Lifestyle Properties have been on an acquisition tear for years buying up private campgrounds and RV resorts at a pace that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Unknown Speaker (12:34): Institutional, corporate, capital, real estate, investment trust, private equity money, all of this pouring into this space because somebody in a boardroom crunched the numbers and realized campgrounds are just real estate with really good margins. KOA keeps expanding its franchise network too, which has its upsides. I like KOA, but it is one more piece of this business getting standardized and centralized under fewer flags. So look what we got. The people building the RVs, the company supplying the parts that go inside them, and now the ground you park them all on, all consolidating into fewer and fewer hands at the same time.

Mike Wendland (13:15): That is not three unrelated headlines. This is one story. Wall Street has figured out that this RV lifestyle we love is profitable, predictable, and ripe for roll ups, and they're moving in on every single link of the chain. I didn't get into this to cheerlead for private equity spreadsheets. I got into it because Jennifer and I fell in love with this way of life and tent camping our way up.

Unknown Speaker (13:40): We started that way through every single kind of rig there is. So forgive me if I'm not doing a victory lap over efficiencies of scale and run rate synergies. Every time one of these deals closes, it's one fewer independent voice, one fewer competitor keeping somebody honest on price and quality, and one more reason it makes sense that we've got quality problems and recalls, we'll talk about that just coming up, piling up at the same time the dealers are drowning in unsold inventory. When an entire industry, top to bottom, gets this consolidated this fast, don't act surprised when it starts cutting corners. That's not a coincidence.

Mike Wendland (14:21): That's what happens when nobody's left to answer to. I had a quick break from the news. Given everything we've just covered, dealers sitting on liquidated inventory and manufacturers and suppliers consolidating into fewer hands, there's never been a better time though for you to walk into a dealership knowing exactly what you're doing. And that's why I put together our RV buying secrets ebook. This is not a blog post.

Mike Wendland (14:47): It is a full digital guide built from fifteen years of buying, selling, watching this industry cycle up and down, and it walks you through how you can negotiate in a market like the one we're in now, what to say to a dealer when they tell you their price is firm, how to spot the difference between a real discount and a repainted markup, when financing offers are actually a good deal versus a trap, and how to read a lot full of inventory the way a dealer reads it so you know when you have the leverage and when you don't. Right now, with lots overflowing and dealers more willing to deal than they've been in years, this guide pays for itself the first time you use it. So go out and grab my RV buying secrets ebook. You'll find it at rvlifestyle.com/rv-buying-secrets. I'll put a link in the show notes.

Mike Wendland (15:37): Read it before your next dealership visit, not after. Alright. Back to the news. Story three. National parks have descended into chaos as staffing cuts have collided with record fourth of July crowds.

Mike Wendland (15:51): Oh my goodness. As if two stories of industry dysfunction weren't enough for one Monday, story three takes us straight to the front lines. Yosemite National Park. And it wasn't just Yosemite. By the time you're reading this, most of you are either home or on your way home for the fourth of July weekend.

Mike Wendland (16:07): So let's talk about what actually happened out there this past weekend because it was every bit as bad as we feared. Here's the setup. Earlier this year, the National Park Service killed the timed entry reservation system at Yosemite that had been in place since 2020. That system wasn't perfect, but it did one thing well. It kept the number of cars entering the park inside what the roads and the parking lots could actually handle.

Unknown Speaker (16:30): Park leadership decided that wasn't necessary anymore. So this Memorial Day weekend was the first real test, and by every account, the park failed it. Visitors described hour and a half waits just to get into the gate, parking lots full by 08:30 in the morning, cars parked illegally in meadows off the pavement because there was nowhere else to put them. One visitor called it shoulder to shoulder chaos with a lot of angry people. Park advocates were blunder than that.

Mike Wendland (16:55): They called it pure chaos, and they've been asking senators to step in, force the reservation system back. Yosemite had already logged nearly a 100,000 more visitors this year than at the same point last year. March visitation was up 45%, and that was before this fourth of July weekend even got here. And this holiday was always gonna be a real stress test. Well, now layer on that with what's been happening system wide.

Mike Wendland (17:25): Since January of last year, the National Park Service has lost close to a quarter of its permanent workforce. It's not a typo. It's a quarter. Rangers, gone. Maintenance crews, gone.

Mike Wendland (17:35): People who used to staff entrance stations, answer questions, respond when somebody gets hurt or on a trail, gone. Zion has had to close fee stations, visitor centers because there's nobody left to staff them. Acadia is short on entrance staff. Search and rescue capacity is stretched thin at parks like Joshua Tree and Yosemite. Emergency response is slower everywhere, and that's not me being dramatic.

