How to Evaluate an RV Park's Competitive Set Before Investing

October 11, 2026 · RV park investing, explained

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This is for anyone looking at an RV park deal who wants to know if the number on the pro forma is realistic or wishful. Doing this well takes a few hours of desk research plus a day or two of driving, and it will change your rent assumptions more than almost anything else in underwriting. Skip it and you're guessing at occupancy and rate, which are the two numbers that make or break the return.

What you need

• A map tool (Google Maps or similar) and a spreadsheet
• Access to directories: Campendium, Good Sam, KOA, The Dyrt, RV Park Reviews, and your state campground association's member list
• County assessor or GIS site for the target market, to pull parcel size and ownership on nearby parks
• Google reviews and photos for each competitor, going back at least 2 to 3 years
• Local visitor bureau or chamber of commerce occupancy or visitation stats, if the area publishes any
• A rate sheet from the seller's park and from as many competitors as you can get, by site type (back-in, pull-through, full hookup, monthly, long-term)
• A full day, ideally two, to physically drive the competitive set

Step by step

1. Set the real radius. Forget mileage circles. RV travelers and long-term residents think in drive time and route logic. For an interstate overnight park, the competitive set is usually anything within 15 to 20 minutes of the same exit or the next one or two exits in either direction. For a destination park near a lake, trailhead, or attraction, the radius can stretch to 30 to 45 minutes because people are driving there on purpose, not just stopping for the night. For a park that leans on long-term and workforce stays, the radius is defined by commute distance to the job base, often 20 to 30 minutes.
2. Build the list, then cut it down. Pull every campground, RV park, and resort in the radius from the directories above. Then remove anything that isn't actually competing for the same guest. A primitive tent campground with 10 non-electric sites is not competing with a 100-site full-hookup park chasing Class A rigs and long-term tenants. A city-run park with a six-month waiting list and below-market rates distorts the picture but doesn't take walk-up demand from you either. You want a final list of maybe 5 to 12 parks that a guest would genuinely cross-shop against the subject property.
3. Score each one on the same scale. For every park on your final list, record site count, mix of site types, average nightly and monthly rate, amenities (pool, laundry, dog park, pickleball, wifi quality, cable, full hookups vs partial), site size and pull-through availability, age and condition of infrastructure, and review trend over the last two to three years. A park with falling review scores and visible deferred maintenance is losing share even if it looks full on an aggregator map. Put all of this in one spreadsheet so you can sort by rate, by amenity count, by review score.
4. Synthesize into a position, not just a list. The goal is a one-paragraph answer to: where does the subject property sit in this set, and why would a guest pick it over the alternatives. If the subject is the oldest park with the lowest amenity count and mid-pack rates, that tells you there's upside if a renovation budget exists, or it tells you the current pro forma rate growth assumption is unrealistic without capital. If the subject already has the best amenities and highest rates in the set, that caps how much rent growth is left and shifts the thesis toward occupancy and operations instead of a rate story.

Where this goes wrong

The most common mistake is treating every campground within 50 miles as a comparable. In rural markets especially, that produces a long list of parks that have nothing to do with the subject's actual guest. A truck-stop style overnight park 40 miles down the interstate is not competition for a destination resort park near a state park entrance. Lumping them together either makes the market look oversupplied when it isn't, or masks real competition that's much closer and more relevant.

Second is ignoring seasonality and park type. Some competitors close for the winter, some are membership-only or age-restricted, some cap stays at 14 days and can't hold the long-term tenants the subject relies on for base occupancy. If you don't account for these differences, your supply count is wrong and your rate comparisons are apples to oranges.

Third is pulling rates once and assuming they're current. RV park rates move seasonally and sometimes change mid-year without the website being updated. A rate pulled in January for a park that does most of its business in summer can be stale by the time you close. Call or email a couple of the competitors directly, or check archived versions of their site, to confirm the rate you're using reflects current peak-season pricing, not an off-season number.

Fourth, and this one costs real money, is skipping the drive-by. Photos and reviews online lag reality by months or years. A park that looks sharp in its listing photos might have a half-empty lot, a broken pool, or a for-sale sign out front by the time you actually visit. You cannot judge true condition, true occupancy on a random Tuesday, or the actual feel of a property from a screen. Drive the competitive set in person before you finalize an offer. It routinely changes investors' read on both occupancy potential and the renovation budget needed to compete.

Fifth is anchoring too hard on one or two comps that happen to be easy to find data on, usually the big branded parks, and ignoring smaller independent parks that quietly take the same guest. Independents often don't show up prominently in searches but can hold meaningful site counts and loyal repeat business, especially for long-term and seasonal stays.

When to stop and call someone

This framework gets you a solid, informed read on the competitive landscape, and for most single-asset deals under roughly $3 to $5 million, a careful self-conducted version of this analysis is usually enough alongside the rest of your underwriting. Where you should bring in a professional is when the deal size justifies a formal third-party market and feasibility study, typically for larger acquisitions, ground-up development, or anything involving a lender who requires an independent study as a loan condition. These studies, often run by firms that specialize in hospitality or campground feasibility, use proprietary visitation data, traffic counts, and demographic modeling that goes beyond what a spreadsheet and a road trip can produce.

Also bring in a local commercial real estate broker or a campground-specific broker if you're entering a market you don't know well. They often have unwritten knowledge of which parks are struggling, which owners are quietly thinking about selling, and which competitors have permits pending for expansion that won't show up in any directory yet. That kind of forward-looking intelligence is hard to replicate from a desk, and it can materially change how you underwrite supply risk.

If you want a sense of how this competitive analysis fits into a full underwriting process for RV park investments, Invest With Zac covers that alongside the rest of the deal evaluation framework.