things to do BEFORE you buy a camper
After falling in love with a Forest River Wildwood travel trailer at the Hershey RV show we decided that we were going to buy another camper. Before we committed to buying a camper, we did a couple of things to make sure we were getting what we wanted.
Here are the top FIVE things you must do before buying a new camper:
- Do your research BEFORE going to the dealer. When we were looking at new campers we looked at a couple different dealers that have the same model. Each dealer takes different pictures and we got a more comprehensive idea of what the camper would look like.
- Once at the dealer, ask to see a couple different campers in the model you are looking at. Manufactures come out with new campers about every six months so an early 2019 is going to be different than a newer 2019. I would even ask to look at a year older in the same model. Sometimes the features in the later models are more desirable than the new features. **sidenote: with the later models you’re going to get a better deal.
- Again while you are at the dealer, ask questions!!! Even though you did research and you know the camper inside and out, still ask questions to make sure that you completely understand how something works.
- Along with doing research about what camper you want and what model you want do research on what you need to make that camper livable for you. You can always add those extra things into the loan and over a long period of time it really isn’t that much extra monthly. Looking to see what we bought for our first travel trailer, check out our 15 must haves for a new camper.
- Before leaving the dealership, take lots of pictures. Get pictures of everything; take pictures of every wall, open cabinets and take pictures, etc. You may ask why pictures, well most likely you aren’t going to be driving away from the dealership with your camper so the pictures are a great way for you to remember different features of the camper when you get home. When taking pictures have the sales guy make note of things that are scratched, chipped, broken, or don’t work correctly. Make sure you note those things as well so that you can ensure that when you take delivery of the camper all those things can are fixed.
We have done all of these things with the both the campers that we have bought and have been very happy with both experiences. We were very thankful we knew a lot about the camper we were looking at before we actually went to look at.
Want to see what our campers look like? Check out our video camper tours.
