An RV park is one of the most misunderstood asset classes in commercial real estate lending. From a distance it looks simple — gravel pads, utility pedestals, a bathhouse, perhaps a small store — and that simplicity is what gets sponsors and lenders into trouble. The economic engine of an RV park is not the dirt or the improvements. It is the interaction between site mix, seasonal demand, length-of-stay distribution, and ancillary revenue, and none of that is visible from a site walk or a tax map. The role of an RV park feasibility study consultant is to make that interaction legible to a credit committee that has likely never underwritten the asset class before.
On a conventional hotel the consultant has STR data, brand-standard development costs, and decades of comparable transactions to anchor the analysis. On an RV park feasibility study none of that infrastructure exists at the same depth. KOA and ARVC publish useful industry-level benchmarks, but no syndicated daily occupancy feed tracks the 9,000-plus private campgrounds and RV parks in the United States. The consultant has to build the demand picture from primary research — competitor interviews, state tourism data, traffic counts, registration trends, and visitor patterns at nearby public lands — and defend each input in writing. That primary research is the single largest difference between a study a lender accepts and a study a lender returns with conditions.
Translating a site into a revenue model
The first analytical decision the consultant makes is site mix. An RV park is not a uniform inventory of pads; it is a portfolio of full-hookup pull-through sites, full-hookup back-in sites, partial-hookup sites, tent sites, cabins, and increasingly park-model rentals. Each unit type has a different nightly rate, a different occupancy curve, a different length-of-stay distribution, and a different capital cost per pad. A destination resort with 40 percent cabin and park-model inventory looks nothing like a pass-through corridor park with 90 percent back-in full-hookup sites, even if the two parks have the same total site count.
The consultant builds the site mix from the bottom up by reconciling three constraints: what the site will physically accommodate given setbacks, utility capacity, and topography; what the trade-area demand will actually absorb at the proposed rate structure; and what the lender's program requires for collateral. SBA 7(a) and 504 underwriting treats cabins and park models as personal property in some configurations and as real property in others, and that distinction changes the loan-to-cost calculation. A consultant who specifies a 30 percent cabin mix without flagging the collateral consequence is doing half the job.
Seasonality, length of stay, and the occupancy curve
Hotels report occupancy as an annual percentage because their demand, while seasonal, is relatively continuous. RV parks cannot be modeled that way. A park in the upper Midwest may run 85 percent occupancy from Memorial Day through Labor Day, 30 percent in the shoulder months, and close entirely from November through March. A park in central Florida inverts the curve. A park on Interstate 40 between Albuquerque and Amarillo runs a different curve again, driven by pass-through traffic rather than destination demand.
The consultant builds the occupancy projection month by month, not as an annual average, and ties each month to a defensible source: competitor occupancy interviews for the same month a year earlier, state-park visitation data, fuel-station traffic counts on adjacent corridors, or a national park's published visitor statistics. The monthly build matters because debt service is continuous and operating expenses are largely fixed. A park that averages 55 percent occupancy on an annual basis but earns 80 percent of its revenue in four months has a very different cash-flow risk profile than a park that earns the same revenue spread evenly across the year.
Length-of-stay distribution layers on top of seasonality. A park with a high share of monthly tenants has predictable cash flow but lower effective ADR and higher utility cost recovery complexity. A park with a high share of nightly tenants has higher ADR but more turnover labor, more reservation system cost, and more exposure to weather and fuel-price shocks. The consultant has to choose a mix that the trade area will support and that the operator can execute, then defend the choice with comparable-park data.
Ancillary revenue and the all-in revenue model
Site-night revenue is usually 70 to 85 percent of total revenue at a well-run RV park. The rest comes from a long tail of ancillary lines: the camp store, propane, firewood, laundry, ice, golf-cart rentals, activity fees, pet fees, premium site upcharges, and increasingly electric-vehicle and pet-wash services. Each ancillary line has its own margin profile, and a few — propane and firewood in particular — can swing a small park's net operating income by several percentage points.
