The Pool Does Not Pay for Itself. The Cabin Next to It Does.

Franchise disclosures, REIT filings, 609,863 published booking prices and a stack of construction and insurance quotes point the same way: amenities do not fill an RV park. They reprice it. Here is what that means for the pro forma, and for the DSCR a lender will read off it.

The question that arrives with every RV park deck

Somewhere in the second or third call on an RV park feasibility engagement, the borrower asks about the pool. Sometimes it is a splash pad, sometimes a clubhouse with a pickleball court behind it, occasionally a lazy river that a broker has promised will "make the property a destination." The question underneath is always the same: if I spend this money, will the park fill up?

The answer, after working through four independent bodies of evidence for this piece, is no. It will not fill up, because it is already as full as the market will let it be. What amenities do, when they work, is change the price of the nights the park already sells, the mix of products it sells them in, and the number of nights in a row a guest is willing to stay. When they do not work, they add a fixed cost that sits on the operating statement in February when nobody is swimming.

That distinction matters more to a lender than to anyone else, because it decides which line of the statement is carrying the debt. A rate-driven return shows up as net operating income growth against a stable site count. An occupancy-driven return asks the market to supply demand it may not have. The debt service coverage ratio does not care which story the borrower prefers. It cares which one the numbers support.

Occupancy has nowhere left to go

Start with the constraint, because it reorganizes everything else. The two publicly traded owners with the largest RV portfolios in the country report their communities as essentially full. Equity LifeStyle Properties carries core manufactured housing occupancy around 95 percent, and Sun Communities reports blended manufactured housing and RV occupancy near 99 percent (1)(2). Those figures describe annual and seasonal sites, where a resident has placed a unit and signed a lease, and they leave no room for an amenity to lift occupancy at all. There is nothing to lift.

The transient side of the business looks different only at first glance. Campspot, the reservation platform behind more than 2,600 parks, reported U.S. occupancy for the May through September window at 30.1 percent in 2026, against 30.2 percent a year earlier, with average daily rate at $24.79 versus $25.09 (3). Flat occupancy and a slightly softer rate on a sample that large is a market at equilibrium, not one with slack a pool can absorb. On the demand side, The Dyrt's 2026 report puts 2025 at 82.4 million campers, the second highest year on record, with reservation utilization climbing to 72.9 percent from 58.9 percent three years earlier, and more than half of campers reporting difficulty booking because campgrounds were full (4). Peak weekends in desirable markets are sold out. Shoulder months and midweek nights are not, and that is the only occupancy an amenity can plausibly touch.

So the amenity question narrows immediately. It is not "will the park fill." It is "will the park charge more, sell a different product, or hold a guest longer." Those are three separate mechanisms, they cost different amounts to pull, and the data treats them very differently.

What the institutions did with their money

Equity LifeStyle breaks its RV and marina base rental income into annual, seasonal and transient stays, and the three lines have moved in opposite directions for three straight years. Annual rent rose from $266.1 million in 2022 to $291.5 million in 2023 and $308.0 million in 2024. Transient rent fell from $84.6 million to $75.6 million to $73.6 million over the same period, and seasonal drifted from $58.9 million to $56.9 million (1). In 2025 the pattern sharpened: core annual up 4.1 percent, seasonal down 9.9 percent, transient down 8.5 percent, with annual now 73.1 percent of the RV and marina line (5). Rate did the work. Core annual growth of 6.5 percent in 2024 decomposed into 8.2 percent from rate, offset by a 1.7 percent occupancy decline (1).

Sun tells the same story with more intent. Its RV real property revenue excluding transient rose from $287.1 million in 2023 to $318.8 million in 2024, up roughly 11 percent, while transient revenue fell from $277.3 million to $249.7 million, down about 10 percent (2). This was not a demand accident. Sun converted 2,257 transient sites to annual leases in 2022, 2,111 in 2023 and more than 2,000 in 2024, and those conversions accounted for 64.6 percent and then roughly 70 percent of its revenue-producing site gains (6). Sun's capital expenditure disclosure lists "land improvements added to annual RV sites to aid in the conversion of transient RV guests to annual contracts" as a recurring category, alongside pool improvements, clubhouse renovations and playground equipment (2). The largest RV owner in the country, in other words, classifies the work of taking a site out of the transient pool as an amenity investment, and it is the one it has funded most consistently.

