RV Wholesalers - Our experience!

Good afternoon RV'ers! A while back, when I first joined this forum, I promised that I would do a report on our experience with RVW and expose the good, the bad and the ugly. So, allow me to create this blog so as to help anyone out there whether purchasing out of state is worthwhile, as well as the in's and out's of doing so.

A little background...

We originally camped with a 27' Starcraft travel trailer. It was a good little unit. Behaved itself and had relatively little problems. We bought it brand new from a local dealership in the Austin, TX area called Crestview RV. I'm mentioning them because doing business with a local dealership versus dealing with an out-of-state dealership is sort of the point to this article. My experiences with Crestview will also serve as a compare/contrast as we discuss our RVW experience.

We sold the Starcraft for the main reason that my wife couldn't get comfortable in the passenger seat of the truck, which in our case was a 2015 Ford F-150 4x4. I liked my truck. It did everything I needed it to do. Well, everything except be able to smoothly tow the TT. I mean, it was equipped with the Ford tow package. Diff geared, tranny cooled, wired and rigged with a Pro-hitch, leveling and sway bars. Even with all this, hooking up the TT and driving at about 40 mph you'd think you were in some severe cross-winds. Then, Sharon says if we bought a motorhome, I could trade the truck in and buy a Jeep...

The Research

I came across RVW during our research as to the RVs that would work for us. What happened first was that I found an older YouTube video where RVW talks about the War on the RV Industry.

You can view them here:


And here:


So, we began to research and it eventually narrowed down to both the BT Cruiser and the Forester 2151LE. I contacted RVW by asking for a price quote.

Let me say that getting a straight forward price kind of blew my socks off. So, the first positive thing I will say about RVW, is they will quote you a price, up front, no haggling. If you want various options, they will quote you a price for that. For us, I wanted several options and mixed and matched them and our salesperson, Jaime Spofford, actually sent me the entire list of available options with all the pricing included. We got to basically build our unit and keep an eye on the cost, right then and there. What was attractive to me was that by going through RVW's financing, they will rebate you the finance incentive that dealerships never talk to you about.

The Financing Incentive Rebate

So, buying a motorhome is a little more expensive than travel trailers and I can't exactly quote how much rebate you'd get with either, but I can say that for our motorhome purchase, RVW rebated back to us off the price of the motorhome $6,000. Not chump change! I understand through talking with Jamie that travel trailer rebates might be half that. In any event, we got a $75,000 motorhome for $69,000. The catch, is that you must go through their financing and promise not to pay off your loan for one year minimum. The rate wasn't shabby either. US Bank picked us up and we got basically about 4.75% for a 20 year term. RVW also discounts the financing rate by 1/4% if you bought a service plan from them, which I did.

One thing I did to verify that it was worth our while to go outside the state and work with RVW, who's located in Lakeview OH btw, was to take a trip to two dealerships, one 200 mi north of us, and another, an hour's drive south. In each instance, I verified that their pricing for similar RVs to the one we were looking at was $75,000 so the RVW rebate indeed was worthwhile.

So, that's all the blogging I'm going to do for now. We flew up to Lakeview OH for about $200 and RVW picked us up at the airport and drove us to their lot. The RV was good. Configured the way we had ordered it. There were a couple items missing from the get-go but as we were now going to take a few days driving it back home, it would double as a shake-out cruise and I would put together a punch list of items RVW will help us with. Nothing that's a show-stopper, mind you.

Probably the most critical thing I can say about our experience picking up the coach was that their check-in team could have done a more thorough job. We had a missing solar panel, a missing Solar-on-the-side port, the batteries weren't tied down properly, and we were missing a spare tire on the underside.

On my next blog segment, I'll talk about the shake-down cruise and what we experienced and our next steps. But, for now, I would say that for the $6,000 real dollars saved, I'm still pretty happy with things so far!