How much does a Casita trailer cost?

This is the whole page. A used trailer's asking price already contains the first owner's build sheet: whatever they ticked is on the trailer and inside the number. A new trailer's base price contains none of what you are going to tick, because you have not ticked it yet. So the buyer who puts a used asking price beside a new base price is comparing a finished trailer against an unfinished one and reading the difference as a premium. At our defaults the used one asks $34,000 against a $32,000 base, which looks like $2,000 more for a trailer that is not even new. Carry both routes out and the new order lands at $39,790 while the used one lands at $38,940, so the $2,000 premium is an $850 saving. Nothing about either trailer changed. The comparison simply got finished, and it pointed the other way.

These are collected rather than delivered, and that is true whichever route you take. A new one is at the factory and somebody drives to it. A used one is wherever its seller lives, which is rarely nearer and is often further, and for many buyers it is two trips rather than one, because looking at it before you agree to buy it is the difference between an inspection and a hope. At our defaults that is $1,100 on the new route and $700 on the used one, and the reason both boxes exist is that this money is invisible to almost everybody: it does not look like part of the purchase, it looks like a road trip, and road trips are not what people budget against a trailer. Two things follow. The return leg costs more per mile than the outbound one, because you are towing. And you cannot judge a delivery quote until these boxes have figures in them, since a quote is only expensive or cheap against the trip it replaces.

Ordering means waiting, and the wait is a real part of what you are choosing rather than a footnote on it, since it is the difference between a season in the trailer and a season without one. The page handles it in two deliberate moves. It asks you for the wait rather than publishing one, because lead times move and a figure we printed would be treated as a fact long after it stopped being true, so the honest place for it is a box you fill from the factory on the day you ask. Then it divides the money gap by those months and stops. That per-month figure is not a valuation of your time and it is not advice. It is the price tag on the waiting, put in front of you so you can decide whether your months are worth it, and the answer genuinely differs between a wait that ends before the summer and a wait that eats it. Notice too that the wait is only a cost on one side: the used trailer is available the day you agree to buy it, which is most of what the used route is actually selling.

The new column has a warranty in it and the used column does not, so a comparison that stopped at the two prices would be quietly unfair to the new one. That is what the inspection and repairs box is doing: it is where the risk gets a number. On a molded fiberglass trailer the hunt is mostly for water, at the seams, the windows, the roof fittings and the floor around them, because a leak shows up years after it started and it shows up in the floor. Tyres and bearings are the usual known-work items on anything that has sat, since both age out on the calendar rather than on the mileage. The honest part is the uncertainty rather than the estimate: if you cannot get a proper look at the underside and the floor, the right figure for that box is larger than you would like, and if you can, it may be small. Either way it belongs in the column rather than in the back of your mind, because a number you did not write down is a number you set to zero.

The test this page applies to every line is whether it differs between the two routes. Tax is in, because it runs on the price, so it scales with whichever trailer costs more and widens the gap rather than cancelling it. A hitch and wiring are out, because your vehicle needs the same hardware whichever trailer you tow with it, so the line moves both columns by the same amount and decides nothing. Insurance, storage, upkeep and what the trailer gives up in value while you own it are out for the same reason. None of that is free and across a few years it is not a footnote either. It is simply not part of THIS decision, which is which of two trailers to buy, and mixing it in would make the comparison harder to read without changing which way it points. When you have picked one, the Airstream calculator on this site prices the years afterwards and the arithmetic is the same for any travel trailer. Finance charges are absent here too: this is what each route costs, not what a loan on it costs.

The trailer itself is a factory quote against the layout and the options you tick, so this page leaves that figure to the factory rather than inventing one to stand in for it. What the page adds is the comparison the price alone cannot give you, which is whether to order a new one or buy the used one that is for sale today. Those two routes finish in different places than their prices suggest, because a used asking price already contains the first owner's build sheet while a new base price contains none of yours, and because both routes carry a trip to go and collect the trailer that almost nobody budgets for. Put your own figures in the form above and you get both landed totals, the gap between them, and what that gap works out at per month of waiting saved. At our defaults the new order lands at $39,790 and the used one at $38,940, which is the opposite of what the two asking prices imply.

Usually because it is not the same trailer, and the comparison is being made a step too early. A used Casita is a finished trailer: whatever the first owner ticked is on it and inside the number they are asking. A new base price is an unfinished trailer, quoted before you add the things you are going to add, because you have not added them yet. So putting one beside the other compares a trailer with a build sheet against a trailer without one, and the difference reads as a premium when a good part of it is just the sheet. At our defaults the used one asks $2,000 more than the new base, and once both routes are carried out to the driveway it lands $850 below the new order. There is a second reason worth naming: what a trailer is asking is not what it sells for. Watch what comparable ones close at rather than what they list at, and the picture usually moves. The fix for both is the same, which is to finish the sum before you judge the number.

This page gives you the price of the wait and stops there, on purpose. You get the gap between the two landed routes and what it comes to per month of waiting the used route saves you, and then the judgement is yours, because what a month without the trailer is worth is a fact about your year rather than a number anybody can publish. What is worth thinking about alongside the money is the shape of the wait rather than its length: a wait that ends in February and a wait that eats a summer are very different purchases even when they are the same number of months, so ask the factory where in the calendar you would land rather than only how long it is. On the other side, ordering buys you a trailer configured for how you actually intend to use it, with a warranty and no history, and a used one buys you availability and somebody else's decisions. If the gap is small in either direction, then the money is not what is choosing, and it is cleaner to admit that and choose on the wait and the risk instead.

Water first, and then everything that ages on the calendar. On a molded fiberglass trailer the shell itself tends to outlast the fittings, so the hunt is at the joins: the seams, the windows, the roof fittings, the vents, and above all the floor around and under them, because a leak announces itself in the floor years after it started. Get underneath if you possibly can, and if you cannot, price that uncertainty into the repairs box above rather than hoping. Then the calendar items, which are the ones that catch buyers on the way home rather than on the driveway: tyres age out regardless of how few miles they have done, and bearings want repacking on a trailer that has sat. After that, anything with a seal or a pump, so the fridge, the water system and the water heater. Take the trip to look before the trip to buy, because a buyer who has already driven six hours to collect a trailer is not in a position to walk away from it, and price both trips above. If distance makes a first visit impractical, pay somebody local to inspect it and put that fee in the same box.