The arithmetic behind that choice is in Sun's investor materials. At Marco Naples RV Resort in Florida, a transient site running 31.7 percent occupancy at roughly $53 a night produced $6,158 a year. Converted to an annual lease, the same site rents for the equivalent of about $26 a day at full occupancy, or $9,324 a year. The site earns $3,166 more, a 51 percent increase, while the operator stops paying for the marketing, the check-in labor, the turnover and the empty weeknights that came with the transient guest (7). The daily rate fell by half and revenue per site rose by half. Nothing about that involves a pool.

Private capital has followed. When 23:32 Capital bought 13 Ontario resorts from Sun in December 2024, 2,840 sites for C$91 million, its chief executive told RENX that roughly 2,650 of the sites were seasonal and only 150 transient, with average tenant tenure running more than twelve years, and that the stability of the seasonal cash flow was the point of the deal (8). A lender underwriting that portfolio is looking at something closer to a ground lease than a hotel.

Two things follow for a borrower building a park today. First, the per-site revenue gap between the two models is wide and measurable. On full-year 2024 disclosures, Sun's RV segment produced roughly $9,986 per site across 56,930 sites, while Equity LifeStyle produced about $6,272 to $6,959 per site depending on whether marina slips are counted, and the ELS figure understates the true number because much of its transient usage is booked through Thousand Trails membership revenue rather than site rent (1)(2)(9). Second, the easy conversions are running out. Sun guided to only about 600 transient-to-annual conversions for 2026, against the 2,000-plus pace of 2022 through 2024 (6). The institutional growth story is shifting from mix back to rate, which puts the amenity question back on the table with a harder edge.

What campers pay for, and what they only say they want

The cleanest evidence on rate comes from a dataset that did not exist in this form until this year. Insider Perks' 2026 Outdoor Hospitality Pricing Report collected 609,863 published nightly prices from 2,110 privately operated campgrounds in 48 states during a two-week window in January 2026 and sorted them by site type and by the amenities attached to the property (10). It is list price, not realized rate, and it is cross-sectional, so it tells you what parks with a given feature charge relative to parks without it, not what any single park would gain by adding one. With those caveats, the premiums are striking in both directions.

The national median RV site is $62 a night. A full hookup site averages $70.31 against $44.73 for a dry site, a 57 percent premium worth about $25.58 a night, and it is the largest infrastructure premium in the dataset by a wide margin. A pool on the property is associated with a 23.3 percent premium. A dog park, 18.2 percent. Location dwarfs both: oceanfront sites average $157.66, 128 percent above non-waterfront, lakefront sites average $104.42 at a 51 percent premium, and a site described as unique or one-of-a-kind commands $111 against $67 for a standard site (10).

Then there is the bottom of the ladder. A pull-through site earns a 3.6 percent premium, about $2.45 a night. Fifty-amp service over thirty-amp earns 7 percent, roughly $4.46. Riverfront, which every broker's listing describes as a premium feature, carries a 9 percent premium (10). These are the amenities every RV owner asks about at check-in and almost nobody pays for at booking.

WiFi is the most instructive case, because it sits at the top of every survey and the bottom of every price list. KOA's 2024 camper profile found 48 percent of campers naming WiFi the single most important amenity at a campground, and nearly half of first-time campers said the same (11). The share of campers who work while camping ran 45 percent in 2024, exactly where it stood in 2019 before the pandemic briefly inflated it (12). Yet connectivity carries no meaningful standalone rate premium in the booking data. The reconciliation is that WiFi is a filter, not a feature. Its absence loses the booking; its presence does not raise the price. TengoInternet, which manages networks for RV parks nationally, puts it plainly: about 30 percent of guests need high-speed service and will pay a premium for it, which is why the tiered "freemium" model has spread rather than a park-wide rate increase (13).

The pattern generalizes. Survey rankings measure what campers notice. Booking prices measure what they pay. The gap between the two is where a great deal of amenity capital goes to die. KOA's 2026 report, drawn from 4,088 respondents, found 77 percent agreeing that simply being in nature is enough, without structured programming or additional amenities (12). The demand for programmed recreation is narrower than the trade press implies, and it is concentrated in the family-resort segment that Jellystone serves, not the roadside and destination segments where most SBA and USDA-financed parks compete.

