Selling Your RV Without a Dealer: What You Need to Know

There are three basic strategies for selling your RV without going through a dealer and some ways are much more effective than others.  To save you time, I won’t “bury the lead” and make you read through the least effective ways to sell your RV in order to discover the best way to do it.  

1) The best way is to work with a team of experts that specialize in helping RV owners sell their RV in the peer-to-peer marketplace.  

2) or you could place your RV on a consignment lot 

3) or worst-case scenario, you can just park it in your driveway with a For Sale sign in the window.  

I will cover all three of these techniques in this article but the last two methods are so inferior to the best method that they are hardly worth considering. However, there may be benefits in those methods that I am unaware of, so I have included them for your consideration.

Connect with a Professional Team

The best way to sell your RV without a dealer is to sell your RV in the peer-to-peer market by using the services provided by National Vehicle.  This company specializes in representing RV sellers with on-line targeted comprehensive advertising and ongoing seller support.  They help sellers create accurate, compelling, and informative ads, then they place those ads in all the most popular publications where the majority of potential buyers will be searching for their next RV. 

Since the exposure is national (international in some cases) the majority of potential buyers will be able to view photos and read about your RV, compare it to other RVs for sale, and make an unhurried decision to request more information or to proceed with the buying procedure. 

If your RV is not conspicuously represented on-line you don’t have much chance of selling it, and National Vehicle staff are experts at helping you create compelling ads and getting it into all the right publications.  Their services don’t stop there.  Your expert representative at National Vehicle continues to support the selling process by monitoring buyer inquiries, and helping both the buyer and seller work through the process. They help buyers overcome the difficulties of shopping for and buying from a remote seller. 

If the buyers can’t personally inspect the RV because of the logistics or location, National Vehicle will arrange for a professional third-party RV inspector to go to the RV to confirm or dispute the publicized condition of the RV. They also have competitive RV financing options available for the buyer and they can even help arrange to have the RV delivered to a remote location if the buyer and seller are not in the same geographical region.  This work is all done for a modest fixed fee not a percentage of the selling price (inspectors, financing, and transportation costs are separate).  

If you have no idea what your RV is worth in today’s market, National Vehicle also provides no obligation free valuations to get you started at the right price to make sure you realize the maximum return on your investment but still have your RV priced to sell.  National Vehicle only does this for RVers so their attention is laser focused on the current market conditions of private RV sales, making them experts at RV valuations and sales.  Partnering with National Vehicle is the #1 best way to sell your RV without a dealer

Consignment Lot

Another less effective way to sell an RV without a dealer is to assign the RV to a consignment lot.  This is marginally better than parking it in your driveway (the third and least effective way) but it is still limited in scope and effectiveness. By using a consignment lot you have created a commercial selling environment for the buyer, much like a dealer’s lot and you take the awkward personal interaction out of the buying process.  But a consignment lot still has limited exposure. 

They primarily rely on buyers physically seeing the inventory parked on the lot and they hope an interested buyer stops by to inquire about the RVs for sale. They may also use on-line advertising to further publicize their inventory but the quality of the ads and placement is questionable.  Therefore, you have a limited number of potential buyers who will see or encounter your RV when it’s parked on a consignment lot.  Plus, these lots rely on low paid personnel to show and “sell” your RV but they don’t really have any intimate knowledge of its features and history so it’s hard for them to make the sale. 

Consignment lots charge a significant percentage of the selling price and once your RV is on the lot you don’t have any recourse to sell it any other way.  We have friends who have had their lovely, well maintained, Class A motorhome on a consignment lot near Washington DC for over a year without selling it.  Now they’re ready to sell their second RV and I have no idea if they will use a consignment lot or try to sell it some other way.  

The cost of selling your RV on a consignment lot is less than what it would cost to sell it to a dealer but it will take a lot longer to sell it that way, unless the lot aggressively advertises their inventory in all the right on-line publications.  Therefore, if you choose to use a consignment lot, find out what their advertising policies are before releasing it to them and ask if you still have the right to sell it on your own without paying their lot fee. 

Also, RVs that are just sitting for long periods of time without a connection to shore power will lose their battery power then none of the interior systems will be operational which makes it even harder to sell since they can’t demonstrate any of the features or highlights of the RV. 

Park in the Driveway with a For Sale Sign

The last way (and least effective way) to sell your RV is to just put a For Sale sign in the window, park your RV in your driveway, and wait for a prospective buyer to discover it on their way back and forth on your street.  Depending on the traffic flow, it probably won’t get much exposure.  As an example, we were camping on the Oregon Coast and observed a Class A motorhome parked in a driveway with a small For Sale sign in the window.  The driveway connected with Hwy 101 which is the busiest north/south thoroughfare on the Pacific Coast. 

The For Sale sign could not be read from the street so buyers would need to get out of their car and walk up to the sign to find out the year, milage, price, etc..  Certainly, the traffic on Hwy 101 gave the seller a lot of exposure but it was still inconvenient to investigate the details, which could lead to an awkward personal interaction with the owner of the RV.  We observed the RV for sale when we first arrived at our camp site and many months later when we were ready to move on the RV was still in the driveway with a For Sale sign in the window.  

Admittedly it was winter and there were probably less people thinking about camping with the unrelenting rain and wind of the Oregon Coast, and we have no idea if any buyers made an offer which didn’t meet the sellers expectations during that time, so we don’t really know if this method of selling your RV with the exposure of one of Oregon’s busiest highways worked for the seller or not.  But how many people’s driveways are right on a busy street?  We personally only have a dozen or so cars go by our house on any given day and most of these folks are our neighbors whom we know and they aren’t shopping for a used RV. 

Your situation might be different or you might be able to find an open parking lot along a main thoroughfare and park your RV there with a For Sale sign and increase its exposure but still the number of potential buyers will be limited to local travelers.  Realistically, to sell a used RV you need to cast a wider net and that’s where National Vehicles gives you an unfair advantage.  They will make sure your RV is properly displayed in a comprehensive on-line ad right when all the buyers are conducting their research pursuant to a purchase.  It’s not just something they noticed on their way to work.

You can sell your RV without a dealer in many different ways.  Park it in the driveway with a For Sale sign, park it in a consignment lot and let people who know very little about your RV try to sell it, or use the services of National Vehicle to advertise your RV in every corner of the country.  National Vehicle will make sure your RV is seen and appreciated by everyone searching for their next recreational vehicle. 

They provide daily updates as to how many detailed views your ad has received since it’s publication.  When hundreds of potential buyers click on the ad summary to get more details it means several hundred potential buyers have looked at all your pictures and read your comprehensive description.  Some of them might just be curious, but some of them are seriously looking for just the right RV for their needs, and one of them is likely going to be your buyer.

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