The numbers for November shipments are in! The bread and butter of the RV industry, travel trailers, continue to cruise into negative territory. If you are thinking this might be the right time to buy a travel trailer, I wouldn’t argue with you. With the numbers sinking it may be a great time to negotiate a huge discount of the price of an RV.
November Shipment numbers from the RVIA.org web site are in, and just like last month it continues to be stagnant news. Like last month, Fifth Wheels and Truck Campers were the only positive news.
As always let me start by saying that the RVIA is comparing their “growth rate”, only to 2024, which wasn’t a great year. It would be better if they used a running five-year average as a comparison, excluding the covid years.
Right now, for all RV shipments for the year, they are at 318,901 Units Shipped. That puts total 2025 down from 3.6% last month to 2.7% YTD compared to 2024. That’s not a positive picture.
Let’s break down the November numbers:
In November Travel Trailer Shipments were down again, this time dropping lower to -16.5% over November of 2024. For the year they are now in even more negative territory at -1.7%. Again, that’s comparing to the bad year 2024. This has been a bleak year for Travel Trailers. As I’ve said before, I’ve never seen a year like this for travel trailers.
November Fifth Wheel shipments were up 25.8% over November of 2024. Total shipments were 4,410, which is down from last month’s shipments but better than Nov of 2024. YTD compared to 2024 they’ve moved up just a hair to 21.5%.
Pop-up Campers moved into positive territory for November at 16.0% but are still in negative territory YTD when compared to 2024, at -1.3%.
Truck Campers had that unexplainable positive wild swing over the last few months. This month they are up again at 11.0% over November of 2024. Again, I’m not sure what’s happening in that category. These last three month has put the truck campers at 25.3% positive for the YTD numbers. Just like pop up campers the number of shipments in this category is so small (just 312 this month) it hardly takes any increase or decrease to make it look like a huge swing. However, this trend seems to be continuing now, so something positive is definitely happening in this category. This is now three months in a row where some really big numbers for truck campers are being generated.
I won’t spend a lot of time talking about Motorhomes, but A’s were up by 6.2% when compared to November of 2024. Type B’s were down -53.9%, and type C’s were down -.3%.
However, for the year, A’s are barely positive at 3.4%, and B’s are diving so much deeper into negative territory, they’ll need a big shovel to recover; now sinking YTD to -6.5%. Type C’s slipped just a bit to 5.2%. Overall, the motorhome market has now dropped to only 2.0% over 2024.
Again, the motorhome situation is a bit like Fifth wheels, truck campers and popups. There are not a lot shipped so a modest swing results in a big percentage shift. However, it does continue to show that the motorhome market is in trouble, particularly on Camper Vans.
Craig Kirby the RVIA CEO states “RV Shipments for the year continue to slightly outpace 2024, which aligns with the latest forecast from ITR Economics showing an expected 2.8% increase this year.”
Well, a 2.8% increase YTD when compared to a bad year isn’t something to write home about. However, look at those travel trailer numbers – this could be a buyers’ market. So, use those numbers to leverage a good deal if you are in the market to buy. When, Travel Trailers shipments look this bad, you know the sales numbers are even worse.
Until next time Happy Camping!
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