We were hanging around Lazy Days all week while the coach was getting an ailing transfer switch replaced and some odds and ends taken care of. Quite a few of the management and staff know of our involvement in the RV Forum and most are willing to talk quite freely about the situation in the RV sales business and LD.
As I reported previously, the service area is swamped with work, as is typical for this time of year (returning snowbirds, etc). Techs and service advisers had been laid off during the summer, fewer people are trying to cope with the work, making things slower than usual. Some techs are being hired back and another service adviser came onboard a couple weeks ago.
Sales are slow but slightly improved, again the result of the winter season in Florida. Nowhere near like typical years, but enough to justify a few more sales staff as well. High end coaches still sell - we had lunch with a guy looking to swap his 07 Beaver Marquis for an 09American Heritage and cocktails with a couple looking to see what the newest Tiffin coaches will have as upgrades to see if they want to trade their early 08 Allegro Bus. Most people, though, are repairing their current rig and taking a wait and see attitude.
Loans are much harder to get if your Beacon (FICO) credit score is under around 700 (out of 850) and it is no longer possible to get 130-150% of the book value of a coach, as it was just last year. As your score goes down, the amount that can be borrowed drops quickly and with a Beacon score in the 500's you can forget about any loan at all. 550 isn't terribly bad credit, but no lender is gambling in the current economy. Bottom line is that easy credit is gone.
On pricing I was told that deals are much tighter than in the past. Last year they could afford to make an extra steep discount to win a sale, maybe netting just a few hundred dollars on a deal after commissions and sales overhead, because the volume was high and a sale often generated more sales in the future (word of mouth advertising or upgrades). With the much lower volume, every sale has to generate some profit in order to keep the doors open. The bottom line is that the initial offers may be better than in the past, but the bottom line after negotiation may actually be higher than the strongest negotiator could have gotten in the past. Salesmen don't bother to bring no-profit deals to their managers cause they are not going to fly. So it is easier to get 25% or so off the MSRP, but harder to get more. Lazy Days is actually advertising up to 33% off on some models, though.