US RV Park and Campground Market Outlook 2026: Full Campgrounds, Unforgiving Math

August 1, 2026 Author: Michal Mohelsky, J.D., Principal, MMCG Invest, LLC

A lender-grade analysis of the outdoor hospitality asset class: demand, supply, development cost, regulation, capital markets, and sixteen years of loan-level SBA evidence that nobody else has published.

Executive Summary

Between 2021 and 2023, wholesale RV shipments fell by almost half, from 600,240 units to 313,174 (2). Campground demand barely moved. More than 52 million North American households camped in 2025, about even with the record years and comfortably above pre-pandemic levels (8). More than half of campers reported they could not book a site because campgrounds were full (9).

If those two facts feel contradictory, you have been watching the wrong number. That is the thesis of this report, and it is the single most consequential correction a lender or investor can make when underwriting this asset class: campground demand is a function of the installed base of roughly 8.1 million RV-owning households and their behavior, not of the annual factory-to-dealer shipment flow (3). The 2025 shipment total of 342,220 units equals about 4.2 percent of the owning-household base. Even the record 2021 year replaced only about 7.4 percent of it. A stock that turns over four percent a year does not collapse because the flow into it halves.

So the demand is real. What is unforgiving is everything downstream of it. New supply is growing at roughly 0.2 percent per year against a standing base of about 1,520,000 private campsites (6). Ground-up resort construction at 2026 costs requires roughly $12,000 of revenue per site per year to clear a development hurdle, against the $5,000 to $10,000 that operating parks actually achieve (16)(19). At an 8.0 percent going-in cap rate and a 25-year bank loan constant of 8.7 to 9.3 percent, entry leverage on institutional-quality parks is negative; the deal is carried by amortization and repositioning, not by the coupon (19)(44). And the median note rate on SBA loans to this sector went from 5.25 percent in fiscal 2021 to 9.87 percent in fiscal 2024, a 462 basis point repricing in three years (1).

Underneath all of it sits a credit story that has never been published, because no public source tracks loan performance for NAICS 721211. We tabulated the SBA's loan-level FOIA files ourselves: 929 approved 7(a) loans and 374 approved 504 loans, roughly $1.44 billion of supported capital since fiscal 2010. RV parks and campgrounds charged off at 0.91 percent of disbursed 7(a) loans against 4.66 percent for the entire SBA book, and 2.63 percent against 6.11 percent on the fully seasoned 2010 to 2016 cohort (1). This is, in credit terms, a lodging asset, and it behaves like one.

The catch, and the finding we believe no one has written before this report: the tenure mix that produces the most stable income, the annual and seasonal book that both public REITs are racing to convert into, is exactly the mix that disqualifies a borrower from the cheapest government-guaranteed debt. SBA eligibility requires that more than half of gross revenue come from transient stays of 30 days or less (23). Stability and financeability are pulling in opposite directions, and the underwriter who does not understand that tension will misprice the deal in one direction or the other.

The campgrounds have never been fuller. The money has never been more careful. This report explains both halves.

Twenty Numbers That Frame the Market

1. 4,513 to 17,037. The range of credible counts of US private RV parks and campgrounds, depending entirely on whose ruler you use. The federal employer-establishment count is 4,513 (2017 Economic Census); IBISWorld's broader business count is 17,037 (2026 edition) (4)(5).

2. $11.3 billion vs $159 billion. Park-level industry revenue (IBISWorld, 2026 edition) against the RV industry's total economic impact (RVIA, June 2026). The second number is roughly fourteen times the first because it measures the entire vehicle value chain, not campgrounds (3)(5).

3. 8.1 million. RV-owning US households, the installed base that actually drives site demand (3).

4. 342,220. Wholesale RV shipments in 2025, about 4.2 percent of that installed base. The 2026 forecast is a median 314,000, a projected 8.2 percent decline (2).

5. 30 days. Median annual RV usage in 2025, up from 20 days in 2021. Fewer new rigs shipped; the existing rigs worked harder (10).

6. 57,400 vs 33,766. Used versus new RV registrations in Texas in 2025. The used market, invisible in shipment data, ran about 70 percent larger than the new market in the largest RV state (11).

7. 52 million plus. North American households that camped in 2025, with a $66 billion community spending footprint, up $5 billion year over year (8).

