Selling a Motorhome: One Owner from New, Slightly Pranged

The Good News

Let’s start with the good news: it’s not OUR motorhome.

SOK is sitting outside in the sunshine as I type (and his alarm is still behaving, hurrah); the only thing missing in SOK’s life at the moment is an imminent departure on another adventure…….

The other Good News is that the sale is done and dusted – this is NOT a sales pitch!

The Not so Good News

My dad (who has had Parkinsons Disease for 15 years and has in more recent times started adding other complaints to his list) has been muttering things like “I’ll have to decide what to do about the van” for a while now. I’d kind of expected that he would struggle on until after the summer before coming to any firm decision.

Anyway, the health gods dropped another surprise on him a couple of weeks back. He was discharged from hospital after a few days, but not in the best of shape and in his head, the decision had been made – the van needed to go and “the sooner the better”.

A Hasty Decision?

Well, no…

We were not at a point where you’d say “let’s leave it a few weeks and see how you feel then, Dad”. It had only been a matter of time. He’d made the right decision so the only thing to do was get on with it.

The Art of Delegation

Given his general condition at the moment, my dad decided to delegate the donkey work of getting rid of the van to his daughter (cheers, Dad!). I hadn’t been expecting that one. I’d figured that he’d be fully able to sell the van himself when the time came.

We discussed it and agreed that I would contact a few dealers and get some prices, then we’d discuss them and take it from there.

Dealers? You’ll Get Much More Money if you Sell Privately!

Yeah… Yeah… Yeah….

One thing I’d point out here is that when these situations present themselves, selling a vehicle is unlikely to be the only item on the to-do list…… there are bigger issues in life….

My dad’s motorhome was worth far too much money for me to be happy even attempting to sell it privately. I did sell our first motorhome, Kampington, via Ebay – but then we were selling for under £10k.

There are lots of a) idiots and b) con merchants who would no doubt respond to a private advertisement. What about test drives? What about ensuring safe payment?

Nope – there are times in life when you just need to get the job done…..

The Motorhome

My dad bought this motorhome about 4 months after we bought SOK (trading in his previous motorhome). It’s a Roller Team T-Line 590, which has a similar layout to SOK (a Benimar Tessoro 481) – was he copying us, by any chance, having seen our splendiferous new purchase?

Both the Roller Team and SOK have a very spacious living area with an electric double bed above that zips down into position as required:

(all photos in this post are of the Roller Team T590)

Whereas SOK has a fabulous kitchen in one rear corner and the bathroom in the other rear corner, the Roller Team has a large bathroom right across the rear of the van and a smaller kitchen area in front:

It’s swings and roundabouts really…. Some people would prefer the Roller Team, others the Benimar (other manufacturers are available!).

We’ll stick with the Benimar, thanks. Partly because the larger kitchen suits us better, partly because my dad hasn’t been near it…..

What do you Mean?

Ah, well, my dad’s motorhomes don’t always have the easiest of lives….

The Roller Team had:

1. a broken wing mirror (see featured image; it did have an “ear muff” to protect it, but I guess that wasn’t enough)
2. a bit of damage on the nearside rear corner
3. some damage near the habitation door

Both prangs had been expertly repaired, as you can see in the photos below!

Obviously, dealers needed to take this damage into account when coming up with prices (and as we all know, repairing coachbuilt motorhomes doesn’t come cheap).

The Prices

It’s always reassuring when prices come back in the same ballpark. It quickly became apparent that the trade price for my dad’s van was going to be about £35-36k.

I did get one low quote (£30k from Marquis) but nothing else below £35k. There was a quote above £36k but that would have involved me delivering the vehicle to England and I wasn’t at all convinced that the dealer wouldn’t then start sucking his teeth and dropping his price.

Dealers? Dodgy? What a Surprise!

Well, no…. not really…. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the professionalism of some of the nation’s motorhome dealers. OK, there were also some who were clearly second hand car dealers in a former life, but I think we can just ignore them….

What was really nice was that motorhome dealers are obviously very used to vehicle sales being arranged by family members on behalf of elderly owners, and (without any prompting) can be very sensitive to the need to deal with the owner appropriately (as a potentially “vulnerable person”) when having any direct dealings with them.

I was particularly happy with the approach taken by following two dealers:

1. Threeways Motorhomes (Bryn Williams)
2. Spinney Motorhomes (Andrew Cooper)

That’s just my experience. Other motorhome dealers are available!

The other learning point for the week is that, when it comes time to trade SOK in for a new motorhome, we probably don’t need to bother considering Marquis……

The Outcome

In the end, my dad sold his motorhome to Threeways for £35,500.

Why Threeways? Well, it came down to a choice between Threeways and Spinney (there seemed no reason to consider anyone else in the £35,000-£36,000 ballpark). Threeways were the obvious final choice for two reasons:

1. They came to look at the motorhome before giving a price, so they’d seen the damage and had been able to fully assess the general condition of the vehicle (my dad does have a very nasty habit of screwing things to the wall in motorhomes, and not always with the smallest suitable screw…. mind you, it could have been worse: at least in this van he hadn’t written on the wall in permanent pen above the light switches – in shaky handwriting and with spelling mistakes!). So there’d be no last minute quibbling…..
2. My dad bought the motorhome new from Threeways and had it serviced by them, at least for the first couple of years. I can’t be sure what has been done more recently, because we never did turn up any service paperwork (either for the Fiat service or the habitation service). I hadn’t mentioned the lack of paperwork when initially asking for prices as, well, you do reasonably assume in these circumstances that a folder will turn up in a “safe place”…. Threeways should be able to resurrect some appropriate paperwork, but another dealer would struggle….

Job Done

The motorhome was collected at lunchtime yesterday. Everything was very smooth and organised – and it’s already up for sale on the Threeways website. Mark has done a really good job of guessing prices as the week has progressed: he predicted that dealers would offer £35,000 and, once the sale was agreed at £35,500, that Threeways would put it up on their website at £44,999.

He’s £4 out. It’s listed at £44,995 (with some low-resolution photos so you can’t see the dings until they’ve had chance to sort them out).

What ?!?!

This is life, people…. How much do you think your £100 weekly shop costs Tesco? It isn’t £95, that’s for sure…..

They’ll only make their money when they actually sell the thing. The general level of demand for motorhomes seems to be favouring them at the moment, but on the other hand my dad’s last van did sit on their forecourt for a good couple of years before they finally managed to shift it…..

I wonder how long it’ll take to sell? At one owner from new, very low mileage, and with the minor dings fixed, I’m sure it’ll be a fantastic little motorhome for someone. Unless, of course, Boris announces that they can go to Spain this year after all….