NY Times - As Elkhart goes
Interesting read in today's NY Times. As Elkhart, Ind, Goes. Seems some slowdowns in the industry are causing some concern. **Edit: some of you may have trouble getting past the paywall but most ...
Forum Discussion
d3500ram wrote:
Not gonna' argue either, but I could see how the Elkhart factor could be a canary in the coal mine as an indicator of the RV scene.
Market saturation. The stats don't lie. They created a huge bubble and raked in the cash while its all trumped up by marketing via the RVIA. Sure they shipped 504000 units in 17...a record. Thats 74000 and change more than 16 at 430000. Not much to crow about however when they sold 390000 in 2007 and well over 300000 for quite a few years prior. The recession knocked them into reality, and they're getting set up to be knocked back to reality again in the near future. It took them 8 years to get back to pre recession levels in 2015.
Selling 500000+ units yearly can not be sustained no matter how much they wish it can, and no matter how much horse poopage propoganda spews from the RVIA. The magic number for yearly sales is somewhere between 300K and 400K at this point in time with current interest rates. Just a slight uptick in interest rates knocks that back a bit progressively and interest rates will be ticking up for at least the next 4 or 5 years if not 10.
RV SHIPMENT HISTORICAL DATA