A consultant who lumps ancillary revenue into a single percentage of site-night revenue is producing a projection that will not survive credit review. The lender's underwriter is going to ask which ancillary lines are included, what the take rate is per occupied site night, and what the cost-of-goods assumption is for each. The consultant builds those lines individually, benchmarks them against comparable parks, and stress tests them in the sensitivity analysis. The result is a revenue model the underwriter can audit line by line rather than a single blended number that has to be taken on faith.
Capital cost, phasing, and the absorption schedule
RV park capital cost varies more than almost any other asset class the consultant covers. A pass-through park with gravel pads, 30-amp service, and a small bathhouse may come in under $35,000 per site all-in. A destination resort with concrete pads, 50-amp service, a pool, an activity center, cabins, and a full amenity program can exceed $90,000 per site. The consultant's role is not to estimate costs in place of the civil engineer or general contractor, but to test whether the sponsor's cost budget is consistent with the rate structure and absorption schedule the projection assumes.
Phasing is where consultants earn their fee on larger projects. A 200-site park built in a single phase exposes the sponsor to absorption risk during the stabilization period. A 200-site park phased 80, 60, 60 over three years matches capital to demand and reduces the trough in early-year cash flow. The consultant tests both scenarios, identifies the inflection point at which phasing improves the debt-service-coverage profile enough to justify the higher per-site cost of phased construction, and presents the trade-off to the sponsor and lender in writing.
Operator capability and the management section
SBA SOP 50 10 8 explicitly requires the feasibility study to address management capability for special-use properties, and RV parks fall squarely inside that requirement. USDA B&I and Community Facilities reviewers ask the same question in different language. The consultant evaluates the operator's prior RV park or hospitality experience, reservation system selection, staffing model, marketing approach, and revenue management practices, and writes a candid assessment.
The candid assessment matters. A study that praises every operator regardless of experience teaches lenders to ignore the management section, which then teaches them to ignore the rest of the study. A consultant who writes that a first-time operator has a credible plan because they have hired an experienced general manager and contracted with a national reservation platform — and who writes the opposite when the plan does not hold up — builds the credibility that gets future studies through credit committee without conditions.
Sensitivity analysis and the lender's stress case
Every lender-grade RV park projection includes a sensitivity analysis, and the consultant chooses the variables that actually drive the downside. For most parks those variables are peak-season occupancy, shoulder-season occupancy, blended ADR, and ancillary revenue per occupied site night. The consultant runs the projection at minus 10 and minus 20 percent on each, in isolation and in combination, and reports the resulting debt-service-coverage ratio and debt yield against the lender's program thresholds.
SBA and USDA reviewers typically want to see a stress case that holds DSCR above 1.15x; conventional bank and CMBS lenders want higher. The consultant's job is not to engineer the projection to clear those thresholds — that is the path to a study the lender returns — but to identify honestly where the project sits relative to each program and to recommend structural changes (lower loan amount, longer interest-only period, phased construction) when the projection does not clear.
How the consultant ties the study to the financing decision
The closing section of a well-written RV park feasibility study is the statement of economic feasibility, and it is the section the lender reads first. The consultant states whether, in their professional opinion, the project is economically feasible under the assumptions and methodology disclosed in the study, and ties that opinion to the specific loan program under review. A study commissioned for an SBA 504 transaction that does not address SBA's special-use and management requirements is incomplete. A study commissioned for a USDA B&I transaction that does not address rural eligibility and job creation is incomplete. The consultant who writes both kinds of studies routinely builds the cross-program awareness into the report from the first page.
For sponsors evaluating which consultant to engage, the test is straightforward: ask to see a redacted RV park study, read the methodology disclosures, and look for primary research that names competitor parks and interview dates. Ask how the consultant handled the most recent SBA SOP cycle. Ask whether the consultant has worked with the specific USDA state office that will review the file. The answers will separate the consultants who treat RV parks as a specialty from the consultants who treat them as a checkbox.
For a fuller treatment of the methodology, site-mix planning, and lender matrix, see the RV park feasibility study service page, the SBA SOP 50 10 8 guide, and the feasibility study cost reference.