Best States for RV Park Investing in 2025

August 15, 2026 · RV park investing, explained

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Some states have the population growth, drive-to tourism, and site economics that make RV park investing pencil out. Others look good on paper but are already crowded or hard to permit in. Here is where the numbers line up right now, and how to tell the difference.

Which states keep showing up on serious investors' shortlists?

Texas, Florida, Arizona, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Utah come up again and again. These states combine strong in-migration, mild-to-warm shoulder seasons, and camping demand that has outpaced new supply for most of the last five years. None of them are secret. That means you need a reason beyond the state name, usually a specific county or corridor with weaker competition.

What actually makes a state good for RV park investing, beyond population growth?

Look at season length, proximity to national or state parks and lakes, highway and interstate access, and how friendly local zoning is toward campground development. A state can have great weather and still be a poor bet if every county requires a conditional use permit and a two-year approval process. Regulatory friction is often the bigger filter than climate.

Are the popular Sunbelt states getting overcrowded with investor capital?

In the top-tier markets, yes. Cap rates in the most obvious Texas and Florida submarkets have compressed noticeably over the past few years as more capital chased the same well-known parks. That does not mean the states are bad, it means the easy deals are gone. Investors are increasingly pushed into secondary counties within these states, an hour or two outside the obvious tourist hubs, where supply is thinner and sellers are less sophisticated.

What about colder states with strong outdoor recreation, like Michigan, Wisconsin, or Montana?

These can work, but the model is different. The season is shorter, often five to seven months of strong occupancy instead of nine to twelve, so the property needs to earn enough in that window to carry the year, or the operator needs a secondary revenue stream like storage, cabins, or off-season events. These states tend to have less investor competition, which can offset the shorter season if the underwriting is honest about it.

Which states should an investor be cautious about right now?

California and much of the Northeast carry higher regulatory cost and slower entitlement timelines, which raises the bar for a deal to work. In some fast-growing Sunbelt counties, new supply has caught up with demand faster than population growth, so it is worth checking recent permit activity before assuming a market is undersupplied. A state's reputation from three years ago is not always its reality today.

How does a reader go from a shortlist of states to an actual property?

State-level filtering gets you to a handful of regions worth a closer look. From there, the real work is county-level: traffic counts on the access road, population within a two-hour drive, existing campground supply and their review scores, and whether local zoning actually allows expansion. A great state with a saturated county is a bad deal. A so-so state with an undersupplied corridor can be a very good one.

Still stuck?

If you have a state or region in mind and want a second opinion on whether the fundamentals hold up, that is a conversation worth having before you start touring parks. Invest With Zac works through exactly this kind of market screening with investors on a regular basis.