8. Minus 9 percent. The 2025 change in transient RV revenue at both public REITs, while annual RV base rent grew 4.1 percent at Equity LifeStyle. The volatile layer softened; the durable layer grew (12)(13).

9. 0.2 percent per year. Net new private campsite supply, roughly 5,716 documented new and expansion sites from 2024 through early 2026 against about 1,520,000 standing sites (6).

10. $30,000 to $40,000. Development cost per site, land excluded, for a good-quality 100-plus-site park; $40,000 to $70,000 all-in for resort product (16).

11. About $12,000. Revenue per site per year required to justify a $60,000-per-site resort build at a 10 to 11 percent yield on cost. Operating parks achieve $5,000 to $10,000 (16)(19).

12. 8.0 percent. Going-in cap rate for Class A and B RV parks per Newmark's 2026 Valuation & Advisory survey; Class C sits near 9.0 percent, a 50 to 150 basis point premium over manufactured housing (19).

13. 53.7 percent. Total operating expenses as a share of revenue in the best line-item benchmark that exists, Newmark's analysis of 62 parks and 10,682 sites, with payroll (15.5 percent) and utilities (14.5 percent) the two largest lines (18).

14. 50 percent. The SBA eligibility line: more than half of gross annual income must come from transients staying 30 days or less, or the park is ineligible passive real estate (23).

15. $10 million. The new combined 7(a) plus 504 financing cap, effective July 4, 2026, the highest in SBA history (24).

16. 0.91 percent vs 4.66 percent. Charge-offs as a share of disbursed 7(a) loans, RV parks against the whole SBA book, fiscal 2010 through March 2026. On the seasoned 2010 to 2016 cohort: 2.63 percent against 6.11 percent (1).

17. 2.63 vs 2.54. Seasoned charge-off rates for RV parks and for hotels and motels, statistically indistinguishable. RV parks are a lodging credit (1).

18. 462 basis points. The rise in the median SBA note rate to this sector, from 5.25 percent (FY2021) to 9.87 percent (FY2024) (1).

19. 24 percent. The share of national SBA RV park lending that went to the four classic snowbird states. This is a far more northern, more distributed business than the trade press implies (1).

20. 38 of 38. Blue Ridge member parks of the Carolinas association damaged by Hurricane Helene, 16 forced closed. Floodplain siting, not soft demand, is what kills RV parks (37).

1. Two Industries, One Word: The Ruler Problem

Ask how many RV parks exist in the United States and you will get answers from 4,500 to 33,000, all delivered with confidence. None of them is wrong, exactly. They are measuring different things, and the failure to say which thing is being measured is the single most common sourcing error in this sector's published commentary.

The narrowest ruler is federal. The 2017 Economic Census counts 4,513 employer establishments under NAICS 721211, private RV parks and campgrounds with paid staff (4). The broadest credible ruler is IBISWorld, which counts 17,037 businesses in its 2026 edition on a universe that includes thousands of non-employer, sole-proprietor operations the Census employer count excludes (5). Woodall's Campground Magazine, the trade's supply reference, puts the private universe at 12,290 parks and roughly 1,520,000 campsites as of 2022 (6). Directory sites go higher still by folding in public campgrounds, which belong to a different universe entirely.

Two calibration rules follow. First, the gap between 4,513 and 17,037 is not measurement error; it is definitional breadth plus the non-employer layer, and the figures are complements, not competitors. Second, a piece of folklore needs retiring: the "7,338 establishments" figure that circulates as a Census count is actually a proprietary business-list count from a commercial directory, not federal data, and it should never be cited as such.

The revenue side has the same problem at larger scale. IBISWorld puts park-level NAICS 721211 revenue at $11.3 billion in its 2026 edition, revised up from $10.9 billion in May 2025 (5). The Census counts about $3.0 billion for employer establishments alone, on 2017 data (4). And the RV Industry Association's 2026 RVs Move America study reports a $159 billion total economic impact with 643,238 jobs (3). All three are tier A figures from named sources. They are also incommensurable. The RVIA number covers the entire vehicle value chain: $70 billion of manufacturing, $38 billion of sales and service, and a $50 billion "campgrounds and travel" slice that itself includes trip spending far beyond anything a park ever collects at the gate. Put them side by side and the economic-impact figure is roughly fourteen times park revenue and about fifty times the Census employer figure. Any market report that quotes one where it means the other, and several ranking reports do, has disqualified itself.

