We're already prepping for your trip.
Oh, no. I'm more than prepped. You kidding me?
Oh, wow.
I'll show you.
Look at that.
Wow.
There we go.
Yeah. I did a lot of research on it.
When we get to that point, you can just tell everyone how good your experience has been.
Yeah. Let's hope I never have to find out how good the service actually is.
That's true.
The people on the phone were great.
That's true.
All right. Good morning, everybody. 11:00 session. We have the management team of Camping World. My name's Jeff Lick. I'm the auto ecosystem and consumer analyst at Stephens. Just so you know, this is an open forum, so feel free to raise your hand, ask questions, jump in at any point. We've got a bunch of questions, but I want to make sure you guys get all your questions answered as well. We have Matt Wagner here, who is the COO, Tom Kim, CFO, and Brett Andress, head of IR and corporate strategy. I guess the first place to start, because a lot of people here know the auto dealers and we cover the auto dealers. We were just talking about this. One of the observations, I'd love for you to just kind of explain how you make money, how the business works.
Obviously, the RV dealership or your store is similar to an auto dealership. I think one of the interesting things about your business is kind of the balance of power between you're the distributor versus the OEM. You guys have a little, I think, a little more power than the average auto dealer, and you also have a little more flexibility to generate gross profit dollars on your own. Maybe that's a great way to start and talk about the business.
Yeah. Thank you very much for the setup, and thanks for having us. Good morning, everyone. Perhaps I even take a step back to make certain that everyone is familiar with the Camping World story and explain from a high level what we do, how we do it, why we do it. The simplest way to think of our company is that our operating company is comprised of two major consumer-facing brands: Camping World and Good Sam. Within the Camping World series of brands, we operate up to almost 200 RV dealerships across the country. Within those dealerships, to Jeff's point, they operate very similar to automotive dealerships. We have RV sales, finance, service, and parts, where we're a little bit different from autos.
We also offer retail parts and accessories, whereby it's more of a lifestyle product, where we'll also sell some coolers and chairs and bikes, etc., whatever's going to be conducive to that RV lifestyle. Within our RV dealership group, we command about 13.5% market share of all new and used RVs sold in North America. We believe that our next close competitor operates at less than 6% market share. Within the new side of the business, in particular, we sell about 25% of all new RVs in all of North America. The used side of the business, we only sell about 8.5%. When we think of the upside and opportunity that exists, yes, we have a disproportionate effect on what happens on the new side of the business, but we also know that there's tremendous upside still on the used side of the business.
Used RV sales are about twice that, the size of the new RV marketplace. We feel like we're well positioned on both sides to take advantage of the opportunities that exist in the future. Moving over to the Good Sam side of the business, the simplest way to think about Good Sam, as much as AAA operates within the automotive space, that's very similar to how Good Sam operates within the RV space. Within Good Sam, we offer roadside assistance, very similar to AAA. We offer finance and insurance products. We also have North America's largest consumer community network of about 1.6 million RV enthusiasts that pay us an annual fee to be part of our community. Those 1.6 million RV owners, not only do they pay us the annual fee, but many of them also participate in our roadside assistance.
Many of them have bought RVs from us. Good Sam represents the wrapper of our ecosystem. If you take a step back and look at our company, think of it very simply. We are trying to satisfy that retail consumer who is an RV enthusiast in every facet of their RV journey. We will offer the RV sale. We will attach our service. We will attach our finance, our parts, and accessories. Finally, Good Sam is that protective mechanism that locks that consumer into our channels and enables that consumer to participate in the lifestyle. When we think about Jeff's positioning of how we operate in RV compared to automotive and why it is a little bit different, within automotive, as you are all very familiar, there are very strict franchise laws that exist out there. Whereas in RVs, we have what is called sales and service agreements.
Yes, we'll be entitled to sell certain OEM brands within a local marketplace, and we won't compete with anyone else. Very similar to a franchise law. Where it's a little different, though, between automotive and RVs, automotive manufacturers have disproportionate control and influence over what the stocking levels are going to be of dealers. They maintain certain stocking levels and certain sales levels to rationalize that franchise agreement and the distance and proximity between competitors. It really doesn't exist the same way within RVs, whereby we have, given that we're about 25% of all new RVs being sold, a disproportionate impact on where we want to sell things and where we're able to step into marketplaces more universally. Never mind the fact that we also operate what we call contract manufacturing relationships.
Within the RV space, you have two major manufacturers between Thor and Forest River, Thor being publicly traded, Forest River being held by Berkshire Hathaway, and there's not as much insight available on Forest River. We work with both of those entities to develop our own private label lineup that'll have bespoke floor plans, bespoke price points to enable us to sell and penetrate that many more marketplaces across the country. As we sit here today, our exclusive brands, our contract manufactured brands, represent about 40% of all new RVs that we sell on an annualized basis. We can use those contract manufactured brands, which span the entire segment from $10,000 trailers to upwards of $120,000 motorized. We're able to satisfy every RV enthusiast price point, segment, features to be able to open up dealerships really across the country.
