can I offer some work I did on pricing older trailers...

[JimFromCanmore]

Hey Escapers! I just posted a listing for an older 17 ft, and before I did that, I used some of my work experience to see if I could estimate a price for the unit. I looked over a number of listings and recorded the asking price and age and the options that the units had. I ended up creating an Excel file (Dropbox), and saw that the adjusted listings made a really nice line on the chart below! It helped me price our unit, because I had no clue otherwise. (...if you know trailers, and know how to price them without all of this fooling around, I am impressed!)

I decided to post this work on the Forum, in case others are scratching their heads about pricing. You need to know Excel to make sense of the spreadsheet (or find a friend that does), but if you do know Excel it is pretty simple and you will be able to adapt it for your model or year.
I put this description of how the Excel works in our sales document, so you can refer to this and the marked columns in the spreadsheet to understand it. I didn't show all the columns in our document.
Hope this is useful to the community!

Column B Model Sub shows which trailers are Model A (without bathroom which is $1,700US less than the reference model), or are Model B. This is reflected in Column E USD 2025 Model Adj.
Column C Options shows other options in the trailer, and Column D USD 2025 Options shows what those options would cost on a 2025 model
I used the following adjustments (USD) for units with options, from the new 2025 trailer build page on Escape’s website:

• dual 6 volt batteries +280
• removable power cord +170
• manual awning +280
• LED lights (4) +165
• drop leaf counter +90
• winterized +1,500
• air conditioning +1,500
• solar panels +1,100
• lithium battery (1) +1,500

Column F USD Year Adj represents the value today of the difference in options and bathroom choice, compared to the reference model trailer. Column F adds Columns D & E together, and discounts the total for the age of the trailer. We used a 5% discount for each year earlier than 2025, using the standard formula Column F = (Column D + E)/((1+5%)^(2025-Column A)). The 5% discount was estimated from the raw prices and matched the asking prices reasonably well.
Column G Adjusted Asking Price USD takes the web listing asking price (not shown in the table) - converted from CDN to USD at an exchange of 1.43 if needed - and adds the Column F adjustment.
It is the estimated price for a 17 foot Escape reference model of any given year.

 

[Mike G]

In Canadian dollars, I assume?

 

[Ron in BC]

Well that's impressive.

Ron

 

[JimFromCanmore]

In Canadian dollars, I assume?

Hi Mike: No, I converted every price to US$ as most listings are in US$

 

[iamunique127]

One thing I'll point out to anyone looking at your chart is all you can ever know is the Asking Price. In most cases Selling prices are not posted. I realize you did say Asking price in your original post.

I find your prices to be much lower than what I've seen here on the forum. OK, I just realized, maybe it's only 17Bs you have on the chart. that would explain the lower prices.

 

[huskersteffy]

Great work. Love the linear regression curve!

 

[Mike G]

One thing I'll point out to anyone looking at your chart is all you can ever know is the Asking Price. In most cases Selling prices are not posted. I realize you did say Asking price in your original post.

I find your prices to be much lower than what I've seen here on the forum. OK, I just realized, maybe it's only 17Bs you have on the chart. that would explain the lower prices.

Yeah, at first glance I thought, did I really overpay for my Escape? Then it hit me: I have a 19!

This sort of info could be useful for insurance comps (heaven forbid that we'd ever need that...), not just purchases.

 

[bicyclist]

Very nice. Now we need someone fluent in spreadsheets to generate graphs for the other trailers (19s, cuz that's what I have).

 

[SCD]

Nice work Jim:
A few statistical things to consider:
Did you correct prices for inflation on your database? Ie, are they referenced to a specific date or based on the date from the presentation of the sale. or are they corrected for average inflation of which country?
Did you do any analysis of the data? how did you fit your regression line?

What does the curve represent; median, mode, average? etc. What is the error factor, ie the standard deviation for each year?

It is great to present date but some times the data suggests more questions than answers.

Sorry science gets in the way some times. Just trying to understand

 

[SCD]

sorry for the silliness

 

[DT6]

I love regression analysis - did it for most of my career, and still mess around with it on occasion just for fun (yeah, nerd). Your analysis looks like you put a lot of effort into it. Can you post the underlying statistics (R^2, Standard Error, etc.)? Just curious.