Where amenities do earn: the shoulder and the midweek

If peak weekends are sold and annual sites are full, the amenity has one occupancy job left, and it is a specific one. Campspot's mid-2026 read shows where the softness sits: platform site nights were running 1.2 percent below the prior year through May, short-stay transient bookings under 28 days were down 2.2 percent year over year, and multi-park operators reported average length of stay slipping by roughly a night while booking windows compressed (14). Extended stays of 28 days or more were holding their share. The park that is losing nights is losing Tuesday through Thursday and the weeks either side of the summer holidays, and it is losing them from the drive-to weekend guest.

That is the guest a pool, a splash pad or a programmed activity calendar is meant to capture, and the honest framing is that the amenity is a shoulder-season and midweek tool rather than a peak tool. Campspot's own resort classification supports the point in a limited way: parks it defines as RV resorts, meaning properties with three or more key resort amenities, ran 41.2 percent occupancy in May 2025 against 39.2 percent for the platform overall, with revenue per available site up 7 percent (15). Two points of occupancy in a shoulder month is real money on a large park. It is not the ten points a brochure implies, and the study should say so.

Revenue quality is moving the same direction. The Dyrt reports short-notice cancellations up 22 percent and early departures up 27 percent in 2025 (4). A park whose midweek occupancy depends on discretionary weekend extenders is more exposed to that behavior than a park whose midweek is contracted. Amenities buy some of those nights back. They do not change the character of the guest who books them.

The rentable inventory arbitrage

If shared amenities reprice a night at the margin, rentable units change the product. This is the single most consistent finding across the four datasets and it is the one a feasibility study should lead with.

Start with the franchise system that discloses the most. Yogi Bear's Jellystone Park, the family camp-resort brand now owned by Sun, reported average revenue per park of $1.69 million in 2019 and nearly $3.1 million in 2023 (16). Its 2019 franchisor breakdown shows why the number moved. Rental units were about 16 percent of sites and 14 percent of camper nights, but about 23 percent of income. Revenue per site came to $7,632 overall, split into $4,852 for a traditional site, $2,784 for a seasonal site, and $10,647 for a rental unit (17). A cabin earned more than twice what an RV pad earned on the same acre of ground, before counting the store and activity revenue that made up roughly 29 percent of park income. In 2023, cabin and glamping revenue across the system grew 8.1 percent and ancillary revenue 6.1 percent, both faster than the 4.5 percent same-park total (16). It is worth adding that Jellystone requires only a swimming pool of its franchisees. Water parks, slides and splash grounds are optional and franchisee-funded, and the franchisor recommends a five-year business plan before adding them (17). Even the brand built on water play does not mandate the water play.

Campspot's transaction data confirm the ratio at national scale. In May 2025, lodging, meaning cabins and glamping units, produced revenue per available site of $26.97 against $13.48 for RV sites, almost exactly double, and lodging posted the highest rate growth of any category at 6 percent (15). Revenue per available site is the right measure here because it multiplies rate by occupancy, so it already accounts for the fact that a cabin sits empty more often than a full hookup pad. Even after that adjustment, the cabin earns twice as much per unit of inventory.

The price list agrees. Insider Perks puts the median cabin or lodging unit at $154.50 a night and glamping at $145, against $62 for an RV site and $45 for a tent site. Within glamping, domes lead at an average of $185.32, followed by covered wagons at $168.55, treehouses at $166.93, yurts at $146.93, safari tents at $136.43 and bell tents at $107.28 (10). At the premium end of the market, Cairn Consulting Group's 2025 glamping industry report, presented at Glamping Show Americas, put industry-wide glamping ADR at $251, up 21 percent since 2023, with stays averaging 2.7 nights and startup costs roughly doubled over the same period (18). That figure skews toward branded operators and should not be underwritten for a campground adding four units, but the direction is not in dispute.