One more absence worth stating plainly, because it shapes everything else in this report: there is no STR equivalent for campgrounds. Hotels have a daily, franchisor-neutral performance benchmark. Real estate has Case-Shiller. Outdoor hospitality has vendor booking data (Campspot), a franchisee-only benchmark (KOA), a member survey (the OHI benchmarking report), and, since April 2026, the Insider Perks Outdoor Hospitality Pricing Index, built from pricing observations across more than 23,000 properties but only months old (15). Every one of those is partial, and none is a true independent daily benchmark. The highest-grade performance data in the sector remains the SEC filings of the two public REITs, Sun Communities and Equity LifeStyle Properties, which together cover a premium, annual-lease-heavy slice that is a ceiling, not an average.

The structural fact those rulers agree on: this is an overwhelmingly independent industry. KOA, the only national franchise system, runs a bit over 500 parks. Jellystone has 75-plus, Equity LifeStyle operates more than 220 RV resorts under Thousand Trails and Encore, Sun holds roughly 165. Add every branded platform together and you are well under 2,000 parks out of roughly 17,000, which is why the trade association's observation that about 90 percent of parks are owned by operators with fewer than five properties rings true (13)(17). Ninety percent of an $11 billion industry is unbranded and family-held. That fragmentation is why the SBA, not Wall Street, is this sector's most important lender, and it is why the loan tape in Section 7 matters.

2. The Demand Engine, and the Honest Bear Case

The centerpiece argument deserves its arithmetic shown in full, because lenders keep underwriting to the wrong series.

RVIA wholesale shipments are a factory-to-dealer flow of new units: 600,240 in the 2021 peak, 493,268 in 2022, 313,174 at the 2023 trough, 333,700 in 2024, 342,220 in 2025, and a forecast median of 314,000 for 2026, which would be an 8.2 percent decline (2). Read as a demand indicator for campgrounds, that series says the sky fell in 2022 and 2023 and is falling again. It did not, and here is why. Against roughly 8.1 million RV-owning households, the 2025 shipment year replaced about 4.2 percent of the installed base. The all-time record year replaced about 7.4 percent. With an average service life around twenty years, the stock of rigs in American driveways moves by low single digits annually no matter what the factories do. A 48 percent collapse in the flow produced nothing remotely like a 48 percent change in the stock, and it is the stock, plus how intensively it gets used, that fills campsites.

Usage went the opposite direction from shipments. The median RV owner used the rig 30 days in 2025, up from 20 days in 2021, across a median nine trips of 250 miles each (10). The owner base also got younger, not older: median owner age fell from 53 to 49 over the same period, 46 percent of owners are 35 to 54, and 36 percent are first-time owners (10). The demographic bear case, that boomers age out faster than younger cohorts age in, is contradicted by the best available profile data, even as the Peak 65 wave adds roughly 11,400 newly minted 65-year-olds per day on the retirement side.

Then there is the half of the market that never appears in shipment data at all. Statistical Surveys registration data shows the used market growing while the new market shrank: in February 2026 new registrations fell 24.1 percent year over year while used rose 1.6 percent, and in March new fell 21.9 percent while used rose 6.6 percent. In Texas, the largest RV state and the strongest concrete datapoint available, 2025 saw 57,400 used registrations against 33,766 new (11). Every one of those used transactions keeps a rig in service and a household in the campground demand pool, and none of them ever touches an RVIA release.

Is the decoupling argument original? Not entirely, and honesty about that is part of the method. Sun Communities' own investor materials have paired the owning-household base against the campsite supply and headlined demand despite declining RV sales; Camping World's securities filings said as far back as 2011 that the installed base and usage are the most important demand factors (12). What has been missing is the clean, lender-facing arithmetic, stated as an underwriting rule: stop anchoring campground feasibility to shipment headlines, and underwrite to the base and its behavior.

Now the bear case, graded rather than dismissed, because a one-sided bull case is how this sector's promoters have burned credibility.

