A Second Major Queensland Caravan Builder Has Collapsed. Here's What It Means for Buyers.

They should have seen this coming
Jason Rieck · Cat Cruisers · Gold Coast · 22 September 2026

On Tuesday 15 September, Australian Off Road confirmed what its customers had feared for days. The 26-year-old Sunshine Coast caravan manufacturer had entered voluntary administration.

Phones dead. Website down. Socials gone. Caloundra factory locked. People who had paid deposits, and owners whose vans were sitting in the workshop, had no one to call.

My opinion, before the rest of it. They should have seen this coming. The whole industry should have. COVID inflated the prices, the order books and the headcount. When the music slowed, the imports were cheaper, the copies were everywhere, and the vans that had been sold at boom money could not carry boom overheads. That is not a shock. That is a hangover.

What happened at AOR

AOR was not a fly-by-night. Steve Budden started it in a Maleny carport in 2000. It grew to about 100 people, a real Caloundra factory, a loyal owner base, and a reputation for serious off-road kit. Last year they built about 250 vans.

Then, in the second week of September, they stopped answering the phone.

Ron and Winsome Vernieux drove nearly 2,000 kilometres from Victoria to collect a van that had been in for repairs for months. The gates were locked. They could see their own van in the car park, about 20 metres away. Winsome told the ABC it was surreal — she wanted to climb the fence and take it. They waited and did the right thing.

Administrators were appointed to Rhost Pty Ltd, the company behind the AOR name, on 15 September. That is administration, not liquidation — yet. Customers who paid deposits are now creditors. Delivery is not a promise. It is a queue.

Weeks earlier AOR was still offering new buyers a bonus pack worth more than $9,000 in extras for 2027 delivery. That is the part that stings. The marketing did not stop when the floor did.

This is the second time on the same coast in nine months

Zone RV went into administration on 1 December 2025 owing about $42 million, including a large book of customer deposits. New owners later bought the brand. A lot of the original deposit-holders did not get a van. They got a claim.

AOR sits in a longer run: Network RV and its sister names, X Series, Sunland, Phoenix, Great Aussie, Star Vision. The pattern is simple. The brands that survive have a buyer. The ones that do not sit in limbo while families wait on a letter.

Australians did not stop travelling

The Caravan Industry Association’s 2026 numbers still look healthy on the surface — hundreds of thousands of registered RVs, millions of trips, billions in spend. Demand is not the whole story.

The boom after lockdown created more builders than a market of 20,000 to 30,000 new vans a year can feed. Prices went up because they could. Lead times went out because they could. Then cost of living bit, used vans came back, and a wave of cheaper imports arrived. The overextended builders cracked first.

That is what I mean by they should have seen it coming. Inflated COVID prices were never a permanent floor. They were a spike. You do not staff and tool a factory for the spike and then act surprised when the spike ends.

If you have a deposit in a collapsed builder

This is not legal advice. It is the queue as it usually works.

• You are an unsecured creditor. Secured lenders and employee entitlements come first. Deposit holders share whatever is left, if anything.
• Delivery is not guaranteed. A van in the shed may be finished and sold to raise cash. You may be offered the van at a price, part of the deposit back, or nothing.
• If you paid by credit card, call the bank about a chargeback now. There are time limits. A bank transfer has fewer options.
• Get on the creditors list as soon as the administrator publishes contact details. Join the owner groups. Zone RV customers who shared information did better than the ones who waited alone.

Warranty is two different things

Statutory consumer guarantees under Australian Consumer Law sit with the seller — usually the dealer — for acceptable quality, fitness for purpose, and matching the description. If the factory disappears, that claim against the seller can still stand.

A printed 5-year or 10-year manufacturer warranty is only a promise from that company. If the company is gone, honouring it becomes an administration question. That is why AOR owners are already asking about parts and service.

Buy from someone who will still have a door you can knock on. Get who honours the warranty in the contract, not in a brochure.

Before you hand over a five-figure deposit

• How long have they actually been building through a downturn, not just through a boom?
• Can you visit the factory? A marketing page with no floor is not a manufacturer.
• What do owners of three-to-five-year-old vans say — not last month’s handover photos?
• How is the deposit held, and what happens if the company is sold? Get it in the contract.
• Pay by credit card where you can.
• Is the product actually different, or is it the same box at a different price? When a dozen brands sell the same shape, the weakest margin dies first.

What I take from it

A $70,000 van that only lives on the road is a single-purpose asset. If the builder goes, if the market softens, if your life changes, it sits in the driveway and depreciates. That is the concentration risk this whole shakeout keeps teaching.

That is why we built Cat Cruisers the way we did. One vessel. Water and land. Electric. Trailerable. Built on the Gold Coast. We bought the CaraBoat lineage two years ago and we still build updated classics alongside the new electric range. A five-year warranty is only as good as the people who answer the phone in year four — so I care more about still being here than about the brochure.

I am not using AOR’s pain as a sales pitch. Families are locked out of a factory looking at a van they already paid for. That is ugly. It is also a warning the rest of us in manufacturing do not get to ignore.

If you are buying anything with a long lead time in the next 12 months — a van, a boat, a conversion — verify the builder, get the warranty in writing, pay in a way that protects you, and favour the outfits that already survived a downturn. The COVID prices were the warning. This week was the invoice.

catcruisers.com.au · 0426 531 750