What Cap Rate Is Normal for RV Park Investments?

August 18, 2026 · RV park investing, explained

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Cap rate questions cause more confusion in RV park investing than almost anything else, because buyers walk in with a number in their head from a different asset class. Someone spent years buying apartments or triple net retail, they know what "normal" looks like there, and they try to apply that same yardstick to a 60-site park in a small town. The number that comes back doesn't match, and they assume either the deal is broken or the broker is lying. Usually neither is true. RV parks just price differently, for reasons that make sense once you see them.

"RV parks should trade at the same cap rate as apartments"

This is the most common one. Apartments in a lot of markets trade in the 4% to 6% range, sometimes tighter. RV parks generally do not. Most stabilized parks today trade somewhere between 7% and 10%, with well located resort-style parks near a metro or a strong drive-to destination sometimes pricing down toward 6% to 7%, and older, rural, or long-term/workforce-heavy parks often pricing at 10% or higher. The kernel of truth in the myth is that both are real estate with a cap rate attached. But RV parks carry more operational intensity, thinner buyer pools, more seasonality in a lot of markets, and less institutional debt liquidity than apartments. Lenders and buyers price all of that into a higher required return, which shows up as a higher cap rate.

"A lower cap rate always means a better deal"

People hear a low cap rate and assume it means the property is high quality, or that the seller is being generous. Sometimes that's true. Often it means the broker's pro forma NOI is optimistic, or the in-place income includes one-time items that won't repeat, or the market is genuinely hot and buyers are accepting compressed yield for growth potential. A 6% cap rate on real, trailing twelve month NOI in a strong market can be a fine deal. A 6% cap rate built off a broker's projected NOI that assumes rate increases, occupancy gains, and expense cuts that haven't happened yet is a different animal wearing the same number. The cap rate itself doesn't tell you which one you're looking at. You have to open up the NOI calculation before the number means anything.

"There's one national cap rate for RV parks"

This shows up in casual conversation a lot: "RV parks are an 8 cap right now." That's a shorthand, not a fact, and treating it as a fact will get a buyer in trouble. Cap rates vary by park type, and destination resort parks with cabins, glamping, and high seasonal ADRs price differently than long-term or workforce-heavy parks with month-to-month tenants. They vary by market, since a park thirty minutes from a national park or a lake draws different buyer demand than one off an interstate exit in a market nobody is trying to move to. They vary by size, since a 200-site park with real management infrastructure trades differently than a 25-site mom-and-pop that one person runs from a golf cart. Quoting a single national number flattens all of that into something that isn't useful for sanity-checking a specific deal.

What actually matters instead

Skip the search for a single correct cap rate and focus on three things instead.

• How was the NOI built? Ask specifically whether it's trailing twelve month actuals, a broker projection, or some blend. A cap rate on a projection is really a promise, not a measurement.
• What are comparable sales doing in the same sub-market and park type? A cap rate only means something next to similar deals nearby. A resort park sale two states away tells you very little about a long-term park in your target market.
• What's the spread over debt cost? If the cap rate is close to or below the interest rate on the debt you'd use to buy it, the deal likely depends on rent growth or expense reduction to pencil, not on current income. That's not automatically bad, but it's a different bet than a deal that cash flows on day one at a healthy spread over the loan rate.

Ranges are useful as a gut check, not as a pricing tool. Somewhere in the 7% to 10% band is a reasonable starting expectation for a lot of stabilized RV parks today, with real markets pushing tighter or wider depending on location, park type, and how clean the income actually is. If a deal comes in far outside that range in either direction, that's the signal to dig into the NOI and the comps before you dig into anything else. At Invest With Zac, that kind of underwriting checkpoint is usually where the real conversation about a deal begins, not the cap rate headline itself.