It is a little bit different space when you think of RVs versus automotive, where RVs are, yes, going to have some similarities with automotive. However, there is still a housing component. Consumers that are interested in this lifestyle, yes, want to explore, see America, but they are very interested in a floor plan and a price point. Affordability is top of mind for these consumers.
You kind of characterized the last 12 to 18 months as back to basics. On your last call, you talked about your four sources of upside, that being SG&A, used RV acquisitions, and new RV. I guess one point of clarification, did you say that the used is twice as, in terms of units, is twice as big as the?
That's correct.
Maybe you could just talk about your four sources of upside and just kind of building the base and then as we go into 2026.
Just as a little bit of more history for those that are unfamiliar, we've gone through quite a bit of changes in this industry over the last two years in particular, where in 2023, heading into 2024, the RV industry experienced deflation on new invoice prices for the first time in the history of the RV space. This, of course, was a byproduct of really that post-pandemic just hangover of margins being exceedingly high, revenue popping, and just as well, everyone getting a little too greedy. Everyone came back down to earth heading into 2024, and it created just a whole flurry of just indecisiveness of what the price points are, how does that impact the used marketplace.
We have taken this approach between 2024, as we sit here today, to about 18-24 months, to really refocus on what has made us successful over our last two decades of being this highly acquisitive roll-up dealership network and ensuring that we were able to eliminate some of these fixed cost structures that we just, frankly, no longer need. Where we had built up certain elements of the business between 2020 through 2022, and we realized by 2023, we just needed to rationalize and right-size this. We have spent the better part of two years now to not only right-size our inventory, but also right-size our SG&A structure. We created a building block heading into next year of where we wanted to set very conservative estimates. By the way, those conservative estimates were still going to be representative of growth year- over- year from 2025 to 2026.
We provided building blocks to suggest off of this conservative estimate, what can we do, what's within our control, and what's an order of magnitude by which we can influence the decisions to the positive, and what could be catalysts for us to drive above and beyond that earnings estimate that we threw out there. For those that had not listened, we put out an estimate of about $310 million of adjusted EBITDA earnings for 2026. That would represent a pretty healthy improvement over 2025. We believe that we'll be able to exceed that $310 million through four principal building blocks. I'll list it in the order of magnitude in terms of what we can influence and where we should yield higher upside. The first one in particular being SG&A savings.
We suggested that at a minimum, we should be able to target and yield an additional $15 million of SG&A savings. We believe over the last few couple of months, actually, we've continued to make good progress to achieve that goal, perhaps even sooner than we anticipated. Of course, we'll continue to push that envelope to receive that much more of a benefit throughout the entirety of 2026. When we think of the second order of magnitude, that's going to be the used RV sales side of the business. We suggested within that $310 million number that our used RV sales would only be up about high single digits, 7%-8% year- over- year, whereas this year we're looking at high double digits. We believe that next year we may be able to exceed that 7%-8% improvement, which would, again, enhance that earnings profile for next year.
Third order of magnitude would be additional dealership M&A. Over our, gosh, going on about 10 years of being public, we've been a highly acquisitive dealership acquisition company. We do believe there still exists a tremendous amount of white space within the RV industry for us to be able to yield that. With each acquisition we pick up, that would, again, enhance that earnings profile. Fourth, and perhaps the one that's most out of our control, is going to be new RV sales. I say most out of our control in so much as we still source about 60% of all of our new RVs from Thor, Forest River, Winnebago, and they're what we call OEM brands, those non-private label brands. We can't necessarily control pricing, nor floor plan, nor what their ability is to produce those same assets.
We know that we could control our fate much more effectively on the used side of the business compared to the new side of the business. Between those four primary pillars, we believe there still exists a tremendous amount of earning power and upside, even off that base that we suggested on the earnings call.
Just to clarify, on that call, you talked about signs of resistance from the OEM. Is that what you're referring to a little bit in terms of the pricing?
Signs of resistance, yes. We were certainly alluding to the fact that OEM manufacturers had raised prices year- over year about 5%-7%. Naturally, prices go up. There's going to be a little bit more resistance. Really, we came out to take a much more conservative approach because in the short term, we just weren't seeing enough factors that could be a catalyst for future growth and upside beyond this very conservative estimate. We wanted to at least set a floor for everyone to say, "This is what we're comfortable with." However, if we're able to take advantage of some of these additional upsides, we do see earnings power continue to improve. If there's another catalyst that exists out there, we believe the upside could be that much greater.