Mike Wendland (17:58): That's coming straight from park advocacy groups and the rangers themselves. You put all that together with this weekend we just had. This was America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday. The National Park Service made every park fee free from July 3 through the fifth to market. Free entry, record travel volumes on a milestone weekend at the exact moment staffing is gutted and the park control systems that used to manage this kind of surge have been switched off at some of the biggest parks in the country, including Yosemite and Glacier And Arches.

Mike Wendland (18:31): Triple a projected more than 72,000,000 Americans traveling this holiday period, one of the highest numbers on record. You don't need an economics degree to see where this is headed, And by all early accounts, it landed like you'd expect this past weekend, colliding with an active wildfire emergency out west. Utah and Colorado both declared states of emergency this week, and, tragically, three firefighters were killed battling fast moving blazes on the Colorado, Utah border. Stage two fire restrictions went into effect at Zion And Arches and Canyonlands. No campfires, no charcoal, fireworks banned across every national park, national forest, and BLM land in Utah.

Mike Wendland (19:10): On top of that, a heat dome pushed dangerous heat and high humidity across a huge swath of the country right through the holiday weekend. Here's the bottom line as everybody makes their way home this weekend. If you were one of the ones stuck at a gate for an hour and a half or circling for parking that didn't exist, you weren't imagining it and you weren't doing anything wrong. That's what happens when you hand a bare bone staff a record breaking fee free milestone weekend crowd and call it a birthday present. And if you're already thinking about your next trip to one of these marquee national parks, learn from this weekend.

Mike Wendland (19:46): Get there before dawn or don't bother. Have a backup parking plan. Watch air quality, not just the weather anywhere near those western fires, and strongly consider the shoulder days. Now that fee free window has closed after today. The back half of this week is shaping up to be a far better time to actually enjoy those places than fighting the holiday crush was.

Mike Wendland (20:10): Somebody in Washington thought a record crowd on a bare bones staff sounded like a great idea. The rangers who had to deal with it and the family stuck in the gridlock at the gate would probably tell you it played out exactly the way anyone paying attention would have predicted. What a mess. Story four. Alright.

Mike Wendland (20:29): The RV recall roundup, another embarrassing reality check for Elkhart. I hate to keep beating up on the RV manufacturing industry week after week. I really do. But folks, come on now. Seriously, can they honestly not do better than this?

Mike Wendland (20:47): Are we setting the quality control bar so low that basic elementary engineering is now considered a luxury add on? The latest round of safety recalls just finalized through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA. And if you want proof that manufacturing quality has completely left the building, look no further than this week's lineup. Let's start with the giant Forest River brands. They're actively recalling over 1,800 of their brand new twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six Nobo, Ibex, and twenty twenty five to twenty twenty seven R Pod travel trailers.

Mike Wendland (21:24): The safety defect? The 110 volt circuits on the main electrical distribution panel were completely mislabeled at the factory. Mislabeled. Think about that for a second. You have an electrical issue on the road, you flip the breaker that says microwave or general outlets, You assume the line's dead.

Mike Wendland (21:42): You stick your fingers in there to check it and bring out the breaker and bang. You get a free unexpected cardiac jump start because the factory workers couldn't be bothered to check a label. NHTSA explicitly warns that this presents a direct risk of severe electrical shock. Owner letters, they don't roll out until August 1. August 1.

Mike Wendland (22:04): But if you own one of these rigs, don't trust the sticker on your panel. Check it with the meter first. And if you think paying top dollar for an iconic legacy brand protects you from basic component failures, think again because Airstream just hit the recall list for their ultra luxury twenty twenty six classic trailers and twenty twenty five to twenty twenty seven interstate class b motorhomes. The issue here is the premium Maxair rooftop ventilation fans. Turns out the printed circuit boards are defective.

Mike Wendland (22:37): Now under normal standard operation, these circuit boards can fail. They can short out. They can overheat. They can catch fire. So the one tool you rely on is to keep cool on a scorching July afternoon might actually set your $100,000 luxury rig ablaze.

Mike Wendland (22:53): Airstream is replacing them for free, but VIN searches won't even be fully active on the government website until August. The biggest headline this week is a massive quiet epidemic rolling through the high end fifth wheel market regarding the CURT touring coil suspension system. CURT, by the way, is a division of Lippert, you know, it's a big merger, Lippert, Patrick. Curt's one of their brands. Reports on this defect just keep growing, confirming a total breakdown in assembly protocols.

