Should I Buy Or Rent A Motorhome?

Are you wondering whether you should buy or rent a motorhome? Unsure which is better value, especially when trying to weigh up the short term against a longer period?

Sadly we can’t give you a definitive answer – you’d be unwise to make big financial decisions off the back of just one website page. However, we can give you some excellent advice and look at the pros and cons of both.

Oh, a quick disclaimer. Our business is selling motorhomes, new and used, and so you might expect us to push you to buy a vehicle. Please worry not – we don’t want anyone to buy a motorhome unless they are sure it is the right thing to do, we don’t want anyone to leave us with any regrets over their purchase.

For many people the right decision will be to rent a motorhome. Let’s make a start explaining why.

Are you a first timer?

If you are brand new to motorhoming it makes sense to consider renting a vehicle to try it out and see just how much you love the experience.

You’ll definitely enjoy it, but you’ll need to see whether you enjoy it as a one-off, or something to do occasionally or something you instantly get the bug for.

Some people do buy a motorhome having never first experienced a motorhome holiday, it might be that they have a good idea what it entails from similar type holidays – perhaps caravaning or even camping (which gives you similar freedom, if none of the luxury!)

While having a tester holiday makes sense, after that the balance quickly switches in favour of buying – well, that is if you intend having plenty more motorhome holidays.

Losing Money

When you rent a motorhome you are spending money that is paying for a great holiday. It is not a waste of money as it is money that is buying wonderful experiences, a good holiday is never a waste of money.

What it might not be is the best use of money. If you buy a motorhome you have an asset, one that will still retain a significant portion of its purchase price when you come to sell (we’ll look at depreciation later but here’s a spoiler – it’s nowhere near as severe as the depreciation on your car).

Renting a motorhome during the summer months will cost at east £1,000 per week for a family-sized vehicle, obviously a fortnight is double – and you need a fortnight for a great trip round the continent. If you also wanted breaks at other times of year; weekends away, city breaks, that would increase the expense further.

If you wanted a few short breaks during the year, you probably wouldn’t continually rent a motorhome you would though have to spend money on transport, hotels and meals out. If you owned a motorhome you could instead use this every time, saving thousands of pounds every year.

Instead of spending a sizeable four-figure sum on holidays and trips away every year, the motorhome owner could use their vehicle and save the majority of the money. This could equate to a few thousand pounds per year – multiply this by the time you keep the motorhome for and factor in the resale value and you may well end up many thousands of pounds better off than you otherwise would have been.

Extra Holidays

Owning a motorhome only makes sense if you’re going to use it – and that’s use it for trips away as well as the main summer holiday.

One of the huge advantages of owning a motorhome, it’s almost our favourite thing, is that you can have spontaneous extra hols. Weekend coming up and at a loss what to do? You could just drive somewhere in the UK, stay at a great site and have a cheap, amazing couple of nights away. That same trip away but staying in a hotel booked at late notice would cost hundreds…

When you own a motorhome you are only a short walk to the drive away from the start of a holiday.

Depreciation – or lack thereof

Anyone who has ever bought a car will know just how quickly they depreciate – especially if you buy new.

Motorhomes simply don’t have the same level of depreciation, in fact if you buy a quality used motorhome you may find that it’s value has dropped very little over the space of a few years. If you buy a motorhome with 20,000 miles on the clock, even if you use it for several trips and a holiday or two every year, the mileage will not increase to levels that greatly affect the value.

Motorhomes have superb engines that can comfortably run to six-figure distances, yet it takes years, decades even for them to get close to this figure (after all, few sales reps use them to hammer up the motorway on a daily basis).

A search online will show you how vehicles hold their value well – or please get in touch if you’d like some examples.

Sweat your asset

If you’ll excuse a horrible expression…

Did you know that you can rent your motorhome out and that there are even sites that take care of it all for you – they match you to someone wanting to rent a vehicle to fit in with when it would just be parked outside your house.

This allows you to potentially receive a four-figure sum each year just by letting someone else use your vehicle for a few weeks.

We have written a post on this very subject, but as you’re still weighing up whether to buy or tent that might be one for another day.Just store the information at the back of your mind.

Overall

There are good reasons for both – renting and buying – especially if you are weighing up whether motorhome holidays are for you.

If you are not sure how much you’d use a motorhome then renting is a sensible option, however if you plan taking several motorhome trips over the years to come and could see yourself adding even more (those wonderful extra holidays) then it has to be worth your time at least seeing what you can get for your money.

About Emm-Bee Motorhome Dealers

Emm-Bee is a leading UK family-run motorhome dealership based in Bury, Greater Manchester.

As well as stocking the latest models from leading makes such as Burstner, Chausson, Bailey, Hymer and Laika, we also have an unrivalled stock of used motorhomes for sale.

We pride ourselves on customer satisfaction and offering unmatched levels of service – we have been in business for 25 years and have flourished on word-of-mouth recommendations.

Please have a look round the site to check our range of used motorhomes and do get in touch with any queries, or just to pick our brains.