Normalization is real. Transient RV revenue fell about 9 percent in 2025 at both REITs: Equity LifeStyle's core seasonal and transient rent dropped 9.1 percent while its annual RV base rent rose 4.1 percent, and Sun's transient RV revenue fell roughly 9 percent with RV segment same-property net operating income down 1.4 percent (12)(13). Campspot's booking network shows US occupancy essentially flat year over year, 30.1 against 30.2 percent, at a slightly lower average daily rate. The post-pandemic transient froth is gone. What remains is a soft landing, not a collapse: Sun guides 2026 transient to roughly minus 1.5 percent, which is stabilization, and the annual book grew right through the softness.

Affordability is the material risk. No bureau publishes RV-specific delinquency, so auto lending is the proxy, and the proxy is flashing. Edmunds reported a record 28.1 percent of trade-ins carrying negative equity in Q3 2025 at a record average of $6,905 underwater, worsening to 29.3 percent and $7,214 by Q4, and a record 22.4 percent of new auto loans stretched to 84 months or longer (34). The Bank of America Institute found nearly 40 percent of lower-income households had no 2026 summer travel plans at all, more than five times the share among higher-income households (34). RVs depreciate faster than cars. The entry-level, price-sensitive camper is genuinely squeezed, and that is the demand layer a commodity roadside park depends on.

The channel is consolidating. Lazydays, a dealer nearly half a century old, went through bankruptcy, sold substantially all assets, and delisted with no residual shareholder value; Thor's fiscal 2025 sales fell 4.6 percent on a deliberate 10.1 percent restraint in unit shipments to protect dealer inventories (35). A shrinking dealer network is a leading indicator worth watching, though the majors are managing to margin rather than failing.

The public competitor is contracting, which cuts both ways. The National Park Service lost roughly 24 percent of its permanent staff, about 4,000 people, by the start of 2026, with an FY2026 budget proposing a further cut of about a third and a deferred maintenance backlog of $24.2 billion (32)(33). Closed and understaffed public campgrounds push overflow demand to private parks, the sector's direct price competitor, and the National Park Service is even statutorily required to keep its rates from undercutting nearby private operators. That is structurally supportive of private pricing power. It also degrades the broader outdoor experience that feeds the whole demand pool, which is why we score it a paradoxical positive rather than a clean one.

Retention is the honest weak point in the bull case. Every participation figure in this industry, KOA's 52 million households, The Dyrt's 82.4 million individual campers, is self-reported survey data, and the claim that pandemic-era first-timers have stuck is a cross-sectional inference with no tracked longitudinal panel behind it (8)(9). Booking difficulty has oscillated rather than climbed monotonically: 58.4 percent of campers reported sold-out frustration in 2022, 45.5 percent in 2023, 56.1 percent in 2024, and more than half again in 2025 (9). Demand pressure is high, and it is also volatile. We maintain a ten-indicator falsification watchlist on this thesis, and three indicators, transient REIT revenue, seasoning RV loan vintages, and dealer consolidation, are already amber. None has breached its threshold. When two more do, this outlook changes.

3. The Revenue Model: Tenure Is the Master Variable

Two RV parks can post identical annual occupancy and be entirely different businesses. The difference is tenure: how many site-nights are sold one night at a time at a rack rate, and how many are locked into monthly, seasonal, or annual contracts that behave like apartment rent. Transient revenue carries the highest rate and the highest cost to earn it. Annual revenue carries a lower effective rate, almost no servicing cost, and it shows up in February.

The best public cross-operator comparison makes the tradeoff concrete. Analyzing operator disclosures and KOA's franchise documents, Innowave Weekly estimated roughly $7,000 of reservation revenue per site across the KOA franchisee portfolio with operating expenses near 70 percent of gross, about $5,000 per site at Equity LifeStyle's annual-heavy RV portfolio at roughly 46.5 percent expenses, and about $10,000 per site at Sun's resort-style portfolio (16). Hold that 70-versus-46.5 spread in mind; it is the single clearest public demonstration of what tenure mix does to a park's cost structure, and it reappears in Section 8 as the key to the industry's notoriously incoherent profit-margin folklore.

The best private-park aggregate is the OHI 2023 benchmarking report, on 2022 operating data: median park revenue of $3.52 million, of which nightly and weekly rentals were $1.43 million and monthly plus seasonal $1.02 million, against median total expenses of $2.89 million; full-hookup RV sites averaged 68 percent occupancy during operating months while rustic and tent sites averaged 25 percent (14). Note the phrase "operating months." Converting an operating-season occupancy to a trailing-twelve-month figure is one of the two systematic errors in seller pro formas, and it overstates revenue by roughly a third in a seasonal market.

