You are about to hand somebody between $35,000 and $200,000 for a vehicle that does not exist yet, on the strength of a website and a phone call. Deposits are largely non-refundable, the wait runs past a year, and no licensing body governs any of it. Get this wrong and you spend the following summer fixing a van instead of using it. Here is how to tell a shop that plans builds from one that improvises them.
The four checks that take an afternoon
Marketing copy is free. Facts are not. Four things can be verified before you speak to anybody, and doing them first means every call afterwards is with a shop that has already survived the cheapest possible filter.
- A physical address you can actually find. Pull it up on satellite view. A shop building vans occupies a building with roll-up doors and vehicles outside it. A mailbox store or a residential driveway is not automatically disqualifying, plenty of good one-person shops start that way, but it changes what you are buying and it should change the deposit you are willing to send.
- How long they have traded. Business registration is public record in every state and the search is free. A shop that registered eight months ago and is taking 50% deposits against twelve month builds is carrying your money straight through its own riskiest period. That is not fraud, it is undercapitalisation, and it fails the same way.
- Any certification they claim. Membership bodies confirm membership directly if you email and ask. A shop that overstates this has told you what its quotes are worth.
- Vans on the floor right now. Not renders, not the same three hero shots recycled since 2023. Ask what is in the shop this week and whether you can come and look at it. The answer arrives in under a minute and tells you more than the portfolio.
We run these four on every shop before it goes into the directory, and we record what we could not confirm as well as what we could, because an unverifiable claim is itself information. The standard we hold shops to sets out exactly what gets checked and what we refuse to take on trust.
The accreditation nobody tells you to look for
Every guide to this decision tells you to check reviews and ask about experience. Almost none of them mention that the chassis manufacturers themselves run accreditation programmes for the shops that cut into their vans, and that membership is public.
This matters because it is the only assessment in the industry carried out by an organisation with money at stake. A blogger's recommendation costs nothing to give. An accreditation that obliges the manufacturer to honour warranty claims on somebody else's workmanship is not handed out on vibes.
Ford runs the Pro Upfitter programme, which was called Qualified Vehicle Modifier for years and is still referred to by both names. Participation requires annual evaluation by Ford covering engineering, manufacturing process and quality control, an on-site facility review, compliance with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, and a documented quality system that tracks issues and records changes. A shop cannot buy its way in and it has to requalify every year.
Mercedes-Benz runs the eXpertUpfitter programme for Sprinter work, and the consequence is more direct: accredited upfitters extend a 3 year, 36,000 mile basic limited warranty across their own installations and components, matching the coverage on the base vehicle. Instead of a build warranty from a shop that may not exist in four years, you get one backed against a dealer network.
The recreational vehicle trade body operates the third programme worth knowing about. RVIA inspectors audit member plants against more than 500 safety-related standards requirements covering electrical, plumbing, heating and fire safety, and the association runs over 2,000 unannounced plant inspections a year. Certification is not necessary and many excellent shops skip it, but it makes insurance and financing markedly easier because it gives the finished van a recognised classification.
None of this is a substitute for looking at the cabinetry. It is a floor rather than a ceiling. What it does is turn a subjective question into a checkable one, and there are very few of those available to you at this stage.
The questions that separate shops
Quotes are not comparable until you have normalised them, and most buyers spend their first three calls collecting numbers that measure different things. Five questions do nearly all of the sorting.
What is in the base price, system by system?
Ask for it in writing as battery amp hours, solar watts, fresh and grey water gallons, heater make and model, and whether the fridge is a compressor unit or a cool box. Two shops quoting $65,000 can differ by 400Ah of lithium and 300W of solar, which is a $6,000 gap sitting invisibly inside identical headline numbers.
A shop that will not commit system specs to paper has answered a more important question than the one you asked. Either it has not costed the build properly, in which case the number will move later, or it intends to specify downward once your deposit has cleared.
What is the queue, and separately, what is the build time?
These are two different numbers and the first is usually the larger. Almost every article on this subject quotes six to twelve weeks and lets readers hear delivery date, when six to twelve weeks is bench time only. A four month build behind a nine month queue puts keys in your hand in thirteen months.
Ask when your slot starts, what the target completion date is, and, separately again, the date your deposit stops being refundable. That third date frequently falls when the queue begins rather than when the build does, which is months before anybody touches your van. The gap between quoted build time and actual delivery is the single biggest source of frustration in commissioning a conversion, and it is entirely avoidable by asking two questions instead of one.
What is your change order policy and rate?
Nobody else asks this and it is the mechanism by which a fixed quote becomes an unfixed one. You want three things: the hourly rate for changed work, the markup applied to parts, and the point in the schedule after which changes are refused outright rather than priced.
A shop that has thought about it has a written policy, because it has been burned before. A shop that has not will invent one in month four, at your expense, while holding your vehicle.
What does the warranty cover and who honours it?
One to three years is typical on workmanship. The detail that matters is whether appliances are covered by the shop or passed straight through to their manufacturers, whether warranty work requires you to return to the shop, and what happens when the heater fails 2,000 miles away in February.
Shops with a partner network or manufacturer accreditation can dispatch this remotely. Most cannot, and a warranty that requires a 1,800 mile drive is a warranty you will not use.
Can I talk to two customers from last year?
The most useful question on the list, and the one that produces the most informative silence. A confident shop agrees immediately and usually offers three.
When you get the numbers, do not ask whether they liked the van. Ask what went wrong and how the shop responded, because something always goes wrong and the response is the actual product you are buying. Ask how many miles are on it now and whether anything has come loose. A van at 30,000 miles has been shaken on a scale a shop tour cannot simulate.
