How Much Does It Cost to Buy an Existing RV Park?

August 18, 2026 · RV park investing, explained

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A small RV park with 20 to 50 sites and basic hookups typically sells for $500,000 to $2 million. A mid-size park with 50 to 150 sites runs $2 million to $8 million. A larger resort-style property with 150-plus sites, a pool, cabins, and heavy amenities can run $8 million to $25 million or more. The spread inside each range comes down to location, occupancy mix, and how much of the infrastructure is actually functional versus patched together.

What you need

• Trailing 12-month profit and loss statement, plus 2-3 years of tax returns if the seller will share them
• Site count broken out by type: full hookup RV, partial hookup, tent, park model, cabin
• Occupancy history split between transient (nightly/weekly) and monthly or annual guests
• Utility setup: submetered to each site or included in the rate
• Total land size and whether there's room to add sites or amenities
• Condition notes on septic or sewer, water lines, electrical amp service, and interior roads
• A handful of comparable sales in the region, ideally from a broker who tracks campground and RV park deals specifically
• An idea of your financing: SBA, conventional commercial, or seller financing, and what down payment each requires

Step by step

1. Run the price-per-site number. Divide the asking price by the total site count. Basic parks with older infrastructure and no amenities often land in the $15,000 to $40,000 per site range. Resort-style parks with strong amenities, waterfront, or high nightly rates can push $40,000 to $80,000 or more per site. This is a sanity check, not a final valuation, but it tells you fast if a price is in the right neighborhood for the asset type.
2. Recast the income and back into a cap rate. Take the seller's P&L and strip out one-time expenses, owner's personal costs, and any below-market management fees. That gives you a cleaner net operating income (NOI). Divide NOI by the asking price to get the implied cap rate. RV parks generally trade in the 7% to 10% cap rate range, with well-run, amenity-rich parks in strong markets trading tighter and rougher, more seasonal parks trading wider. If the implied cap rate looks too good to be true, check the NOI assumptions again.
3. Price the deferred maintenance gap. Walk the property or hire someone to walk it for you. Septic systems that need replacing can run $100,000 to $300,000 depending on size and soil conditions. Upgrading electrical service across a park from 30-amp to 50-amp pedestals can cost several thousand dollars per site once you add labor and panel work. Road resurfacing, water line replacement, and drainage fixes all add up. Whatever this comes to, treat it as a subtraction from your offer, not a future problem to deal with later.
4. Stress test the price against real financing terms. Take the recast NOI, subtract realistic debt service at current rates with a 15% to 30% down payment, and see what's left. If the property barely breaks even or goes negative at the asking price, either the price needs to come down, the NOI needs to grow, or the deal doesn't work at your required return. This step catches deals that look fine on a spreadsheet but don't survive contact with an actual loan.

Where this goes wrong

The most common mistake is pricing off gross revenue instead of net operating income. Two parks can post the same top-line number and have wildly different profitability once you account for utility costs, labor, and deferred maintenance. Buyers who anchor on revenue multiples instead of NOI tend to overpay.

Sellers sometimes hand over a "pro forma" that shows what the park could earn with higher rates or better management, instead of what it actually earned. That pro forma is a sales tool, not a financial statement. Base your offer on trailing actuals and treat upside as a bonus, not a given.

Small parks, especially seasonal ones, are often run as cash businesses with thin or inconsistent bookkeeping. Verifying real income takes more digging: utility bills, occupancy logs, booking platform records, even local tourism tax filings if the market has a bed tax. Skipping this step means you're valuing the business on numbers nobody can confirm.

Buyers also sometimes borrow cap rate comps from a different asset class, usually mobile home parks or small hotels, because that's what their broker or lender is used to. Mobile home park cap rates and RV park cap rates don't move together, since the income mix, tenant turnover, and capital needs are different. A comp from the wrong asset class will steer your offer in the wrong direction.

Finally, underestimating infrastructure costs is the classic way a decent-looking deal turns into a money pit. A park that looks fully occupied and profitable can still be sitting on a septic system near the end of its life or electrical service that won't meet code for an insurance renewal. Those costs don't show up in a P&L until the year they hit.

When to stop and call someone

Once you have a price range you're comfortable with, bring in a commercial appraiser who has actually valued campgrounds or RV parks before. General commercial appraisers sometimes default to hotel or multifamily methodology, which doesn't fit this asset type well.

Get a Phase I environmental assessment before you close, especially on older properties with legacy septic systems, old fuel tanks, or a history of other uses on the land. This is standard due diligence, not overkill, and most lenders will require it anyway.

A broker or consultant who specializes in RV park and campground transactions is worth the fee for comp data alone. They see deals that never hit public listing sites and know which markets are trading at tighter or wider cap rates right now.

Loop in a CPA to review the recast financials before you finalize an offer, and a real estate attorney to handle the purchase agreement, title work, and any easement or utility access issues. If you're financing through the SBA, get pre-qualified early, since SBA underwriting has its own view of valuation and eligible use of funds that can affect how the deal gets structured.

If you want a closer look at how these numbers play out across real markets and property types, that's the kind of thing we walk through regularly at Invest With Zac.