On rates, the market finally has a monthly composite. The Innowave Pricing Index put the national weighted average nightly rate at $103.60 in July 2026, with the RV-site sub-index at 99.0, just under its April baseline; the national median RV site runs $62 and the average $69.72, premium-designated sites command $84.05, about 24.5 percent over standard, and waterfront runs about 22.5 percent over (15). Public campgrounds anchor the floor: National Park Service developed sites run $15 to $36 and state park electric sites $20 to $55, and Insider Perks computes private camping at 2.93 times a comparable federal site. Glamping stretches the ceiling, at $158.80 a night inside conventional campgrounds and $304.37 at standalone properties. One warning attaches to the index itself: it launched in April 2026, and in July it recorded its first month-over-month decline. It is the best rate instrument the sector has ever had, and it is months old.

Ancillary revenue is where operating skill shows. Well-run parks earn 15 to 25 percent of total revenue from the store, propane, firewood, laundry, rentals, cabins, and activity fees; under-managed parks sit near 9 percent (1)(14). The KOA fee structure quietly confirms where the margin lives: the 8 percent royalty and 2 percent advertising fee apply only to site registration revenue, with nothing charged on store, propane, or food (17). The franchisor is telling you which revenue is the operator's to keep. In our own underwriting we treat the ancillary ratio as a management-quality signal before we treat it as a revenue line.

Three revenue mechanics deserve a flag because they routinely distort projections. Membership programs cut both ways: Thousand Trails converts nightly demand into subscription revenue for Equity LifeStyle, roughly 108,000 members across about 80 properties, with net contribution up 9.6 percent year to date on rate rather than volume, but a park filling 40 percent of its nights at Passport America's flat 50-percent-off rack rate has an effective rate far below its posted one, and the model must haircut accordingly (13). Dynamic pricing is the live 2025-2026 lever, and vendor claims about it, including a 191 percent revenue uplift figure, are marketing; we credit a conservative single-digit lift in a base case and reserve the rest for sensitivity. And workforce housing, the monthly full-hookup site at $400 to $700 in an oil-field or data-center market, is a stability story with a legal tail: in California an occupant becomes a tenant after 30 consecutive days and a protected resident at nine months under the RV Park Occupancy Law, and operators structuring around those thresholds are managing litigation risk, not paperwork (31). Section 9 covers what happens when the anchor employer leaves.

4. Why New Construction Doesn't Pencil: Supply, Cost, and the Yield-on-Cost Gap

Here is the strangest fact in this market, and the article's lead number lives inside it: demand exceeds supply, supply is barely growing, and yet ground-up development still fails the arithmetic almost everywhere.

Start with supply. Nobody tracks it comprehensively; Loan Analytics says outright that no detailed supply dataset exists, and closures are tracked by no one at all. The best available series is the Woodall's and RV Business development tracker, which documented at least 4,146 new RV sites across 31 new parks plus 1,570 expansion sites, 5,716 in total, from 2024 through early 2026 (6). Against the standing base of roughly 1,520,000 private campsites, that is net supply growth of about 0.2 percent per year. Even the fuller forward pipeline of 18,115 sites across 90 parks from 2023 to 2027 would add under one percent annually if every project delivered (7). Many will not: RV Business notes projects being delayed "not by permitting issues, but by the high-interest rates and inflation." KOA opened fifteen new parks in 2024 and just three new builds in 2025 (6). Meanwhile supply leaks out the other end where land value exceeds park value, with parks converting to housing and industrial uses in growth markets, a mechanism documented mostly in blended mobile-home data but real for RV land on appreciating corridors.