Just building on the used market, one of the reasons I double-taped was your new to used mix is not two to one used, which implies you have got to, it is actually about 70,000, I think, new to 50,000 used. That implies there is quite a bit of upside. You have talked about some of your competitors just being a little upside down on used inventory. I am just going to walk through the dynamics of the used market in 2026 and why you have confidence that you can grow it.
The used market is relatively complicated and inefficient in the RV space. If we're again to compare automotive to RVs, within automotive, there's a host of different products, digital products that are available for dealerships to just put the right value on a used asset. It's largely a derivative of a VIN decoding system that's been fine-tuned in the automotive space for going on three decades. There's no VIN decoding system that exists within the RV space at all. Fortunately, because we've sold in our history in excess of about 1.3 million new and used RVs, not only factoring in the fact that we've looked at, goodness, about 800,000 service vehicles on an annualized basis, we've created a relatively enriched database to put an accurate value on used RVs more so than any other entity that exists out there.
We've been able to leverage that over the last six years in particular to create our own residual value calculations to understand what could we sell any used asset for at any given moment if we're to see it in any one of our channels. It's off of that that we've created what I would regard as our most creative mousetrap to capture consumers' information, where we either haven't seen their information, haven't seen their RV yet, and the ability to give them an instant value on any used asset. No other entity within this industry has a capability nor the scale to actually create these residual value calcs. When we think of our differentiator of how we're able to control that, we're able to toggle on and off our lead volume of what used assets we'd like to buy at any given moment.
That's where you've seen us over the last two years develop even more and more sophistication, similar to what CarMax was doing about two decades ago. We've been able to take a lot of their lessons learned and transplant it into our industry to be able to scale up the acquisition funnel and provide whatever dealerships' needs are on a very localized level, satisfied in a quick order. When I think about our competitive landscape, many of our dealership competitors don't have the capital or the balance sheet. I say that because within the RV space, the advance rates on floor plan are only going to be about 75% of an independent NADA valuation. Not only do you need at least that 25% equity upfront, but there's going to be an accelerated curtailment schedule.
That'd be suggestive of the fact that many of these dealerships would need to maintain a fair amount of additional working capital in their business compared to what they do today. We have the balance sheet capability, sophistication to be able to scale this up, the likes of which no one else in this industry can take advantage of.
I would just add, when you think about the optimism and why we're optimistic on used going into 2026, it really has to do with two things. One that Matt talked about, the size of the industry, right, being twice the size of new. Really, when you think about an environment where affordability matters, an environment where you have another 5%-7% increases in new invoice pricing, that inflationary backdrop tends to be very conducive, as you know, for used values and for the value proposition for the consumer. That's the other tailwind that we really see going into next year on the used business.
Just double-clicking back on the private label business, whereas you said 40% of your units, and obviously your manufacturer is the same entities that you're buying the branded from. I mean, it seems like that's kind of maybe an interesting dynamic. Can we just talk a little bit more about the private label business and how you kind of view that as a strategic tool in your business in 2026 and going forward?
The secret in the RV industry is very similar to the secret within the home building industry, where there's only so many different ways you could develop a floor plan in the home building business between a 2,400 sq ft home and a 3,000 sq ft home. The same thing holds true within the RV space. When you look at roughly about 200 sq ft of living space to upwards of maybe 700 sq ft of living space, there's only so many ways you could chop up that floor plan to actually make it suitable for different consumer personas that exist out there. Our exclusive manufactured brands enable us to just use different design elements and different additional features, parts, components that either represent an upsell opportunity, or we're able to commit at scale to these certain brands to ensure that we're driving down our price points.
An example of this is Coleman is the number one best-selling brand in all of North America. We are the exclusive dealership for Coleman. We're able to go back to the suppliers and the OEMs and lay down orders that would amount to about 20,000 assets of even fasteners or different AC units or stairs or steps or an enhanced mattress. By means of making those commitments upfront, we're able to level load the entire supply chain to ensure that we're driving down prices and we're able to hold a fair margin while still passing along some of the price savings to consumers. When we think of all these dynamics at play, yes, it is true what Jeff said. We do have dynamics on every one of our lots where we'll have exclusively branded products that'll compete head-on with OEM branded products.
The reason being, some consumers just want to have a tan color versus a black color versus a beige. Some of them want to have the additional AC unit on their asset. Some of them want to have the enhanced steps, where there's enough different product features similar to when you build a home, where there is a need to at least have two options for every single floor plan, if not in some price points, upwards of three.
The two other revenue or gross profit buckets, F&I and parts and service, you guys do pretty well on F&I, I think $5,000 a copy. Talk about those dynamics there. The interest rate environment, will you expect to see as will your consumer interest rates toggle with the Fed funds rates, or will they be a little more sticky downward?
