Jessica Rider runs a mobile RV repair company and does warranty work, and in a column for RVBusiness she asked the question the entire industry has been avoiding: "Why is it that my company can get an OEM warranty job done in five days while a dealership takes 45?"
Her answer is that it is not volume. She says she has spoken with owners of some of the largest dealerships in the country and books as many appointments in a week as they do, sometimes more. Her answer is that the system is broken, and that the industry has spent three years calling service a bottleneck without addressing it. She describes watching someone raise exactly that at an industry Leadership Conference, in a room full of the biggest decision makers in the business, and watching the room go silent.
Hold that number. Five days or forty-five. Because the rest of the market data explains why it has stopped being an operational annoyance and started being the whole ballgame.
Three numbers that appear to disagree
Read the RV trade press this month and you will come away confused, because the headline numbers point in opposite directions.
New units are forecast down. The Summer 2026 edition of RV RoadSigns, the quarterly forecast ITR Economics prepares for the RV Industry Association, cut 2026 wholesale shipments to a range of 300,000 to 328,100 units, with a median of 314,000. That median is an 8.2% decrease from the 342,200 units shipped in 2025. RVIA President and CEO Craig Kirby attributed it to higher financing costs, uncertainty and inflationary pressure on household budgets causing consumers to delay discretionary purchases, while arguing that the long-term fundamentals of RV ownership remain intact.
Used values are up. National Powersport Auctions reported average RV and camper values running 11% higher than a year ago, with sustained retail demand and continued appetite for quality used inventory keeping values elevated. That is NPA describing its own wholesale auction lanes rather than an independent retail index, and it is worth reading as such, but the direction is unambiguous.
Financing is scaling hard. Octane closed a $337 million asset-backed securitization of RV and marine loans, the largest in its history for that asset class, pushing cumulative ABS issuance past $5 billion against more than $9 billion in all-time originations. The senior tranches drew AAA ratings from S&P. Mizuho structured it, with J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo alongside. The company reported RV originations up 146% year over year.
Those three facts are all true simultaneously, and the reconciliation is the most useful thing in this article.
The market is not strong or weak. It is splitting. The new-unit transaction is contracting. Everything attached to the unit / the used unit, the loan, the parts, the labor, the years of ownership after the sale / is doing fine or better than fine.
A caution about that 146%
Before anyone builds a plan on it: 146% growth in one lender's originations is not 146% growth in the market. It is market growth plus share capture, and at a fintech scaling a proprietary underwriting platform into a niche asset class, the share capture is almost certainly the larger share of it.
What the Octane number genuinely tells you is something better than a demand signal anyway. It tells you that institutional capital has decided RV paper is a real asset class. AAA ratings on the senior tranches, Mizuho structuring, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo participating, $5 billion of cumulative issuance and an ABS Issuer of the Year designation are the machinery of a market that has been normalized. That matters more than any single quarter of originations, because it means the capital to finance these units is no longer dependent on a handful of specialist lenders having a good year.
Which is worth sitting with next to Kirby's explanation for the shipment cut. Higher financing costs are suppressing new-unit demand at exactly the moment the financing infrastructure is getting deeper and cheaper to access. Those two things resolve, over a few years, in favor of volume returning. They do not resolve in time to fix anybody's 2026.
The forecast moved twelve points in ten months
Here is the detail from the RoadSigns story that deserves more attention than the headline.
RVIA's first 2026 projection, issued in September 2025, called for a 3.6% increase. The Summer 2026 revision calls for an 8.2% decrease. That is a swing of nearly twelve percentage points in under a year, from the same forecaster, using the same methodology, about the same twelve months.
This is not a criticism of ITR, who are working with genuinely volatile inputs and publish a range rather than a point for exactly this reason. It is a criticism of how the number gets used. An annual industry forecast is a weather report, not a calendar. Any business that set its 2026 staffing, floor plan and inventory commitments off the September projection has spent this year adjusting, and the adjustment cost more than the plan saved.
