RV sales seen as a return to ‘old values’

MOSES LAKE — Even with many things closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans still want to go on vacation.

“Nobody’s going to Disneyland right now,” said Joe O’Masters. “So everybody and their brother are buying RVs, all across the nation.”

O’Masters, a retired U.S. Navy petty officer better known as “Sasquatch” — he wears size 16 shoes — was in Moses Lake last week to help Spokane-based ClickIt RV open up its Moses Lake location. And all indications are ClickIt RV, located at 12976 N. Frontage Road right next to M-1 Tanks Inc., is selling them faster than it can get them in.

“Every dealership that I know of has, this whole industry has just gone crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it. Inventories are depleted, manufacturers are not prepared, because they shut down for two months in response to COVID,” said Clint Mock, general sales manager for ClickIt in Moses Lake.

He said the company had around 60 units on site — mostly bigger trailers, fifth-wheel or even motorized coach RVs — but he’s sold 35 since they informally opened in July.

He’s tried getting smaller trailers, such as teardrops, but Mock said smaller trailers move fast and manufacturers are simply unable to keep up with demand.

“People just kept coming and coming, ‘we want to buy, we want to buy,’” Mock said. “What I think people are doing is saying we’re restricted in what we can do, but we’re going to go out with our families and still do things, and that’s what happened.”

According to data from the RV Industry Association, RV sales hit a peak of 504,000 units valued at $20 billion in 2017. While sales showed strong growth in June — the last month the association has data for — overall sales for 2020 are still 19 percent lower when compared with this point in 2019.

Mock, who described himself as working as an RV dealer “for a long time,” said the company held a 10-day temporary sale in Moses Lake in early March to test the market and see if there was enough demand to merit opening a location here.

“After about four days of it, we realized that this market is huge,” Mock said. “We had so many people, and they kept saying to us ‘you guys need to be here full time.’”

O’Masters says he likes to let customers look at vehicles and decide what features are most important to them before he begins to talk about specifics. Because it’s the rare customer who finds exactly everything he or she wants in the same unit.

“That one’s got the kitchen that I like, that one’s got the bedroom that I like, that one’s got the bathroom that I like,” he said. “I can’t mix and match them, and you’re never going to find one that has everything that you want. So you find the one that’s the closest.”

Everyone is looking for something a little different, Mock said. Young families tend to look for smaller trailers, while older folks like motorized RVs and the folks buying fifth wheels tend to look for luxury, he explained.

Along with the smaller units and several toy haulers, ClickIt also has several huge “destination RVs,” 40-foot-long behemoths with washer/dryer combos and one with a small sleeping loft above the main bedroom. O’Masters said people buy these as “bunkhouses,” or farmers even use them to house farmworkers.

But the folks at ClickIt on Saturday were primarily young families looking for a way to spend recreation time together.

“We’ve been looking since about last year, because we hunt, and we want to be able to take it hunting, and the girls camping,” said Rebecca Byers, a mother of two. “We have a few places that we go that have vacancies in their RV sections but not in their cabins.”

“I just got my hunter’s license this year and I’m so excited to go hunting,” added Byers’ 9-year-old daughter Caleigh.

O’Masters thinks the increased sales in RVs is a return “to old values,” the way more Americans took vacations in the 1950s and 1960s.

“People are taking these and taking their kids out into the woods just to have fun. And I love it,” he said.

“We’re selling fun,” O’Masters added.