Brett, do you want to take and speak to that?
Yeah, I'll speak to the interest rate topic. When we think about how the banks that we work with, so just to be clear for everyone in the room, we do not actually hold the paper of the loans that we underwrite for the consumers. We actually give that to the banks. When we think about what drives the rate of the loan from those banks, it really has to do with the 10-year, more specifically the 5-year. The Fed funds rate, while it's important to our business from a P&L standpoint, when we think about our term loan, when we think about our floor plan rate, we really watch that move in the 5 and the 10-year.
I would say where we are today, we've obviously had a lot of volatility in the 10-year rates, anywhere between 4.75 to where we are today in that 4% range. I would say it's probably, just based on our conversations with our banking partners, probably another 50, potentially 75 basis points of unlock as we get into next year, which is really the time where the banks start to get aggressive and they start to think about market share gains should the rates kind of hold around these levels. I don't know, Tom, if you want to speak about the F&I.
Yeah, I think when we think about F&I and kind of the competitive landscape there, what we see at other dealers, I know we've talked about previously when we make acquisitions, we frequently see other RV dealers with a more limited menu, limited options of the products they're selling at a higher cost because it's a smaller portfolio. They are really proud of a 5% or a 6% contract penetration rate. We're closer to that low double digits rate on a percentage of new and used vehicle costs on an annual basis. Part of the secret sauce to that, in addition to the process and the breadth of the menu, is the product development that we get out of the Good Sam team and the partnership internally with that business.
When you walk into one of our dealerships, you will see a Good Sam Finance Center, and that is how our finance managers are branded today. We sell Good Sam roadside assistance in there in the box. Good Sam's also helped develop new products for us, like our roof vehicle service contract, which was a new product for us. We worked on it together to make sure that it was a product that actually drove incremental upsell opportunities with annual inspections for the customer so we could drive more service revenue for the dealership business as well. It is really that partnership and that innovation too that helps broaden the portfolio and give us more upsell opportunities with the customer.
I'll add one last point on the F&I, and it goes back to our M&A strategy, which I'm sure we'll get into on the dealership side. Historically, when we look at the dealers that we're targeting to acquire, they'll run F&I penetration on a good day at 3%-4% of vehicle revenue. I mean, as Tom said, we're in that low double digit type range. It really becomes that's probably one of the main building blocks when we talk about synergies and accretion in these dealership acquisitions. It's obviously very important to us.
In terms of the breakdown on the 5K, what's the breakdown between the finance commission versus product? How many products do you sell? What type of penetration do you see?
Oh, gosh. I mean, you want to kind of roll through that?
Our average product index is about three, a little north of three. However, as one of those products that we sell, it's going to be that indirect loan. Assume that's just one product. That would suggest that we're selling at least two additional products, be it either roadside assistance, extended service plans, tire and wheel protection, windshield protection, or roof VSC protection. We're relatively effective in terms of yielding that upside, where I'd say the indirect, typically we're in that mid-single digits, about 6%. The other balance of it is going to be the other products. Say our PVR, or per vehicle revenue or retail of all new and used RVs being sold, is about 13%. That's suggestive that 6% will be part of the indirect loan.
The balance will be the other products that we're able to sell as a result of that attachment.
The breakdown of the $5,000, but half is the finance and the rest is product.
Yes. Obviously, there's a lot of variability within the product.
Yeah, obviously. Yeah, thank you. Any questions? On the parts and service business, I want to just kind of run through. I think you guys had changed up a little bit how you did things. You sold some non-core assets. Maybe if you want to use the auto dealer metaphor in terms of your parts and service business, other ability to generate incremental gross profit outside of a typical dealer model, how do things stack up there?
Yeah, I would say over the last couple of years, we've really been focusing on narrowing the assortment and kind of getting back to the basics on this is what that RVer wants to use inside the campground in their RV, on their RV. In doing that, we got out of a couple of product categories or a couple of businesses. We sold a furniture business where we had some distributor light manufacturing capabilities. It just wasn't core to us, and we were able to exit that and refocus our energy on some other partnerships with some of the parts suppliers and also on our Amazon business as well.
We're really focused on kind of core product categories, core product development in the RV space today and upselling those and attaching those with both used RVs as well as folks that just walk in the door looking for a new Subarus or whatever the case may be.
Switching gears to the Good Sam business, about $100 million EBITDA, which if you talk about your $310 million goal next year or your floor, again, not a goal. Obviously, that's a nice recurring revenue. When you just talk about the dynamics, and I know you guys at one point had thought about maybe spinning that off and decided not to. Talk about what factors led to that. As you studied it, what did you uncover?