The operating lesson generalizes past RVs: when your planning input can move twelve points in ten months, the correct response is not a better forecast. It is a plan that does not require one. Build to a range, tie commitments to trailing actuals rather than projections, and put the decision points on the calendar rather than the outcomes.
Used is where the margin went
With new units down and used values up 11%, the arithmetic points one direction, and NPA is fairly explicit about the timing.
As the market moves out of the peak summer selling season, wholesale prices begin their normal seasonal adjustment downward through the fall. NPA's framing is that this is the acquisition window: buy quality pre-owned inventory at more favorable wholesale prices and position it for the next selling cycle. They ran more than 700 pre-owned RVs, campers, fifth wheels and towables through their August lineup across fifteen sales.
Take that as a vendor telling you to attend its auctions, which it is, and the underlying point still holds. When new-unit volume contracts, a dealership stops being a distribution business and becomes a sourcing business. Those require completely different skills. Distribution rewards process discipline and turn. Sourcing rewards judgment, reconditioning capability, and a realistic view of what a unit will actually cost to make ready.
That last one is where the two halves of this article meet. If used inventory is the margin opportunity and your service department is the constraint, then your acquisition strategy is capped by your reconditioning throughput, and buying more units than you can make ready converts a margin opportunity into aged inventory and floor plan interest.
The constraint is the system, not the headcount
Which brings us back to five days or forty-five.
Industry-wide, RV service waits are widely reported as approaching six weeks, and the default explanation is the technician shortage. The shortage is real. The RV Technical Institute exists specifically because of it. But Rider's argument is that the shortage is not the binding constraint, and her evidence is that she does the same category of work, in a less capable environment, without a building, in a fraction of the time.
Her diagnosis is worth reproducing because it is unusually specific for a trade column.
Warranty routing. When a component is still under its manufacturer's warranty, letting the service writer get a case number and approval directly from the component manufacturer takes about two days. Requiring the claim to route through the OEM instead adds five to seven days of back-and-forth email, and gets worse when the OEM team does not understand how the component works inside an RV.
Team knowledge, not just technician knowledge. When a service writer does not know the difference between 12V and 120V, they do not know what to look for on a warranty form. A misdiagnosis then travels to the OEM, then to the component manufacturer, and comes back rejected because the voltage reading was inaccurate under warranty guidelines. That is a week gone, and no technician was the cause of it.
Documentation. Wiring diagrams, access instructions, torque specs, component location, troubleshooting guidance. Where documentation does not exist, diagnosis time balloons, because technicians spend the hours searching rather than solving. Her line about calling an OEM for this material and being laughed at is the kind of detail that does not appear in a market report.
Her summary is the sentence to take into a Monday meeting: hiring more technicians without fixing the system is "like widening one lane of a highway while the on-ramp stays blocked."
Every one of those failures is a handoff. None of them happen in the bay. The technician, the person everyone agrees is scarce, is not the scarce resource in that description / the scarce resource is an approval, a document, or a correctly filled form. That is a process problem, and process problems are the cheapest expensive thing to fix, because the fix is usually a decision rather than a hire.
One caveat, stated plainly: the five-versus-forty-five figure is Rider's own account of her own business, compared against dealerships she has talked to. It is a practitioner's claim rather than a study. It is also the only number in this article that anyone can go test in their own shop this month.
If you own one, or live in one
Three things follow for the people on the other side of the counter.
Your rig is worth more than you think. If used values are running 11% above last year, the number in your head is probably stale, and it matters for insurance coverage, for trade equity, and for whether selling privately is worth the effort.
A six-week wait is a planning input, not an emergency. Book service against the shoulder seasons rather than the week before a trip. Ask, at booking, whether the work involves a component under its own manufacturer's warranty, and whether the shop can approach that manufacturer directly. Ask what the shop needs from you to avoid a second diagnostic visit. And know that mobile RV repair is a genuine alternative for a meaningful share of warranty and repair work, not a last resort.
Keep your own documentation. Model and serial numbers for the appliances and components, not just the coach. Photographs of the installation before anything gets covered. Every prior repair order. When the industry's own documentation is the constraint, the owner who arrives with the component's part number has just removed days from their own repair.