What it costs to get there is well documented. A factory park model from Athens Park Models lists from roughly $49,900 to $58,900, and from Cavco roughly $55,900 to $62,900 (19). Delivered, set, connected to utilities and furnished, operators consistently land between $60,000 and $90,000 per unit (20). A quality safari tent or yurt runs $15,000 to $30,000 before a platform and site work of $500 to $3,000, and a geodesic dome $5,000 to $15,000 before the same (21)(22). At $154.50 a night and 120 occupied nights, a $75,000 park model grosses about $18,500 a year, and at 50 percent annual occupancy closer to $28,000. Simple payback, before the operating drag, lands in the four-to-eight-year range that manufacturers cite and that we see in the engagements that reach us.

The drag is real and it is the thing that separates a cabin from a pad. A cabin turns over. Vacation rental cleaning runs $20 to $30 an hour, more in coastal markets, and a one- or two-bedroom turnover takes about two hours, so each departure costs $40 to $130 in housekeeping before linens, supplies and the accelerated wear that comes with strangers using a kitchen (23). Green River Cabins, a manufacturer with an obvious interest in the answer, nonetheless concedes that park model returns slipped from more than 40 percent before the pandemic to roughly 25 percent afterward as unit costs rose, which is why it now markets a $32,900 A-frame as a route back to the old margin (24). A study that models cabin revenue at hotel-like rates and RV-like expenses will be wrong in the direction lenders least like.

What the pool costs

Now the pool, which is where most of the amenity capital in a new park goes and where the payback math is least forgiving.

A commercial in-ground pool sized for a park of 100 to 250 sites runs $50,000 to $150,000 for the shell, before decking, code-required fencing, drain covers compliant with the federal pool and spa safety act, and the safety equipment a health inspector will look for on the first visit (25)(26). That is the easy part. Operating a commercial pool costs $10,000 to $20,000 a year in a typical installation, and a large heated pool with a heavy bather load can run past $100,000 once gas heating, electricity, backwash water and chemicals are added up (27)(26). Most states require a certified pool operator to supervise the water chemistry and an annual public bathing place permit. Lifeguard rules vary by state and by feature: several states exempt campground pools from lifeguard requirements but require an attendant, while Pennsylvania puts a certified lifeguard on duty the moment a water slide or diving board is installed (28). None of that staffing scales down in a slow week.

Then the insurer weighs in. No carrier writing RV parks publishes a dollar surcharge for a pool, but the exposure moves the account. Leavitt Recreation and Hospitality Insurance, which places coverage for several thousand parks, tells applicants to expect longer underwriting times if the park offers water slides, inflatables, equine activities, zip lines, paintball, jumping pillows, e-bikes, boat rentals or diving boards, adding that these are not impossible to insure but can be hard to place affordably (29). Pools come with conditions: fencing with self-closing gates, marked depths, posted rules and lifesaving equipment within reach. Whole-park premiums run roughly $1,500 to $12,000 a year for most independent operators, and large resorts with insured values above a single carrier's appetite face minimum property premiums of $35,000 to $60,000 on layered programs (30)(29). The most frequent claim in the sector, according to Leavitt, is a falling tree. The severity claims are drowning, propane, slips and dog bites (31).

Set that cost base against the revealed premium. A 23.3 percent lift on a $62 median site is $14.45 a night. If a 150-site park captured it on every one of 120 occupied nights per site, the pool would add about $260,000 a year and pay for itself in months. It will not, because the premium is cross-sectional. It describes the gap between parks that have pools and parks that do not, and those are different parks in different markets serving different guests. A realistic underwriting credits the pool with a fraction of that lift on the family-segment bookings it actually influences, then subtracts $15,000 to $100,000 of annual operating cost and the staffing. On those terms a pool at a mid-size park is a multi-year, occupancy-defending investment. It belongs in the pro forma as a competitive necessity for a family-resort positioning, not as a rate play, and a lender who sees it modeled as a rate play should ask what happens to DSCR in a year when the shoulder season disappoints and the pool's fixed cost does not.

The splash pad deserves a specific word because it is sold as the cheap alternative. It is, in one configuration. A flow-through pad that drains to waste can be installed for $65,000 to $150,000 with low operating cost and, because there is no standing water, a lighter regulatory and liability profile (32). A recirculating pad, which is what a water-conscious jurisdiction will require, adds $100,000 to $300,000 for the mechanical vault, filtration and treatment, and then inherits the pool's chemical management, certified operator and health-code inspection regime, with permitting alone running $5,000 to $15,000 in Texas jurisdictions (32)(33). The recirculating splash pad can cost more to build than a modest pool and nearly as much to run. The claim that it is cheaper is true only for the version many health departments will not permit.