Maybe if I start in reverse, we even contemplated perhaps spinning it off in so much as we feel as though that's an undervalued asset within our entire enterprise. When you look at most businesses, you can look at a Brown and Brown or Aon or whatever it may be. Whenever there's that recurring revenue that's so predictable with those future recurring revenue streams that are guaranteed, generally those businesses are yielding at least 10 times earnings, if not greater. Our rationale for doing that was just to solicit offers, in which case we had received an abundance of inbounds inquiring about it.
We looked at this and said, "Okay, if this is truly what it's valued at, what can we do to enhance this value proposition to prove to our investors that this is that valuable of a proposition?" That is really where we took that as the opportunity and come upon ourselves to figure out how can we step into adjacent industries to continue to show expansion of Good Sam products in other industries where we've historically just limited Good Sam just to RVs. This is where we've been a little bit more effective in stepping into marine, stepping into power sports. Really all we're offering are just these insurance and protection products that exist out there. Over time, we could see that revenue continue to grow more and more gradually. As you look at this year, we're putting up record revenues within Good Sam.
However, we've had some pressure on our gross profit profile because of some claims information where there's a claim associated with any roadside assistance claim being made in the industry. There's been a lot of just upheaval within the roadside space. We feel as though we have our arms around that now heading into next year, where we've been able to take in-house a lot of our dispatch capabilities by means of setting up our own platform in-house to actually yield the savings to manage our gross margin profile heading into next year.
As we think of Good Sam's, though, opportunity expansion, yes, it's in other adjacent industries, but also we believe we have an opportunity to acquire other businesses for a relatively insignificant multiple compared to where we believe our multiple is on Good Sam and how people actually comprise our enterprise value, where Good Sam is obviously a critical element within that. Over the next couple of years, I could see us taking these small little tuck-in businesses, either in the vehicle service contract space or perhaps in the agency space as a third-party administrator, where we'd be able to just rationalize a small tuck-in as opposed to taking these big leaps of faith in that space. We've been very effective with Good Sam, and most people don't realize this, but that brand's been in existence since 1966.
This has been a slow, gradual process, the likes of which can't be replicated in the RV space. There is very positive consumer sentiment for these RV enthusiasts associated with Good Sam. That really is our competitive barrier compared to everyone else in that space.
I would say we have a live example of expanding into adjacent markets because Jeff is a card-carrying member of Good Sam Roadside Assistance.
Just for auto.
Yeah, but just for auto.
Just for auto.
For now.
It's a good experience. What hooked me is that I'm just curious, when you bring some of the call center stuff in-house, I think that's one of the issues anyone that's ever had to use roadside assistance. You get somebody that they're an agent, they're probably not vested in that company, they're probably indifferent, they're calling a tow truck at 11:00 P.M. Have you found that your customer satisfaction's gone up as well?
Our NPS scores have never been higher, which I could not be more proud of the team in-housing all this functionality. This is all in-house support, where we're sitting with an NPS score in our roadside assistance business of about 78, which is pretty darn high when you consider the likes of which other entities struggle to get even in excess of 20 positive NPS because you're dealing with a distressed customer on the side of the road.
You have to have a more delicate touch with this consumer that has a breakdown, they need to get a tow truck, there's cars whizzing by them, where our team has been very effective at not only the reduction in that dispatch time to actually get a roadside provider out there, but also remaining on the phone with these consumers that are honestly in distress, especially given that many of our consumers not only are auto carrying card holders, but most of them are going to be RV holders. They'll have the likes of which their truck plus maybe a 20-foot RV behind them, which is a relatively dangerous position to find oneself in.
Let me just talk about the demand environment. I mean, look, Home Depot had numbers out yesterday, a little disappointing. They're specific to them to some degree, and it was specific to the consumer. I think you look as investors, when I've been doing consumer for a long time, we always sit here and we're worried about the consumer as we drink our $8 coffees and are sleeping in $500 hotels. I bring that up because it paints the picture of, look, there isn't just one consumer in the U.S. There's a lot of classes. You guys also have a demographic story to what you're doing. You're clearly the market leader, so your competition could be 10 points below you in sales. Just maybe talk to where we're at in the demand environment today.
I think it's no secret for everyone in this room that affordability is top of mind for nearly all Americans. We believe that the RV lifestyle is no different. However, we also know that an RV enthusiast will remain in the lifestyle and will engage in the most affordable way reasonable for them. Almost 80% of our consumers finance their RVs. As long as we're able to provide a solution to a consumer that's going to hit their monthly payment goals and objectives, we believe we'll be able to win this game and continue to solicit more and more growth within this entire industry.
It should be noted that not many people have actually said this out loud yet, but we've noticed a relative stabilization of new and used sales combined over the last few weeks, especially, but it's been a more prevailing trend over the last few months. We've just called attention to the fact that the new RV sales side of the business has continued to decline at a gradual rate, just low single digits, whereas the used side of the business continues to stabilize and actually start to drive some growth up there. I use that as an example just to frame up the possibility for next year that consumers are going to be agnostic to new or used. You can make an argument within the RV space.
