I kinda want to hear about the Prevost saga
I now have a second one, and both stories should make the folks who follow this thread laugh and/or shake their heads. I'll start with the first Prevost we almost bought. These stories read like a lot of airplane sales.
I follow several Prevost groups on Facebook. I have for some time, although I unfollowed them for a bit after buying our first RV three years ago. However in recent months I've re-followed the groups because our interest in a Prevost has been reignited and I've wanted to follow patterns, as my expectation is the market is going to drop (and is starting to), much like airplanes.
One group member posted her and her husband's bus for sale, on paper it looked about perfect for us. 45', Detroit Series 60 (no interest in the older 2-strokes), indoor stored, really liked the paint job. They'd sent it out for an interior remodel and after 2 years the shop had managed to get the interior gutted and done some start on the remodel, but it was nowhere near completed. It was at the shop and they needed to get it out of there, but the shop was a ways away and they just wanted it gone. For us, that's all pretty ideal. What they'd done we liked, and having the ability to easily change things to our liking is right up our alley. I message the woman, ask her some questions, things sound good overall. One of the questions I asked was how many miles on the bus, which she responded "It probably has a million miles" but followed that and some other questions such as generator hours with "My husband is the technical one, I'll give you his number and you can call him." Ok, fair enough. The paint and exterior made it look like there was no way it was a million mile bus. I figured she was just making a number up.
Talk to the husband and he didn't answer my question on generator hours, but also they hadn't seen the thing in quite a while as it was at this shop so fair enough. We talk and arrange things enough that we had an agreed upon price, I had a check, and we were going to meet to get the bus and complete the deal. Mileage as he claimed was around 200k when they bought it, and around 280k now. Ok, higher than I'd like, but the price was right and it's a Prevost, I can accept that.
Then he sends me a picture of the title, which shows mileage when they bought it (in 2006) of 625,000 miles. So, I pull the CarFax (yes, CarFax exists on busses, or at least can). It also showed the reported mileage of 625k. But it also showed almost exactly a year prior a mileage of 536k. So then some more digging, and the original owner of the bus was right outside of Nashville. This was originally an entertainer coach. Yeah, all of those miles add up. As a chartered entertainer coach, 70-80k miles a year makes complete sense. Those busses will tend to just run miles and miles every day as the performers get to their different gigs, and they don't get paid to sit around.
I confronted the sellers on the 625k mile number (not having told them I ran the CarFax) and they said that they lied on the title application because they were trying to save on taxes, and to make that story play out they had to put a fake mileage number in. Note, the wife and husband were both on speakerphone in the car, and the wife (who'd told me originally it was probably a million mile bus) claimed a very clear memory of their falsification of numbers on the title to get the lower tax rate. They'd bought it out of Tennessee and then supposedly leased it to a preacher for the first year (must have been a traveling preacher of some sort to need a tour bus). So then I pointed out CarFax showed that it had about 90k miles in the previous year. They stumbled on that one and then settled on the explanation that the preacher must've lied on the title too.
A little more digging into her previous Facebook posts showed that they had been leasing it out as well under their ownership, at least some of the time, and including right before they'd taken it in to have the interior redone - because the previous lessees had trashed the thing.
Putting the numbers together, a few things became obvious:
1) They were lying about the mileage somewhere to someone
2) I was one of the people they were lying to
3) The actual mileage number was probably much higher than anything that I had been told, be it via messages on Facebook, the title, or conversations on the phone
4) I therefore had a very hard time being able to trust anything else they said
My guess is that the bus actually had well over a million miles on it. I passed, and simply told them that the mileage on the title that I would have to carry forward would make sale very difficult for me in the future, and so we weren't going to be able to move forward. I talked with a couple of other Prevost owners who had million+ mile coaches, and they seemed to confirm my suspicions (which are fairly obvious and to be suspected). The busses may be advertised as 3M mile design life, and Charlie Daniels may have put 2M miles on his before he died, but once you hit that million mile mark you'll be nickel and dimed to death with little issues popping up. Sure, that's somewhat the nature of RV ownership, but I don't see a reason to go into something like that, and their price was also significantly too high given that mileage and history.
From what I can tell they ended up retrieving the bus and taking it back to their home and nobody else bought it, probably having similar issues to us (or just not actually able to buy/only tire kicking). It hasn't been listed/re-listed as being for sale. So, no idea if they're going to try to complete the interior the way they wanted it, or wait a while and then re-list it.
Then fast forward to this week. While driving home from 6Y9 Laurie was looking at Prevosts and we found another one that looked interesting. This one was complete and driving. The seller had just lowered the price fairly significantly, and while it was on the low end of finished Prevosts within that year (and had low total miles) it was also an appropriate price for this one in our opinion as the interior had some poor "customizations" and it was clearly not the top of the line. Talked to the fellow, overall liked what he had, but he'd owned it for 5 years and had it uncovered outdoors in that timeframe. Thought on it some and called to say that we liked it, understood he was firm on price, but weren't interested in that price because of the outdoor storage. Fellow said he was pretty sure it hadn't sold because the price was too low so he was going to raise it so people didn't think it was a piece of junk, because it wasn't. Also Prevosts don't leak!
Actually, yes, they do leak. The windows are known for leakage issues, and when they leak they'll leak inside the walls. If you look at the windows on this type of Prevost (picture is just a generic one on Google, not one I have been attempting to buy):
You can see how they curve up around the top. Basically, you've got similar kinds of potential water pooling as you find on a sunroof. Just like an airplane or pretty much anything else, indoor storage is better, and the older it gets, the more you don't want it to be stored outdoors.
But sure enough, he decided to raise the price back up to the initial value he had it at - where the thing hadn't sold for a month before he lowered the price in the first place. With the outdoor storage and some other issues, a realistic value is probably about half to 2/3 of what he's got it listed at right now. Someone else may feel differently.
Just like airplanes. "Don't have to sell, I know what I got!"
Meanwhile, I'm hoping to put the different tires on my existing bus next week, and I'm also thinking that my Bilstein shocks with around 40k miles on them need replaced. That was one of the first bits of work I did on this thing after purchase. I went with the Bilstein option because they were supposedly a softer ride than the Konis, and significantly cheaper. At that time, softening the ride was my primary concern as I hadn't completed a good number of my other improvements yet. Now ride is still a concern, but I feel like handling (specifically highway speed handling) feels worse than when the shocks were new. While buying a bus and selling this one is probably in the cards, we still have trips we'll do with this one, so I'll continue to make improvements that will benefit us on those trips.