RV Park Feasibility Study

The Market: Maturing at a Higher Plateau

The RV park and campground sector entered the current decade on a powerful tailwind and has since settled into a more durable phase. Industry revenue reached roughly 10.9 billion dollars in 2025, after several years of strong growth from the pandemic-era travel surge, and forecasts point to steadier expansion of around 2 percent a year through 2030, reaching an estimated 11.9 billion dollars. The important point for an underwriter is not the headline number but the quality of the revenue behind it: the post-2020 surge permanently reset the baseline, and even as growth slows it slows at a higher plateau. This is a maturing asset class, not a cooling one.

The demand fundamentals support that read. A typical RV park operates at roughly 60 to 70 percent annual occupancy, with utilization spiking toward 100 percent in peak summer months at popular destinations, and the installed base of more than 11 million RV-owning households provides momentum that does not depend on new buyers. Demand has run ahead of supply, with a majority of campers reporting difficulty finding available sites in recent peak seasons, and operators have demonstrated real pricing power, with a large share raising main-season rates year over year and still holding strong occupancy. The industry remains highly fragmented, with roughly 90 percent of parks owned by operators with fewer than five properties and national brands franchising only a fraction of total sites, which leaves room for both consolidation and professionalization. That professionalization is the defining trend: parks increasingly run on hotel-style revenue management, with dynamic pricing, modern reservation systems, and amenity investment, from full hookups and reliable high-speed Wi-Fi to pools, pickleball, dog parks, and cabin rentals, that lift both occupancy and rate. Each of these forces shapes how a new project should be positioned and underwritten.

What an RV Park Feasibility Study Analyzes

A credible study is built from the trade area outward and translated into hospitality metrics. The starting point is demand, defined by the specific drivers that bring guests to the site: tourism visitation patterns, proximity to natural attractions measured against National Park Service and state tourism data, commercial activity such as energy, agricultural, or construction work that generates longer-stay demand, and seasonal population flows. Against that demand base, the study surveys the competitive set, identifying the genuine competitors rather than simply the nearest parks, and benchmarking them on occupancy, average daily rate, and revenue per available site, the same metrics a hotel analyst would use. It then segments demand, separating overnight corridor travelers, destination leisure guests, workforce stays, snowbird extended stays, and group business, and projects a capture rate for each, because a park's realistic share differs sharply by segment.

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From there the analysis builds the revenue and coverage conclusion. It decomposes demand by month to capture seasonality, projects occupancy and rate by site type, and layers in the ancillary revenue that materially affects a campground's economics, the camp store, propane, laundry, cabin and park-model rentals, and event or amenity fees. It builds an operating expense model grounded in actual campground cost structures rather than a hotel template, and it resolves into a multi-year pro forma with the net operating income available to service debt, the debt service coverage the lender tests, and sensitivity analysis that stresses seasonality, a downturn in attraction visitation, and the effect of fuel prices on RV travel demand. The study also evaluates site suitability in detail, because a campground is constrained by its land: parcel size and topography, access, the adequacy of electrical, water, and wastewater capacity, zoning posture, and environmental factors including flood and wetland constraints and on-site septic and well permitting. Utility and wastewater capacity in particular is a frequent point a lender or a federal reviewer challenges.

The RevPAR-and-Seasonality Test

The single most important analytical discipline in an RV park study is that the asset runs on hospitality metrics under heavy seasonal concentration, and the annual figures can hide the risk. Revenue per available site, the product of average daily rate and occupancy, is the cleanest measure of how hard each site works, and it is where conservative assumptions matter most, because a modest overstatement of either occupancy or rate compounds across every site and every night. But the deeper issue is seasonality. RV demand in most markets is sharply seasonal, with peak summer months carrying 80 to 95 percent occupancy and shoulder and off-season months dropping materially, and in many markets the off-season cannot cover monthly operating costs and debt service on its own. A study that reports a comfortable annual coverage ratio while ignoring the monthly pattern is hiding exactly the risk a lender needs to see.

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This is why the demand segmentation matters financially, not just descriptively. Workforce demand, from energy, agricultural, healthcare, and construction activity, tends to be longer-stay and year-round, and snowbird demand fills southern markets from late fall through early spring, and both stabilize revenue against the seasonal leisure pattern. A park whose business plan depends entirely on summer leisure travel is a riskier loan than one with a workforce or snowbird base carrying the shoulder and off seasons. A feasibility study earns its keep by reading revenue per available site, the monthly seasonality decomposition, and the segment mix together, and by showing whether the off-peak revenue can carry the property through its low season.

Worked Example: Revenue, Coverage, and the Seasonality Stress

The following example shows how the revenue and coverage analysis comes together, and why seasonality is the test that matters. The market ranges referenced above are verified; the specific inputs here, the rate, the occupancy, the expense ratio, the project cost, and the interest rate, are illustrative and chosen to demonstrate the arithmetic.

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Assume a 100-site RV park. The study projects a blended average daily rate of 52 dollars across site types and a stabilized annual occupancy of 62 percent, within the typical 60 to 70 percent range. Revenue per available site is therefore 52 dollars times 62 percent, or 32.24 dollars per site per night. Across 100 sites and 365 nights, site revenue is 32.24 times 100 times 365, which is about 1,177,000 dollars. Ancillary revenue from the store, propane, laundry, cabins, and fees, modeled at roughly 12 percent of site revenue, adds about 141,000 dollars, for total revenue of approximately 1,318,000 dollars.

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Operating expenses for a campground, modeled at about 60 percent of revenue, are roughly 791,000 dollars, leaving net operating income of about 527,000 dollars. Now the financing. Assume a total project cost of 4,000,000 dollars funded with 800,000 dollars of borrower equity and a 3,200,000 dollar loan, that is 80 percent loan-to-cost, at a fixed rate of 9.5 percent on a 25-year amortization. The annual debt service on that loan is approximately 335,500 dollars. The stabilized debt service coverage ratio is therefore 527,000 divided by 335,500, or about 1.57x, which looks comfortably bankable.

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Here is where the seasonality test changes the picture. That 1.57x is an annual average. If the park earns 85 to 95 percent occupancy across four summer months and only 30 to 40 percent across the off-season, the summer surplus is carrying the year, and several off-season months may not cover the roughly 27,960 dollars of monthly debt service on their own. A lender will want to see that the property has the reserves, or the workforce and snowbird demand, to bridge those months. Then apply the downside. Suppose a fuel-price spike and a soft travel year pull stabilized occupancy down by 10 points, from 62 to 52 percent. Site revenue falls to about 987,000 dollars and total revenue to about 1,105,000 dollars, and because a large share of a campground's operating costs are fixed, net operating income compresses disproportionately, to roughly 365,000 dollars. The coverage ratio falls to 365,000 divided by 335,500, or about 1.09x, below the 1.15x most lenders want and with almost no margin. The same park, a 10-point occupancy swing, and a very different verdict. That sensitivity is precisely why an RV park study has to be built on conservative, evidence-based occupancy and rate assumptions, and why the seasonality decomposition is not optional.