Sometimes it's better to buy a used asset where there are certain things that have been worked out already over the last couple of years, or there's been some retrofit items that have been custom built just to satisfy whatever needs would be. By the way, that asset's going to be a little bit more inexpensive than a new asset. We've been incredibly effective at moving some of these consumers that wanted to buy new into the used space because, simply put, that was a monthly payment they could afford. We are very disciplined at looking at that basket of goods, personal consumer expenditures, and household income, and defining what's a reasonable monthly price point that we could sell them an RV. That's how we really back into all of our inventory strategies.
We make sure to be super disciplined about our capital allocation, and we are very effective at hitting that price point with these consumers.
To your question on the demographics, right, of the RV consumer, what we see, there obviously can be some stereotypes out there for people who do not know about the lifestyle. We think about our average customer, the FICO is going to be about 700, slightly above that. You are going to have a household income that is going to be above $100,000. You are going to have mainly a rural consumer primarily, right? A lot of these consumers, it is hard to obviously store an RV in a major city, right? Rural consumer tends to be more fiscally conservative. That is going to be your policemen, your firefighters, your school teachers, your nurses, your small business owners. Instead of being located 20 minutes from an airport, they may be located two hours from an airport.
It tends to be a way that they recreate, different from probably a lot of us in this room.
What percentage of your sales are first-time buyers versus repeat buyers?
It's very difficult to arrive at a definitive stat, but what I can share with you is that about 25% of all RVs we sell are sold to a consumer that has a trade-in. That's to suggest that at least 25% of all consumers that bought from us over the last 12 months, and this has been a very consistent trend for years, they have collateral or an asset that they currently own. What you could back into and suggest is perhaps upwards of about 75% of the RVs that we sell are to a first-time buyer. I don't believe that's the case in so much as many of these same consumers say, "You know what? I exited the lifestyle for a short time, waited for the kids to grow up because they no longer wanted to RV.
Now it's just my wife and I, and we want to go RVing again. That's an oftentimes normal occurrence, as Jeff was sharing with us some of the road trips he was taking when he just went on his honeymoon. Now even contemplating going back out to go on another road trip, we oftentimes see that amongst his consumer base. Nonetheless, this has been a growing environment for consumers that really want to engage in the lifestyle. Perhaps the more important status, I'm thinking through it, is for a number of years, in fact, the last 10 years, there has been more entrance of RV consumers into the lifestyle than there have been that have entered into owning homes.
There's been that outpacing trend of consumers on a household basis that have been buying more RVs or engaging in the lifestyle compared to actually buying a home. We look at that as a trend to suggest, "Okay, if that holds true, as long as the consumer demographics continue to be favorable over a long term, that's where RVs in operation, this RV installed base continues to grow, which enhances the overall proposition for our enterprise." That's where Good Sam thrives in particular, and that's what constantly fuels just RV sales, service, finance, etc.
The honeymoon was 22 years ago, by the way. It didn't sound like it was last week. That's not the case. In talking to one of the OEMs that was here yesterday, they did bring in interesting stuff. Look, the pecking order is generally someone buys a home first. That was interesting you brought that up. I mean, I'm assuming that homeownership is probably one of the biggest factors in terms of commonalities of your customer.
Oftentimes, yes, which is why it's been kind of staggering to see those that perhaps bought a home 20 years ago, but maybe over the last 10 years chose to engage in the lifestyle, which is why you saw those trends start to favor more RVs compared to even those homeownership trends. Nonetheless, yes, there is oftentimes commonality of those that own a home will have a higher likelihood of buying an RV. It's just a matter of the timing and cadence of amounting to more discretionary funds within their bank accounts and then also whatever portion of their life they find themselves with. It's a likelihood to see consumers that have young children. That's where they start their RVing journey. They oftentimes come back to the RVing journey once they're a little bit older.
The average age of our consumer is about 49 years of age, which is actually a lot younger than it was just 10 years ago. About 10 years ago was about 54 years of age. We view this as a positive to suggest that we're finding consumers earlier on in their journey to hopefully resell them many more RVs throughout their entire journey.
What type of data or data capture or CRM do you have in the store so the salespeople and the people that are in the store can kind of identify, like, "Here's the trends of the consumer in the store. Here's maybe a different archetype that's coming out." Look, I'm just guessing, assuming, knowing who your CEO is, that most good consumer companies break down, they've got three or four or five consumer archetypes. How are you capturing that and evolving?