The last observation is about the customer rather than the vehicle. The Tumbler Ridge Outdoor Recreation Association, a volunteer group in northern British Columbia, is running its first Show and Shine at a fall fair this September, at ten dollars an entry, and expects turnout from its snowmobile club and its ATV club. That is not an RV story and it is not a market indicator. It is a reminder that this customer does not experience themselves as a vehicle owner. They experience themselves as a member of something, and they organize into clubs, forums, rallies and local events at a rate almost no other category of buyer does. A dealership that shows up at those with a technician and a tent will out-perform one that shows up in a feed with a payment offer.
The playbook
DMAIC at the strategic layer, disciplined delivery underneath. Six moves, in the order we would run them.
Sellers: stop planning off the shipment forecast. It moved twelve points in ten months. Plan to the published range rather than the median, tie inventory and staffing commitments to trailing actuals, and schedule the decision points instead of forecasting the outcomes. A plan that only works if the forecast is right is not a plan.
Re-weight toward the installed base. If new-unit volume is contracting and everything attached to the unit is not, then the customer who already owns one is the growth segment. Every unit you have ever delivered is an annuity that most dealerships bill as an interruption. Count how much of your marketing spend is aimed at people who already bought from you. It is almost certainly a rounding error.
Service: measure repair event cycle time in the customer's unit. Not touch time, not billed hours, not bay utilization. Days from drop-off to keys back, measured the way the owner experiences it. Those other metrics can all look healthy inside a forty-five day cycle, which is precisely why the problem has survived three years of being discussed.
Find your on-ramp. Take your last twenty warranty jobs and mark, for each one, where the calendar days actually went. Rider's list is where to look first: OEM-versus-component-manufacturer routing, a form filled out wrong by someone who is not a technician, and a missing wiring diagram. If the days are not in the bay, hiring for the bay buys you nothing.
Cap acquisition at reconditioning throughput. Used is the margin opportunity and the fall wholesale softening is the window, both true. But units you cannot make ready are not inventory, they are floor plan interest with a roof. Know your make-ready capacity in units per week before you bid, and buy to that number.
Make the wait legible. People tolerate a long wait far better than an unknown one. A promised date, a status they can check without calling, and one honest update when it slips will save more repeat business than shaving a week off the cycle. This costs nearly nothing and almost nobody does it, which is the reliable signature of an opportunity.
Our position
The RV industry spent 2021 through 2024 learning that it could sell anything it could build, and it is now relearning something the automobile business figured out decades ago: the unit is the beginning of the relationship, not the transaction that defines it.
A forecast calling for 314,000 wholesale units is not a crisis. It is a number roughly in line with a normal year in a cyclical business that had an abnormal decade. What makes it feel like a crisis is that a lot of capacity, staffing and expectation got built for 342,200 and up.
Meanwhile used values are up, the financing is being institutionalized by people who put AAA on the senior tranches, and there are millions of RVs already out there that will all need service from somebody. The demand did not leave. It moved down the value chain, out of the sale and into the years afterward, which is the part of the business almost nobody has instrumented.
The most valuable sentence published about this industry this month came from a woman running a mobile repair company, and it was a question about why her competitors take nine times longer than she does to do the same job. Nobody in the room had an answer. That is not a bad sign. That is an opportunity sitting in plain sight with a number attached to it, which is the rarest thing in business.
Five days or forty-five. Go find out which one you are, honestly, and then go find out where the other forty days went.
Sources: RV Industry Association's Summer 2026 RV RoadSigns forecast, prepared by ITR Economics, via RV Pro; Jessica Rider of Pull Through Sites Mobile RV, writing in RVBusiness; National Powersport Auctions via RV Pro; Octane via FF News; and Energeticcity.ca. The 8.2% figure is a forecast, not an actual. The 11% used-value increase is NPA's own figure describing its own auction lanes. The five-versus-forty-five comparison is Rider's account of her own business, and she owns a mobile repair company, which is both why it is credible and a commercial interest worth naming.