Is the quote sane? Check it against the market
A quote in isolation is meaningless. You cannot tell whether $88,000 is fair without knowing what the rest of the market charges, and until now nobody published that. We track published pricing for 46 US shops, so here is the distribution your number sits inside.
| Percentile | Starting price | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| 25th | $35,000 | The accessible end. Catalogue layouts, modest power, no bathroom |
| 50th | $58,000 | The middle of the US market. A quote near here is unremarkable |
| 75th | $115,000 | Premium territory. Expect design time and engineered systems |
| Median top of range | $130,000 | What the typical shop's flagship build costs |
Two things fall out of that. First, the median shop's own range spans roughly 2x from its cheapest build to its most expensive, so a shop quoting you $60,000 probably also builds at $120,000 and the version you are being shown may not be the version you are being quoted. Ask which end of their range your spec sits at.
Second, a quote well outside the band for its stated spec deserves a question rather than a celebration. A $30,000 quote for a heated, plumbed, 400Ah build is not a bargain, it is a shop that has either misunderstood the brief or intends to charge the difference later. Knowing what each tier of build actually costs is what turns a suspiciously low number into a specific question you can put to the shop.
What deposit is normal
No trade body publishes a standard, so the ranges below come from payment schedules that shops in our directory publish themselves. They are what the market does, not a rule anybody enforces.
| Stage | Typical amount | What you should have in return |
|---|---|---|
| Design deposit | $1,000 to $5,000 | Drawings, a spec sheet, and a dated queue position |
| Slot deposit | 25% to 50% | A written start date and a completion target |
| Progress payments | 2 to 4 milestones | Photographs at each stage, tied to named work |
| Final balance | On collection | A handover walkthrough and every appliance manual |
Above 50% before any work starts is outside what the market normally does, and it moves essentially all of the risk onto you. A shop asking for it is telling you something about its cash position. Pay deposits by credit card wherever the shop allows it, because a card charge carries dispute rights that a wire transfer does not, and the fee is trivial against the exposure.
Warning signs worth walking away from
| Signal | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| No physical address or shop photographs | Broker, subcontractor, or very early stage |
| Will not itemise systems in the quote | Improvising the spec, or hiding it |
| Pressure to deposit today for a discount | A cash flow problem wearing a sales tactic |
| No written change order policy | You will negotiate it mid-build from a weak position |
| Refuses to connect you with past customers | There is a reason |
| Deposit above 50% before work starts | Outside market norms, and you carry all of the risk |
| Quote arrives with no lead time attached | The queue is longer than they want to say |
| Wire transfer or cash only | You give up every dispute right you had |
Matching the shop to the build
The best shop in the country is the wrong shop if it does not build what you want. Three axes decide fit, and they matter more than reputation.
Chassis. Shops specialise, and the specialism is visible in the work. A shop that has built two hundred ProMasters has already solved problems on that van that a generalist will meet for the first time on yours. The geometry is genuinely different: the ProMaster's near-vertical walls and low flat floor let cabinetry be cut square rather than scribed to fit, which is labour nobody has to charge you for, and it is why shops that specialise in it cluster at the accessible end. Sprinter specialists sit highest, with a median starting price of $65,000 against $50,000 for shops working on the Transit.
Tier. A shop whose median build is $150,000 will not do good work at $50,000 and will usually decline politely. Calling outside your tier wastes a fortnight. The sharpest illustration in our data: the seven shops that build on the Sprinter and nothing else have a median starting price of $115,000, against $58,000 across the whole directory. That is not a chassis effect, it is a selection effect, because going deep on one platform is a decision shops make at the premium end.
Custom against catalogue. Some shops build one layout very well and sell it repeatedly. Others draw from scratch. The first is cheaper, faster and lower risk, and for most buyers it is the correct answer. The second is worth its premium when you have a genuine constraint a standard layout cannot solve, and the shops doing genuinely bespoke work are a small and identifiable group rather than everyone who uses the word.
One check worth running on the chassis itself before anybody cuts into it: put the VIN through the federal recall lookup. An open recall on a van that is about to disappear into a shop for nine months is far cheaper to clear beforehand.
Why travelling for a build usually pays
Most buyers call shops within two hours of home and stop there. If your local market is thin, that single habit costs more than any negotiation will recover.
Market depth suppresses price far more reliably than geography raises it. Colorado's fifteen listed shops produce a median starting price of $55,000. Oregon, with four listed shops and a premium-heavy mix, sits at $120,000. That is not because Oregon labour costs twice as much.
Flying out to collect and driving home costs a few hundred dollars against a spread that runs into tens of thousands. The one thing distance genuinely costs you is warranty convenience, so ask how a fault is handled when you are three states away before you decide it is not a problem. A shop with manufacturer accreditation or a partner network can answer that. A shop without one will say bring it back.
Key takeaways
- Verify address, trading history and any claimed certification before the first call. It takes an afternoon.
- Check manufacturer upfitter accreditation. Ford and Mercedes-Benz both publish theirs, and Mercedes-accredited work carries a 3 year, 36,000 mile warranty.
- Get systems in writing: amp hours, solar watts, water gallons, heater model.
- Queue and build time are different numbers. So is the date your deposit stops being refundable.
- The median US starting price is $58,000, with a quarter of shops under $35,000 and a quarter above $115,000. Place your quote in that distribution before accepting it.
- Deposits above 50% before work starts are outside market norms. Pay by card where you can.
- Match shop to chassis and tier. Sprinter-only shops start at a $115,000 median for reasons of selection, not quality.
- Travel if your local market is thin. Depth of choice is what suppresses price.