We regard as six archetypes, just given the complexity that exists within the RV space. There are so many different segments, so many different price points where, for those that are unfamiliar, you have a travel trailer, a fifth wheel, which are tow-behinds. They are going to have some sort of vehicle that has to tow it. Even within the motorized space, you will have a Class E, a Class B, a Class A gas, Class A diesel. When you think of all these segments, it almost becomes dizzying. For us, we have distilled it down to six. Even off of those six, you will have your enthusiasts, you will have those in their twilight years, you will have those at the young family, you will have the weekender. We oftentimes break that up even into subcategories thereafter.
We have what I would regard as one of the more sophisticated marketing technology stacks that exists out there. We have our own central repository where we spent the better part of the last five years harmonizing all of our information in a Snowflake instance, where we're able to append basically an infinite amount of attributes. We enrich our customer database off of Deep Sync, not to be confused with Deep Seek, Deep Sync, which is going to have that enriched database so that we could append then household information, demographic information, general age range information. We also have layered on top of that Segment, which is a consumer data platform. We log every activity of these consumers either in person or online.
It can be anonymous at first until such time as they create a de-anonymizing event where they have to submit a lead or buy something from us. It is all cross-domain tracking. I am giving you this long drawn-out conclusion to suggest we are just really in the beginning of our journey with GenAI, where we went through a lot of the heavy lifting over the last five years, and we have been relatively quiet about it just because we have only now started to deploy more use cases over the last year that we have been able to create quantifiable, measurable results off of what we are able to leverage. Through that Snowflake instance, we have been able to layer on top of it an enterprise AI solution, which then fuels all the agentic functions.
The agentic functions being, we have a service advisor agent, whereby if a consumer has questions, a service advisor is able to just log on to an agent and do a quick diagnosis, troubleshooting, and come up with the hours required to actually fix something and give the consumer even a DIY write-up if they'd like to do it themselves because perhaps it'd be more economic, albeit we have the specialists in-house to be able to handle that. Using that as one example, that's where we've been able to scale out all these different ways and agents that we can converse with consumers in an intelligent way to make certain that we're just satisfying either a service journey, a sales journey. This whole CRM, the foundation of it is, yes, Snowflake. That's the customer database. We have our enterprise AI level on top of that.
We have Salesforce as our central CRM, and then we have offshoots of different CRMs that are agents off of that. It is through this entire environment we are able to handle a customer's complete journey from either the sale, F&I, service, retail, or all the Good Sam products that we offer.
You set the kind of the baseline next year at $310 million in EBITDA. You have talked about a mid-cycle goal of, I think, $520 million. Just curious how it is, what would it take to get there, and what do you mean by mid-cycle? Then wrap that into the capital allocation. If you started having a trajectory towards $520 million, how would you allocate the capital?
Yeah. When you think about that mid-cycle that we put out, it really has to do with an industry volume level closer to 400,000. Today, just for reference, you have a new industry that's tracking about 340,000-350,000. That compares to a peak that was closer to, call it high fives, 600,000 around COVID. That 340,000 is more akin to what you kind of saw in the early 2010s would probably be the right range. When we think about, obviously, the RV business having cyclicality to it, right now, the biggest impediment, if you will, to getting back to a mid-cycle in our view is really that affordability equation. We think we've done a very good job broadening our product assortment with contract manufacturing from a product side to get there.
To get the industry back to closer to a mid-cycle, I think we're going to need some more tailwinds, probably closer to 100 basis points or so on the interest rate side when we talk about that 10-year to kind of drive that volume. That volume obviously drives more gross profit dollar through our system. When we think about how we laid out that $525 million mid-cycle type target, that's really just based on historically how this business has performed through cycles. There are really no crazy assumptions or extra assumptions to layer on top of there. It's really just historic through-cycle metrics that we've used. I know Tom talked about some of the deleveraging and some of the capital allocation.
Yeah. No, I think that generally kind of goes through the mid-cycle assumptions. I would say from a capital allocation perspective, we're continuing to make headway on improving our net debt leverage. We talked about that on the earnings call. We've made significant improvement this year in our minds, both through earnings improvement, mostly through the used business and growth that we've seen there. It's been fantastic this year. We've also paid down the revolver. We've made some incremental payments on the term loan. As we've consolidated stores, that's really been a big focus of ours this past year. You've seen our rooftop count shrink a little bit on a net basis. That's really, as we've looked at the store portfolio in the current 340-350 retail environment, we've said, "You know what?
We could actually get more out of our fixed cost base if we consolidated resources to some of our highest-performing locations in certain markets. We have been able to, as we have shut a few stores down, unfortunately, exit the real estate, exit some of the fixed costs in a pretty economical manner to help improve that fixed cost leverage and get some cash back into the system to improve the net debt leverage. While we have made good progress this year, that is something we are going to obviously continue to be a serious focus of us heading into next year and as we kind of march toward that mid-cycle.
