The headline number looks almost boring. America’s biggest RV retailer finished the second quarter with 200 locations — 199 dealerships plus one service and retail center — against 201 a year earlier, per its filing with the SEC. One store. That’s the whole net footprint change.
Except it isn’t, and the interesting part is buried three tables down.
Follow the impairment charge, not the store count
Camping World booked $13.1 million in long-lived asset impairment in the second quarter. The comparable figure a year earlier was zero. Over the first half of 2025 it was $620,000. When a retailer writes down leasehold improvements, buildings, and fixtures on that scale, it isn’t reshuffling — it’s deciding certain rooftops will never earn back what’s sunk into them.
The real estate flows tell the same story faster than any press release. In the first half of 2026 the company spent $1.4 million buying real property and collected $67.6 million selling it. A year earlier those numbers were $72.4 million out and $9.8 million in. Acquisitions of businesses fell from $81.2 million to $7.1 million. The company that spent the post-2021 years buying dirt is now a net seller of dirt.
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Net store count stayed flat because they opened as they closed. That’s consolidation, not retreat — and for an owner, a consolidated store is functionally identical to a closed one if it was your store.
The margin math is ugly in a specific, instructive way
New RV unit sales fell 16.4% to 22,312. That part everybody expected. Here’s the part that should worry anyone shopping a 2026 coach:
Average selling price on a new unit rose 13.6% to $38,950. Average cost per new unit rose 17.4%. New vehicle gross margin collapsed 286 basis points to 10.9%.
Read that again. Sticker prices went up double digits, and the dealer still made less on every unit. That gap is the sound of manufacturer cost increases — components, tariffed imported content, chassis pricing — arriving faster than retail can pass them through in a soft market. The buyer is paying more. The dealer is earning less. Somebody upstream is capturing the difference.
Used told the inverse story and it’s arguably worse. Used units rose 5.2%, but average selling price dropped 3.6% and gross profit per used unit fell 22.3%, from $6,190 to $4,810. That’s a company clearing aged trade-ins at whatever the market will bear. CEO Matthew Wagner’s assessment of the quarter was blunt: “We are not satisfied with the result.”
Finance and insurance is quietly carrying the company
Finance and insurance revenue is recorded at 100% gross margin — Camping World books the commission, a third party carries the paper and the risk. F&I gross profit per unit rose 8.3% to $4,780 in the quarter.
Compare that to $4,261 of gross profit on the average new RV. The dealership now makes more money arranging your loan and selling you a protection plan than it makes selling you the actual vehicle. That is not a Camping World quirk; it’s the structural reality of modern vehicle retail, and it’s why the F&I office is the longest part of your purchase day.
Practical consequence: the deepest discount you’ll ever be offered on the unit itself is bait for the room you walk into afterward. Price the RV and price the money separately. Get a credit union pre-approval before you set foot on the lot, and treat the service contract as a standalone purchase you can decline and buy later.
Floor plan explains the aging-inventory fire sale
Dealers don’t own their new inventory outright. They borrow against it under a floor plan facility — Camping World’s is a $2.15 billion syndicated line, and the applicable rate at quarter-end was 5.89%. Interest accrues on every unsold unit, every day it sits.
At roughly 6% on a $45,000 travel trailer, that’s about $225 a month in pure carrying cost before anyone waxes it. Multiply by a lot full of prior-model-year stock and you understand why a dealer will take a beating on a two-year-old unit rather than keep it. Camping World paid down $245.2 million of floor plan borrowings in the first half and cut total inventory $200.8 million year over year.
For a buyer, that’s the actionable insight of this entire earnings report: leverage lives in the build date, not the model year badge. Ask for the unit’s inventory age and the manufacture date on the federal certification label. Anything approaching two model years old on a shrinking lot is a negotiation you’re going to win.
The service bays went up while the stores went down
Buried in the same table: service bays rose 33 to 2,842, even as the location count fell. That’s deliberate. Service and collision work is margin the manufacturer can’t compress, and it’s the revenue that keeps flowing when nobody’s buying.
It also matters mechanically. RV service capacity has been the industry’s chronic bottleneck for a decade — a slide-out mechanism repair or a delamination fix can sit for months. If your local store consolidates into a regional one, your warranty work doesn’t disappear, it just moves further away and into a longer queue.
Two things owners should do regardless of what happens to their dealer:
Know who actually holds your paper. Extended service contracts and roadside coverage are administered by third parties and remain enforceable if a selling location closes. Find the administrator’s name on your contract now, not when the slide-out fails in Utah.
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Register with both manufacturers. A motorhome has two recall lineages — the chassis (Ford, Mercedes, Freightliner) and the coach builder. Recall notices go to the last known registered owner, and a closed dealership isn’t going to chase you down. Run your VIN yourself at NHTSA’s recall lookup once or twice a year.
The cycle context nobody quotes
The RV Industry Association’s summer forecast put 2026 wholesale shipments at a median of 314,000 units, an 8.2% decline from 342,200 in 2025 — and a downward revision from its own spring number. That sounds catastrophic until you check the long arc: RVIA counts a historic peak of 600,200 units in 2021 and a 2009 trough of 165,700.
So the current market is roughly half the 2021 mania and nearly double the financial-crisis floor. What broke wasn’t demand — it was a dealer network built to sell 600,000 units a year.
Camping World cut full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance from $275–325 million to $230–270 million, identified another $100 million in structural cost savings, and reported net debt of $1.31 billion at a 6.3x leverage ratio. Trailing-twelve-month net loss: $121.4 million. Marcus Lemonis stepped down as chairman and CEO at the end of 2025.
Bottom line for buyers: this is a legitimately good moment to buy a used RV and a mediocre one to buy new, because new pricing is being propped up by cost inflation rather than demand. For owners: service is getting more centralized, not less, so build a relationship with an independent RV tech now — the good ones book out further every year this cycle continues.
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