Mike Wendland (23:25): The factory shock retaining bolts improperly tightened. If they were over torqued, the bolt heads can completely fracture and snap off. If they're under torqued, they simply vibrate loose and drop off on the highway. Either way, your independent suspension undergoes a catastrophic failure while you're towing at highway speeds, creating a severe crash risk, sending heavy metal flying into trailing traffic. This week's finalized list includes over 1,100 Grand Design reflection fifth wheels, Keystone's premium Alpine and Montana lines, Alliance RV's Paradims models, and rigs from Brinkley, Ember, and KZ.

Mike Wendland (24:05): If you bought a luxury fifth wheel built within the last year, do yourself a huge favor. Crawl under your rig with a flashlight, check out your suspension hardware before your next next trip. Seriously, folks, mislabeled live electricity, ventilation fans that cause fires, and suspension bolts that snap off at 65 miles an hour. We're paying historic premium prices on these units, and this is what's rolling out of the factories. They gotta do better.

Mike Wendland (24:33): We gotta have some good news, don't we? So I have a good news roundup for you. Kinda wash down all the bad taste. I mean, I know I just spent the last few minutes beating up on the manufacturers, and frankly, they deserved it. But look.

Mike Wendland (24:45): I don't wanna leave a bad taste in your mouth today. There's still plenty of good news out there on the highway, and we have two fantastic stories that remind us why we fell in love with the RV lifestyle in the first place. First up, if you're tired of fighting the reservation algorithms and finding every single park book solid months in advance, we've got some fantastic news coming out of our public park systems. We are officially entering a major public campground expansion boom. State park systems across the country finally using federal infrastructure grants to build entirely new loops specifically designed for modern larger RVs.

Mike Wendland (25:25): Prime example that just fully opened is the Cattail Cove State Park along the Colorado River in Arizona. They just unveiled a massive new upper campground loop, adding 78 brand new spacious campsites equipped with full water, sewer, 50 amp hookups, alongside a brand new white sand beach. And it's not just happening out west. From state parks in Connecticut to county and municipal parks across the Midwest, public lands are aggressively expanding their site footprints. They're adding big rig friendly spaces and heavy duty hookups that we actually need, which means more inventory, less stress on reservation sites, and more opportunities to find a last minute weekend slice of paradise.

Mike Wendland (26:09): Now our final story today is a camper spotlight that we just wanna celebrate. If you think your summer road trip logistics are complicated, I want you to meet a guy named Micah Meyer. Micah set out to do something that many experts said was logistically impossible. He wanted to visit every single national park service site in The US. A lot of people wanna do that, but he wanted to do it in one single continuous uninterrupted road trip.

Mike Wendland (26:38): Now we're not just talking about the 63 headline national parks like Yellowstone and Zion. We're talking about all of the national monuments, historic sites, battlefields, recreation areas. It's a mind boggling total of over 400 separate properties spanning all 50 states and multiple US territories. How did he do it? He bought a used cargo van on Craigslist, spent weeks converting it himself into a custom camper van that he affectionately named Vanny McVan Face.

Mike Wendland (27:08): He hit the asphalt, and after three years of continuous travel, logging over 70,000 miles on the road and flying or boating out to the remote island territories, Micah officially crossed his final park line and set the world record as the youngest person to visit every single National Park Service unit and the only person in history to do it in one single continuous push. He spent over seven hundred nights sleeping right inside that DIY camper van, surviving everything from extreme subzero blizzards to the scorching desert heat. Micah took on this epic trip as a moving tribute to his late father who passed away before he could fulfill his own retirement road trip dreams. It's an extraordinary, heartwarming milestone that captures, I think, the true essence of why we travel. And it reminds us that our rigs aren't just vehicles.

Mike Wendland (28:07): They're the tools of absolute freedom that allow us to honor the people we love and explore the history of this country and prove that no horizon is truly out of reach. Hats off to Micah. He's held that record now for a couple of years. Alright. That's it for today's RV podcast news edition.

Mike Wendland (28:25): Head over to rvpodcast.com for full show notes and sources on everything we covered. And, again, a couple quick things here. If you're not on our newsletter yet, get on it. Come on. Rvlifestyle.com/newsletter.

Mike Wendland (28:38): We send you a free email every morning by 07:30. Best way to stay ahead of what's happening in the industry between episodes. And second, if this show has ever helped you, saved you money, or just kept your company on a long drive, would you just take thirty seconds and leave us a review? It generally means the world to Jennifer and me. This podcast had been running now for over twelve years, and every single review helps new RVers find us.

Mike Wendland (29:05): So we appreciate those reviews. We love to see them. Alright. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being part of this community, and we will be back next Monday with more news.

Unknown Speaker (29:15): But, also, don't forget on Wednesday, it's our stories from the road episode where Jennifer joins me, and we talk about all the things you need to know to make as much as you can out of the RV lifestyle. I'm Mike Wendland. Happy trails.