Clubhouses and pavilions sit in a gentler category. A community building runs $100,000 to $300,000 or more depending on finish, and a covered pavilion $35 to $60 a square foot installed (34)(35). They carry utilities and cleaning rather than chemistry and lifeguards, and they earn their keep through events, seasonal-resident retention and the group bookings that fill a shoulder weekend, not through a nightly premium the booking data can isolate.

The infrastructure nobody photographs

The best return in the entire amenity ledger is the one that never appears on a marketing page. Bringing water, 50-amp electric and sewer to a site that lacks them costs $5,000 to $15,000 per site depending on whether the park is on municipal utilities or wells and septic, with electrical typically $500 to $2,000, water $700 to $15,000 and sewer $2,000 to $12,000 (36)(25). Against the 57 percent full hookup premium, worth $25.58 a night, a site running 120 occupied nights generates roughly $3,070 of incremental revenue a year with almost no incremental operating cost. Simple payback is two to five years per site, and the premium is the one in the dataset most likely to survive translation from cross-section to a single park, because it is tied to a physical capability the guest either has at the pedestal or does not.

The same logic explains why the pull-through and the 50-amp upgrade, which owners obsess over, carry premiums of 3.6 and 7 percent. They are conveniences layered on a site that already has hookups. The guest values them, and will not pay much for them, because the competing park down the road has them too.

WiFi sits in a similar category with a different cost curve. Industry guidance now calls for 5 to 10 megabits per site as the working range even at parks of a hundred sites or more, and fiber distribution can run up to $500 per site where trenching is involved (37)(38). The network earns little or nothing in rate. It is built because a park without it loses the 45 percent of guests who work on the road and the families whose teenagers will not tolerate its absence. That is a defensive amenity and should be underwritten as operating cost, not as revenue.

Dog parks are the surprise in the ranking. A fenced run with gravel or turf and waste stations is a low-five-figure build, and it is associated with an 18.2 percent premium in the price data (10). KOA reports 53 percent of campers travel with a dog and 44 percent consider pet amenities extremely important (11). The one caveat is insurance: animal liability is commonly excluded unless the amenity is scheduled with the carrier, and dog bites are on Leavitt's severity list. Tell the insurer before pouring the gravel.

Pickleball, for completeness, runs $20,000 to $50,000 a court professionally installed and carries almost no operating cost (39). No dataset isolates a rate premium for it. It is a retention amenity for seasonal residents and a line in a listing, and it should be budgeted as such.

What a lender reads off the amenity line

Bring this back to the operating statement, because that is where a feasibility study earns its fee. A lender underwriting an RV park does not fund amenities. It funds a DSCR, typically 1.25x or better on the stabilized year, and it wants to know which revenue mechanism is producing the coverage and how that mechanism behaves in a bad year.

A rate-driven pro forma is the lender's friend. If the park's site count and occupancy are held flat and NOI growth comes from a $62 site becoming a $70 site because it now has sewer, the coverage improves without asking the market for anything it has not already demonstrated. Equity LifeStyle's own numbers are the template: 8.2 percent rate growth on annual sites carried the RV line in 2024 despite a 1.7 percent occupancy decline (1). A mix-driven pro forma, where twenty transient pads become twenty annual leases, is nearly as strong, because it trades a variable, seasonal, marketing-dependent revenue stream for a contracted one at higher revenue per site. Sun's Marco Naples example, a 51 percent revenue lift at a lower daily rate, is exactly the kind of exhibit a credit committee understands (7).

An occupancy-driven pro forma is the one that gets a study sent back. If the pool is in the model because it will lift park-wide occupancy from 35 to 45 percent, the analyst has to show where those ten points of demand come from in a market where Campspot's platform is running flat, RV wholesale shipments are forecast down 8.2 percent to a median 314,000 units in 2026, short-stay transient bookings are down 2.2 percent year over year, and multi-park operators report average length of stay falling by about a night (14)(40). Those are not reasons to avoid the pool. They are reasons to underwrite it as a cost of competing in a segment rather than as the source of the coverage.

