Buying used trailer: couple of questions
We're hoping to buy our first travel trailer in the very near future and have been making the rounds of dealerships and obsessively checking Craigslist for a few weeks now. The frontrunner at the moment is a used (2011) Shamrock hybrid that we looked at today at a dealership. A couple of questions if we decide to move forward with it:
1. Is it typical/expected/accepted/essential to have trailers checked out by an independent service place before buying (when buying from a dealer)? The sales guy acted like he had no idea what I was talking about, but he also admitted he had just started there a few weeks ago.
2. Three of the tires looked to be in decent shape, but one of them was way more worn than the others--like it looked like it should have been replaced a long time ago. I expect we should replace all the tires right away anyway; I'm assuming they're probably the original, now 4-5 year old, tires....but what would cause one of them to wear differently than the others?
Aside from that, everything appeared to be in good shape and well taken care of, as far as we could tell. We're really hoping to buy used....I don't want to find out we've guessed wrong about what we want and don't want in a trailer and feel stuck because we've paid for a brand new one and its lost a ton of value. I feel like if we buy used and get a decent deal, we'll be able to sell it and buy something different in a year or two if we want to without taking too much of a hit. But, of course, I also don't want whatever we buy to be a constant headache that makes us wish we'd never bought a trailer to start with.
Thanks in advance!
1. Is it typical/expected/accepted/essential to have trailers checked out by an independent service place before buying (when buying from a dealer)? The sales guy acted like he had no idea what I was talking about, but he also admitted he had just started there a few weeks ago.
2. Three of the tires looked to be in decent shape, but one of them was way more worn than the others--like it looked like it should have been replaced a long time ago. I expect we should replace all the tires right away anyway; I'm assuming they're probably the original, now 4-5 year old, tires....but what would cause one of them to wear differently than the others?
Aside from that, everything appeared to be in good shape and well taken care of, as far as we could tell. We're really hoping to buy used....I don't want to find out we've guessed wrong about what we want and don't want in a trailer and feel stuck because we've paid for a brand new one and its lost a ton of value. I feel like if we buy used and get a decent deal, we'll be able to sell it and buy something different in a year or two if we want to without taking too much of a hit. But, of course, I also don't want whatever we buy to be a constant headache that makes us wish we'd never bought a trailer to start with.
Thanks in advance!
