RV shipment numbers in September were higher than the same month a year before, breaking a 13-month streak of negative reports.
This story by Rasmus Jorgensen originally appeared in The Elkhart Truth.
Total shipments for September reached 31,639, beating September 2018 by 670 units, according to numbers released by the RV Industry Association.
Shipments for the year remain lower than in 2018 by 18.2 percent.
The positive September results come after some industry leaders and experts have projected improvements in the fall.
Keystone RV president and CEO Jeff Runels at an event August predicted “a better fall than we’ve actually seen over the last couple of years.”
That same month, RV industry analyst Richard Curtin, who is the director of surveys of consumers at the University of Michigan, projected shipments for the remainder of 2019 would be closer to those of the year before. After looking at the September results, he was optimistic, but perhaps not as much as Runels.
“If you’re thinking it means that we’re now going to have cumulative gains in RV shipments throughout the balance of this year and next year, I don’t think that’s probably true,” Curtin said on Monday.
The reason for the apparent uptick is a good economy, he said.
“Interest rates got pushed even lower, wage gains are even higher and the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low,” he said. “This is the longest (economic) expansion we’ve ever recorded, and that dates back to the mid-1800s.”
Curtin projects that the most likely total result for 2019 to be 401,200 shipped units, down 17.1 percent from 2018. Next year should be slightly down as well, but the dropoff will be lower than this year.