Seasonality compounds the point. A pool's operating cost is front-loaded into the months it is open and its insurance and depreciation run all year, while the transient revenue it supports is concentrated in perhaps fourteen weekends. A park with a 1.35x DSCR on an annual basis can run well below 1.0x through the first quarter if its cost structure is built around summer amenities and its revenue is not. Institutional owners solved this by converting to annual leases, which flatten the revenue curve to match the cost curve. An independent operator solves it, if at all, by keeping the fixed amenity load proportionate to the share of revenue that is contracted rather than transient. That ratio, contracted revenue to fixed amenity cost, is one of the first things we compute on an RV park engagement and one of the first things a USDA or SBA lender asks about when the study lands.

Sun's own hurdle rate provides the institutional benchmark. Its expansion underwriting has historically targeted a five-year unlevered internal rate of return of 12 to 14 percent on roughly $35,000 per site of development cost, and only in communities already above 96 percent occupancy (41). Note what that combination implies. The largest operator in the sector adds sites only where demand is proven, and it treats the return as a function of site cost, not amenity cost. A borrower proposing a KOA-standard new build, which the franchisor itself prices at $3.9 million to $6.8 million excluding land, engineering and permitting, on a minimum of 75 RV sites and 90 total, is asking a lender to accept a lower return on a higher cost base than the sector's most sophisticated owner will accept (42). That is not disqualifying. It is a fact the study has to address directly rather than bury in a blended occupancy assumption.

One more institutional data point deserves a place in the file. KOA's 2024 franchise disclosure document reports that campgrounds converting into the KOA system between 2014 and 2022 saw gross registration revenue rise an average of 20 percent in the first full year, with a median of 16 percent, and averaged 15 percent annual growth over the first five years (43). KOA does not break its results out by its Journey, Holiday and Resort tiers, so the conversion figure is the closest thing to a disclosed amenity-and-brand premium the franchisor publishes. It is also worth remembering that KOA's system registration revenue crossed $500 million in 2023, held there in 2024 and came in at $494 million in 2025, up 31 percent over 2019, on camper nights that fell 4.8 percent in 2023 (44). Six years of growth in one of the sector's largest systems came almost entirely from rate. That is the whole thesis in one line.

The ancillary line rounds out the picture. Campspot reports that parks on its platform sold $43.6 million of add-ons in 2025, up 13 percent in a year, on top of point-of-sale and lock-site fees (45). At Jellystone, store and activity revenue is close to 30 percent of park income (17). That revenue is what pays for the water slide at a family resort. An independent park that builds the slide without the store and the activity calendar behind it has bought the liability and skipped the revenue, and the DSCR will show it.

A build order, in the sequence the data supports

Rank the choices by what the evidence says a dollar returns, and a sequence falls out that looks nothing like the amenity page of a resort brochure.

First, full hookups on every site that can physically take them. It is the largest infrastructure premium in the market, it survives translation to a single park, and it pays back in two to five years with no operating drag.

Second, rentable units, as a pilot before a program. Two to four park models or a cluster of domes, priced at the local cabin median and tracked for a full season. If they hold above roughly 45 to 50 percent annual occupancy at $150 or more, add more. If they do not, the market has answered a question the brochure could not.

Third, managed WiFi at five to ten megabits per site, underwritten as operating cost. It does not raise rate. It stops the leak.

Fourth, the dog park, with the insurer notified first.

Fifth, and only for a park competing explicitly for family-resort bookings, the pool, modeled as a positioning cost with its own operating budget, staffing and insurance line, and with a sensitivity that shows DSCR holding above the lender's floor in a year when it lifts occupancy by five points rather than ten.

What is not on the list is telling. Water slides, jumping pillows, zip lines and horseback riding all appear on Leavitt's hard-to-place list, all carry staffing or supervision burdens, and none appears in any of the four datasets with a measurable rate premium. They exist in the market because Jellystone and a handful of destination resorts have built a brand around them, with an ancillary revenue engine to support them. Without that engine, they are a cost.

