Just as baby boomers cruise into retirement, their plans of buying a motor home or travel trailer have run into speed bumps such as higher interest rates and unstable fuel prices.

Nationally, motor home sales have been down every month since February 2005, according to Statistical Surveys Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich., firm that tracks the industry. Instead of taking out a $300,000 mortgage for a Class-A motor coach, more consumers are turning toward smaller units or used ones. Some are holding out until next year, hoping that the cost of borrowing money will edge down a little.

“We have had a lot of people who are going to wait,” said Ron Peterson, owner of Scenic Traveler RV Centers in Slinger and Baraboo, Wis. “We think they are ready to buy, and they just sort of back off.”

Motor home and travel trailer sales are strongest early in an economic growth cycle when interest rates are low and consumer confidence is improving. Sales languish when the cost of borrowing money rises and the economy sputters.

It’s like the housing market, said Craig Kennison, a Robert W. Baird & Co. analyst who follows the RV industry.

In a recent survey of 96 RV dealers, Kennison found that motor home sales were down 13 percent from a year ago and travel trailer sales had slipped 8 percent. Dealers, on average, expected motor home sales to be flat for the year.

“I think like most RV dealers, we got sucked into thinking the (boom) market would last,” a Baird survey respondent said.

There are a lot of credit issues with customers at this time, another dealer said in the survey.

“We are in a panic mode, and are going into the winter with more inventory than we wish to carry,” a third dealer said.

Some RV dealerships have slashed prices to stimulate sales and lower inventories of big rigs that cost them thousands of dollars in finance charges. Motor home sales have picked up in recent weeks, according to dealers, and the sales outlook for 2007 is more upbeat.

“It’s still not 100 percent, by any stretch, but it’s good to see people coming in the door this late in the year,” said Don Dosch, sales manager at Wisconsin RV World in Madison, Wis.

“This market seems to have picked up, and I am absolutely tickled to death to see it,” he added.

Long term, the RV industry ought to benefit from a swell of baby boomers reaching retirement age. People between 55 and 64 are more likely to buy motor homes than any other age group, according to industry research.

By 2010, the industry expects to sell 500,000 motor homes and travel trailers a year, up from 350,000 now.

“The bullish case is that interest rates continue to decline and, sometime in the second half of 2007, RV dealers will start to see growth again,” Kennison said.

Used motor homes are selling well, whether they’re late models with low miles or older ones with high mileage, according to Dosch.

“They disappear almost as fast as I get them,” he said.

In Hartland, Wis., Jay and Ginger Mays are selling their 39-foot Winnebago Journey motor home. It’s two years old, with a diesel engine, and comes loaded with amenities such as three slide-out rooms and leather seats.

The Mayses are asking $135,000 for their motor home. Two potential buyers said they had to sell their current motor homes before buying another one, which is a common dilemma for people wanting to upgrade but who haven’t paid off what they owe.

First-time buyers might balk at the price, Ginger Mays said.

At the other end of the size spectrum, a Necedah, Wis., company makes travel trailers small enough to be towed by almost any vehicle. The Camp-Inn brand is styled after teardrop-shaped trailers from the 1940s.

Retro-teardrops are a hot item on the West Coast, where camper clubs get together in them on weekends. Most teardrops are built by small manufacturers, some of them working out of garages, on the West Coast.

“We are the oddity in Wisconsin,” said Cary Winch, co-owner of Petenwell Industries LLC, which builds Camp-Inn trailers.

Winch and his business partner, Craig Edevold, were engineers at Best Power in Necedah. That company once employed 1,200 workers in Juneau County, Wis., making power-supply equipment, before the work was dispatched to Mexico and elsewhere.

Winch and Edevold could have left Necedah and continued working for Best Power. But they stayed to build the little aluminum trailers with birch veneer interiors.

In 2002, their first full year, they sold 15 trailers. Since then, they have averaged about 35 trailers a year.

Currently, the company has an 11-month backlog of orders. On one recent day alone, it turned down an order for 30 trailers that would have gone to Norway.

“We just don’t have the production capability,” Winch said. “If we had it, we could sell as many trailers offshore as we sell here.”

Camp-Inn trailers are hand-built. They start at about $5,600, and some models are more than twice as expensive as other teardrops.

The company has targeted baby boomers often engaged in sports such as kayaking and mountain biking.

“Their kids are out of the house. They have time and money that they didn’t have when they were younger,” Winch said.

Someone shopping for a $300,000 diesel motor coach isn’t likely to change his or her mind because fuel prices go up. That’s more of an issue for buyers of less expensive motor homes and travel trailers, according to area dealers.

“It’s just enough to put the edge on things,” Peterson said.

Sales peaked in 2004 when interest rates were low. It could be a few years before those buyers are ready to trade their motor homes for new ones.

“It’s just like a home,” said Kennison with Robert W. Baird. “Anyone who financed a home and got a really low interest rate in 2003 would not be that interested in selling that home and buying another one when rates are higher.”