I WENT TO PA TO BUY A PREVOST AND GOT BUS CATFISHED

what is going on everybody today i'm making a video that i was hoping was going to be made a completely different way a gentleman reached out to me a few weeks ago he saw that i was looking for a pre-owned prevost that would be a little bit less expensive and called me and let me know about a prevost that he had bought new in 1987 and told me about how great of a coach it was how he was the only one that maintained it he bought it new in 1987 and he was really worried about this coach going to the right home and wasn't concerned about price as much so i told him listen it's a lot of money for me to travel all of the way to pennsylvania to take a look at this bus but he was very confident that it was a clean deal and i'm rolling around in this tour bus and was already out on the east coast so i was like wow what's another four or five hundred miles i was in indiana already uh you know four or five hundred miles uh round trip times two a thousand miles five miles of the gallon was not a cheap proposition at all to travel to pennsylvania but i thought you know what let's go out there and uh and check it out so the gentleman was was very adamant that he wanted this bus to go to the right home and he'd watch my youtube channel and i'm like hey man if you make me the right deal i'd love to love to do that now i've talked about it in previous videos how important it is to inspect a coach you can have two coaches the same year same amount of miles and they can be completely different the analogy i like to use is there could be two brand new minivans sold today one minivan may be used for maybe like a traveling sales person that talks on their bluetooth goes highway miles all day every day maybe has a cup of coffee in the cup holder and then there could be a minivan sold today that is just going to be totally just children dogs it's going to have all kinds of people trampling through it it's not going to get maintained it's not going to be in a corporate account where they're very religious about maintenance so both of these vehicles can travel the same amount of miles but the values of these two vehicles can be completely different so it's so important when buying an rv to go lay eyes on it touch it feel it inspect it i've actually helped a couple of my clients purchase some motorhomes if you're looking at a you know multi-million dollar motor home and your time is very valuable i am for hire rving with andrew steele.com you can consult the phone call it's a hundred dollars an hour to jump on a call and then from there i can get you on a retainer and do some traveling to go try to help you find the best bus but this was one that i was actually looking at for myself it was gonna be you know in a price range that i could probably pull off and i thought it'd be a really fun story the gentleman also told me about some other interesting stuff that he had going on that would be cool for me to make some youtube content out of i thought well worst case scenario i'm gonna go out there if the bus isn't as good as the gentleman saying at least i can maybe film some other stuff well i got out there ladies and gentlemen and unfortunately with this internet i think there's a lot of people out there just looking for a friend and i got out there and this gentleman started you know telling me his stories and he had some interesting stories but at the end of the day i'm young i'm not retired like this gentleman was and i've i've got to make a living you know my my sadie lady we got to put dog food in her bowl so i got out there to this gentleman's house and immediately i saw several cars in the driveway i would probably say this this gentleman was probably a hoarder there was probably 20 cars on the property and that was kind of the first red flag and the gentleman was like 87 or 88 years old so maybe he was trying to find a good home for some of this stuff so he showed me some of his stuff and it was it was a pretty lengthy process but i wanted to hear him out and i wanted to you know give him respect and hear his stories and understand where he was coming from and try to learn as much as possible well when i saw the bus and i found out and he had said it was all maintained you basically represented it that this bus was a total cream puff and i asked him how much he wanted for it he said 75 000 which was you know for a total cream puff that that may be you know fair for a 1987 that's not you know not a bad deal it's an 8v 92 still so definitely has its pluses and it's minuses but i thought hey if i can get into prevost for real cheap if it really was a legit cream puff for 75 grand that wouldn't be terrible well i walked into the bus and the bus had not moved in 10 years and now i was feeling pretty bad about myself but today i actually got a phone call from a couple of my buddies over at premier rv service so louis you guys flew all the way out to st louis to buy this coach and then what happened when you got there basically it was misrepresented by the owner um you know when you ask you all the questions before you make this trip and you get there and their idea of mint is a lot different than ours but yeah it had a had some fault codes coming up on the engine just like a lift pump failure and a couple low coolant um faults which typically leads us to think that the radiator might be aluminum which it was and we had to put three gallons of coolant in there so we were kind of thinking that's 2200 miles back to oregon and the coaches and what we thought it was going to be so we just decided to pass on it and uh fly home and how many coaches do you have an inventory right now you guys are pretty hungry for inventory so it would have been real easy to try to jam something in there huh it's it's funny to say that andrew we were just talking about that sometimes you just gotta walk away and not buy something even though that we're at record lows of inventory but now the the risk reward wasn't there in the sense of what could be wrong so driving 2200 miles and finding other issues and breaking down just we just decided to pass on it well that makes me feel a lot better i'm glad i'm not the only one that uh traveled across country to to inspect the condition and that's why it's so important to inspect condition of a coach you definitely made the right decision i mean when a coach sits for a long period of time you know you can build up a lot of things in the fuel systems as algae and other things like that when