Caveats, stated plainly

Three limits on this analysis should sit in the file next to the conclusions. The Insider Perks premiums are list prices captured in a two-week January window from parks with online booking, and they are cross-sectional. They overstate what any one park would capture by adding a feature and should be treated as ceilings. The institutional filings do not report occupancy for transient RV sites at all, so the claim that amenities leave occupancy untouched rests on revenue and utilization commentary rather than a disclosed occupancy series. And no campground insurer publishes a per-amenity premium load, so the insurance cost of a pool shows up in eligibility and carrier availability rather than in a number a study can cite. Every figure above is either directly disclosed or computed from disclosed inputs, and the sources are numbered so that a reviewer can check the arithmetic.

The pool is fine. It is just not the reason the loan gets paid.

Families like it, brokers photograph it, and in the right market it is the price of admission. But the four datasets are unanimous on what it is not. It is not the reason the park makes its debt service. That job belongs to the sewer line under the pad, the cabin at the end of the loop and the annual lease that turns a $53 weekend into a $9,300 year. Build those first. Then decide whether the pool is worth what it costs to keep the water clean in a month when nobody is in it.

Frequently asked questions

Do amenities increase RV park occupancy? Rarely by much, and never at the peak. Institutional RV portfolios already run 95 to 99 percent occupied on annual and seasonal sites, and national transient occupancy on the largest reservation platform was flat year over year in 2026. Amenities mainly change the nightly rate, the product mix and length of stay. The only occupancy they plausibly move is shoulder-season and midweek, and the measured effect there is a couple of points, not ten.

Which RV park amenity has the best return on investment? Full hookups, by a wide margin. Bringing water, 50-amp electric and sewer to a site costs $5,000 to $15,000 and is associated with a 57 percent nightly premium over a dry site, for a simple payback of two to five years with no added operating cost. Rentable cabins and park models are next, producing roughly double the revenue per available site of an RV pad.

How much does a campground pool cost to build and operate? A commercial in-ground pool for a 100 to 250 site park runs $50,000 to $150,000 for the shell before decking, fencing and code equipment. Operating cost is $10,000 to $20,000 a year for a typical installation and can exceed $100,000 for a large heated pool. Add a certified pool operator, state-specific attendant or lifeguard rules, and insurance underwriting conditions. Against a revealed 23.3 percent rate premium that is cross-sectional rather than causal, most mid-size parks should treat the pool as a competitive necessity rather than a rate investment.

Are cabins and glamping units worth adding to an RV park? Usually, and they are the strongest amenity case in the data. Lodging units produce about $26.97 of revenue per available site against $13.48 for RV sites on Campspot's platform, and at Jellystone rental units are 16 percent of sites but 23 percent of income. A turnkey park model runs $60,000 to $90,000 all-in and pays back in four to eight years, provided the study models housekeeping of $40 to $130 per turnover rather than RV-site operating costs.

How do lenders underwrite RV park amenities? Lenders fund coverage, not amenities. They want a DSCR of roughly 1.25x or better on the stabilized year and they want to know whether the coverage comes from rate, from mix or from occupancy. Rate-driven and mix-driven pro formas, where NOI grows on a stable site count through hookups, cabins or transient-to-annual conversion, are underwritten more favorably than occupancy-driven ones, which require the market to supply demand it has not demonstrated. Seasonality matters: a park with adequate annual coverage can run below 1.0x in the first quarter if fixed amenity costs are carried by summer-only revenue.

Is a splash pad cheaper than a pool? Only in its flow-through form, which drains to waste and can be installed for $65,000 to $150,000 with a light regulatory footprint. A recirculating splash pad, which many jurisdictions require, adds $100,000 to $300,000 in mechanical and treatment equipment and inherits the pool's chemical management, certified operator and inspection regime. In that configuration it can cost more to build than a modest pool and nearly as much to run.

September 5, 2026 by Michal Mohelsky, principal of MMCG Invest, LLC, a national SBA and USDA feasibility study consultancy

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Michal Mohelsky, J.D. | Principal | mmcginvest.com 

Contact: michal@mmcginvest.com

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Disclaimer: This report is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, or tax advice. Data presented herein is derived from proprietary MMCG databases and third-party sources believed to be reliable; however, MMCG Invest makes no representation as to the accuracy or completeness of such information. Figures from third-party industry databases have been independently verified and, where appropriate, adjusted to reflect MMCG's proprietary analytical methodology. Statutory and regulatory references are provided for context and must be verified with counsel before reliance. Past performance is not indicative of future results.