What I failed to mention on that mid-cycle, that $525 million is really based off of the store count today. That does not account for additional M&A dealerships that we would do in the future. I think that is an important point. Really, that is just catching, I think, the industry catching a couple of macro tailwinds as opposed to headwinds that we have had the last three to four years.
Your net debt, you own, I think, over $400 million of used inventory outright, correct? When you kind of, we're not filing a K or a Q, and so you don't have to put any footnotes. As a practical matter, on a dollar basis, what do you assume your net debt is now if we just gave you 100% credit for the used?
I don't want to give you a new non-GAAP measure, but yeah, we have a.
It would be a couple of turns lower.
Yes, it would be a couple of turns lower if you consider the equity that we have in the used inventory, the equity in the parts inventory, plus the real estate that we have free and clear, equity in real estate that's on the mortgage line. There's a lot of, there's capital throughout the business.
With those buckets, it would be more than a couple of points lower.
Yeah. How much real estate do you own free and clear?
It's over $200 million.
Over 200 million. Have you guys done the analysis? I'm assuming, given you're a pretty analytical bunch, when you talk about affordability, I mean, it's not, you can figure out what the cost of the lifestyle is, the cost of ownership and the add-on cost of the lifestyle. You could kind of look at that in terms of a multiple of income. How far off are we on affordability relative to better times in the industry?
I'd say that perhaps the best way to even think of this is we have to run this analysis on a segment basis. If we're just to look at travel trailers, and even more specifically, entry-level travel trailers, which would be regarded as those that are under $20,000 retail price point, that's going to be the largest segment of the new RV space. We know that that basket of goods, that monthly payment on a new travel trailer entry-level price point can really be no higher than about 6% of household income or 6% of their total expenditures within that consumer base. That %'s going to fluctuate depending upon the segment. I use that as an example whereby we are hitting that price point very effectively within our contract manufactured line. However, OEM brands aren't necessarily hitting that price point as effectively.
That's where they're about 2% higher frequently, as opposed to we're able to reduce the price much more extensively in contract manufactured because you're still able to hit the scale again, as I alluded to earlier. Does that help to answer the question a little bit?
It does. I mean, I knew you guys had thought about it more than just casually.
Yeah. I would just say category-wise, we have a slide on this, I think, earlier in the year. We do look at the monthly payments, % of disposable income. On a travel trailer segment, particularly our travel trailers that we sell, we're back to 2019 levels. We're close to it on a disposable income type level, right, which I think is the best way to measure affordability in this industry, which is wallet share. If you look on the other end of the spectrum, something like a motorized has a lot more wood to chop, right, if you think about chassis cost and that part of the market. We've done a good job over the last, I'd say, 18 to 24 months as a company working with our OEM partners to produce private-label motorized units at price points that that category hasn't seen in five-plus years.
I think we're on the right trajectory as we think about just extending that affordability from travel trailers and going up across the rest of the categories to further penetrate and gain market share.
Okay. Any questions?
What's the trend been in independent mom-and-pop dealers over the years? I would think they're going to go out of business during tough times and higher rates. What are the planned financials?
You'd think that there would be more of a deterioration of the dealership body. However, when you look just even over the last couple of years, there's only been a net decrease of about 150 locations, which is kind of staggering when you think of within stats surveys, I think there's about 2,700, 2,800.
In that range, yeah.
Dealerships?
Yeah, mid-20s, mid-2000s.
When you think of the conditions over the last couple of years, it's been a relatively challenging environment for those mom-and-pops. What we've found when we acquire these smaller dealerships is that many of them just completely eliminate all of their personnel, fixed cost structure, and they'll just have their aunt and uncle, their brother and sister chip in on the weekends during the week, and they somehow just make it work as opposed to having to just bring on excessive people, and they're able to just forgive some of the issues that they have here or there. They just are scrappy, and they figure it out, and they oftentimes own the real estate. They think of the lack of a rent factor, lack of a landlord.
They're able to just limit all their CapEx, wipe it all away, and just keep as much cash in-house to weather these storms. At some point, though, there's got to be a breaking point for some of these smaller mom-and-pops because we have certainly seen larger consolidators like Blue Compass, etc., that have consolidated some of their rooftops, similar to what we've done. When you look at truly the absolute value of change, there's actually many more hundred absolute value change dealerships that have just consolidated, shut down. There's also been some other smaller ones that have popped up. They're only selling maybe like 100 new and used RVs a year.
Towards the end here, if you have any wrap-up remarks, or we can wrap it up.
Truly appreciate everyone's time. We're incredibly optimistic about the future of this business and the earnings power of this business. We believe that we've been incredibly nimble in what could have been regarded as a challenging environment. Thanks for everyone's time.
Thanks so much for coming.
Thanks for.