we arrived at this coach that was the first thought i thought i mean the thing had less than a quarter of a tank and it hasn't really moved in the last year so just think of all that time of all that fuel and everything all the moisture that you're going to be getting in these tanks oh yeah you would have you would have ran it for 30 miles down the road and then had all kinds of problems i just heard about a guy in new jersey that had that same thing happen so well we've had it happen to us from florida wow and how expensive how expensive can that get if there's algae in the fuel tank and you don't know it until you're driving down the road so yeah that just happened on a coach um and it they had to pull the whole tank on it he ended up spending like 22 thousand dollars wow it affected the lift pump and then injectors injectors were all clogged up so they had to do all that and then it was just one thing after another um so yeah coaches that sit you know everyone wants a low mileage coach and you hear that from everyone oh i don't want anything that has more than 50 000 miles i tell you what i'd rather have a coach that someone's used it and maintained it and did a lot of these uh preventative maintenances yeah i'm actually rolling around in a tour bus that has almost a million miles on it everybody thinks it's brand new and we just went to new jersey and they just went to st louis missouri to buy a coach and they ended up getting on an airplane flight back to oregon so this isn't the first time i've heard i've actually heard a lot of stories about you know buyers traveling across country inspecting a coach it's nothing like the seller represented over the phone and then you spend money on an airplane ticket so you waste your time on rental cars hotel rooms your time airplane tickets all of that stuff so i'm not the only one so i finally got to see this bus and honestly i didn't even take a single picture of it or video of it i was just so disappointed at that point i just wanted to get back to the bus and it just was not not a good situation so the bus had not moved in 10 years and i tell people whether these buses move or not they need to be maintained every year those tires have you know date codes on them that are getting older every piece of rubber every piece of fluid and what i've found is you'd much rather have a coach that's been used than a coach that sat because if the coach is being used good chances are the owner's going to get things repaired and they're going to have to maintain it and it's just much better i wouldn't be afraid of miles on a coach i'd rather have a higher mile coach that's been maintained than end up with a situation like this i walked into the bus and it was clapped out so i'm like thinking maybe you know the guy said it's not about price so you know maybe if this coach just needs a lot of maintenance and whatnot it's still a possibility but i was going to need him to come down like significantly on price and i got into the bathroom i opened the bathroom door and there was a toilet paper roll that had been completely eaten by rodents so it was scattered all over the floor you could see all the toilet paper like he hadn't even gone in there to even clean up the toilet paper and i told them buddy you've got rodents in here and he in his response was well the rodents ate the toilet paper they didn't eat the wires i will tell you the worst possible thing that can happen to a bus is rodents getting into it i remember talking to a dealership that said i asked him what's the worst worst bus you've ever had he said a bus that rodents got into it ate the wiring i'd rather have a bus with a fire than a bus with rodent damage a fire you can at least track the damage you just track the fire cut it all out rebuild it rodents they're just all over the bus all over this thing they could be you don't know where they're eating so you're basically chasing a tornado losing proposition at that point trying to chase rodent damage in a bus that has a whole value of 75 000 it's a losing proposition i told that gentleman unfortunately with rodent damage this bus is maybe it's just worth it's a parts bus at that point it hasn't been maintained rodents have eaten it up it is not worth restoring that shell especially for what he wanted out of it because you're gonna have to just basically rebuild it i mean you'd be better off to almost just you know just a lot cheaper ways to do it than to strip out this bus that's been damaged i just thought i'd take a moment today to share with you guys um the downside of trying to travel around the country and look at these buses and that's why it's so important to touch and feel these coaches and if that guy had any common sense he could have cleaned up that toilet paper and i wouldn't have seen that that's why it's so important to have a technician go and check every one of these systems you want them to turn on the systems let you know if they're functioning or not i would definitely not buy a used rv without getting inspected inspecting it yourself the more time you spend with the bus the more you're going to learn the more you can get the owner of the coach to talk the more you're going to learn as well so that's another thing just keep them talking let them they'll they'll tell you the truth there's a lot of truth there's definitely a lot of people that hide the truth out there but there's a lot of people if you get them talking enough they'll let you know exactly what's going on with that coach so i wish that i was making a video about i just bought a prevost in pennsylvania and got a great deal on it i mean the gentleman baited me i knew i knew i was getting baited when he says i just want the coach to find the right home i'm not worried about price i wish that was the case and unfortunately the right home for that bus is a junkyard so appreciate all of you liking these videos and subscribing to the channel i hope you're all having a better day than i am today but could be a lot worse i have a lot to be thankful for but it can get really expensive trying to buy these buses so make sure you do your homework and ask as many questions before you jump on that airplane so greatly appreciate all of you and i hope you're having a great day thanks again

Channel: RVing with Andrew Steele

Views: 145,718

Keywords: rv, rv buying, catfish, prevost, prevost for sale, rv buying tips, rv inspection, prevost royal coach

Id: gnf7SC3grEg

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020