First Time Buyer...Updated 03/06/2006
This post is intended to be helpful to the first time buyer of a motor home. For those of you who don't fall into that category or believe this post is incomplete or off the mark, do us all a favor, a...
Forum Discussion
This is a great post for first time RV buyers. I would recommend it for anyone buying their first motorhome. I think we just got lucky when we bought ours- we went straight from a tent to a 32' Class A motorhome, and couldn't be happier.
The only research we did ahead of time was looking at floor plans and pictures on manufacturer web sites and we went to only one dealership. We did know it needed to be smaller than 35' because that is the limit in many of the state parks we go to on weekends, but we wanted it to be comfortable enough for 2 week trips. We started out thinking we wanted a Class C about 6 ft smaller than the Class A we bought- the salesperson really wanted us to look at a Class A for comparison and we really liked them much better. He really explained a lot of the features of the various models and let us spend lots of time checking everything out- we were on the lot several hours and narrowed it down to 2 models. The salesperson also gave us great prices on both without any prompting from us (although we really didn't know it at the time- I found out from reading this forum that the discount we got was what we should have gotten). The dealership also let us test drive both and told us that they would want us to spend a night in the one we purchased in their "campground" on the lot- this was invaluable for us since we really didn't know anything about how things worked in an RV when we bought it. They spent a lot of time before they left us for the night walking us through the operation of everything and were very patient.
I certainly don't recommend our approach as ideal, I think we were extremely lucky to end up with a great dealership. If we had seen this post before we bought we would have been a lot more prepared and not had to depend on dumb luck!
The only research we did ahead of time was looking at floor plans and pictures on manufacturer web sites and we went to only one dealership. We did know it needed to be smaller than 35' because that is the limit in many of the state parks we go to on weekends, but we wanted it to be comfortable enough for 2 week trips. We started out thinking we wanted a Class C about 6 ft smaller than the Class A we bought- the salesperson really wanted us to look at a Class A for comparison and we really liked them much better. He really explained a lot of the features of the various models and let us spend lots of time checking everything out- we were on the lot several hours and narrowed it down to 2 models. The salesperson also gave us great prices on both without any prompting from us (although we really didn't know it at the time- I found out from reading this forum that the discount we got was what we should have gotten). The dealership also let us test drive both and told us that they would want us to spend a night in the one we purchased in their "campground" on the lot- this was invaluable for us since we really didn't know anything about how things worked in an RV when we bought it. They spent a lot of time before they left us for the night walking us through the operation of everything and were very patient.
I certainly don't recommend our approach as ideal, I think we were extremely lucky to end up with a great dealership. If we had seen this post before we bought we would have been a lot more prepared and not had to depend on dumb luck!