Now cost, with the definitional reconciliation the circulating figures never provide. The most credible component build-up, from Outdoor Hospitality Weekly for a 100-plus-site good-to-excellent park with land excluded, runs: surveys, engineering and permits about $2,500 a site, grading $2,400, paving $3,600, patios and walkways $3,200, sewer and septic $2,500, water $2,400, electrical $4,000, buildings $5,000 to $10,000, landscaping $5,000 to $10,000, for a total near $30,000 to $40,000 per site (16). The $15,000-to-$100,000 spread you will see quoted elsewhere reconciles on exactly three variables: whether land is included, the amenity level, and terrain plus utility distance. Resort-quality all-in with land runs $40,000 to $70,000 per pad, and a full bells-and-whistles resort reaches $60,000 to $80,000 per practitioner estimates. A site that cost $25,000 to build in 2019 costs $35,000 to $40,000 or more now; nonresidential construction inflation ran about 8 percent in 2021 and roughly 12 percent in 2022, and Mortenson's index was still up 6.77 percent in the year to Q1 2026 (41).

The utility detail is where budgets die quietly. The electrical code counts a 50-amp site at 12,000 volt-amperes against 3,600 for a combined 30/20-amp site, so a twenty-site 50-amp park needs roughly 600-amp service; a three-phase first-pole utility charge alone can run $26,000; sewer and septic run $2,000 to $12,000 a site and a package wastewater treatment plant can exceed $1 million; a mesh wifi system runs $15,000 to $35,000. And the amenity arms race compounds it: a pickleball court at $20,000 to $45,000, a commercial pool from $30,000 into six figures, a 2,000-square-foot clubhouse near $500,000, design and engineering at 10 to 20 percent of project. Premium features do command 15 to 30 percent higher rates. But the pool costs the same whether the park has ten sites or a hundred, so amenity cost per site falls only with scale, and every amenity is a permanent labor and maintenance line after it is a capital line.

Now run the test. Newmark's 2026 valuation survey puts Class A and B RV parks near an 8.0 percent going-in cap rate (19), and a stabilized 115-site resort in Abilene traded at about 7.75 percent in December 2025 (20). No brokerage publishes a formal development yield-on-cost hurdle for this asset class, which is itself a finding; the only named RV-specific target is an operator's, roughly 300 basis points of development spread over the going-in cap. Take 200 to 300 basis points over 8.0 percent and required yield on cost is 10 to 11 percent. At $30,000 all-in per site, that demands about $3,000 of net operating income per site. At $60,000, about $6,000. At $70,000, up to $7,700.

Set that against what parks actually produce. The Section 3 benchmarks imply roughly $2,100 of NOI per site for a KOA-style transient park, $2,675 for the ELS annual model, and about $5,000 for Sun's resort portfolio. A basic, land-light build at $30,000 roughly clears its hurdle. A resort-quality build at $60,000 to $70,000 needs more NOI per site than all but best-in-class destination resorts generate. The more amenitized the build, the wider the gap between required and achievable return.

Stated as the plain sentence a credit committee can use: justifying a $60,000-per-site resort requires about $6,000 of NOI per site, roughly $12,000 of revenue at a 50 percent margin, which at the national weighted average rate of $103.60 a night means about 116 occupied site-nights per year, roughly 32 percent annualized occupancy or 64 to 68 percent across a six-month season, before ancillary. That is achievable only in a genuine destination market that sustains both the rate and the occupancy. And the rate environment is softening at the margin, not firming, which widens the gap.

The REITs have already voted with their capital. Equity LifeStyle added 503 expansion sites in the year to mid-2026 at existing properties, where the land, entitlement, and amenity spine are already paid for and a new full-hookup site costs $3,200 to $29,000 (13)(16). Sun delivered 360 ground-up plus 440 expansion sites in fiscal 2023, then in fiscal 2024 sold thirteen RV properties and recorded $24.1 million of impairments on non-continuing expansion and development projects (12). That impairment line is a public company stating, in audited filings, that ground-up development stopped penciling at current costs and rates. Expansion of an existing park, or acquisition and repositioning of an under-managed one, beats new construction on risk-adjusted return almost everywhere. The exceptions are cheap-land, fast-entitlement Sun Belt sites built basic, and true destination markets that clear resort rates.

5. The Rulebook Decides the Site Plan

Construction is not the binding constraint on a new park. Permission is. The regulatory overlay adds roughly three to six months and low tens of thousands of dollars to a simple expansion in a permissive jurisdiction, and 18 to 36-plus months and hundreds of thousands to a ground-up resort in a restrictive one. Three gates do most of the gating: zoning, wastewater, and floodplain.

Zoning is the gate that kills projects. Outside unincorporated jurisdictions, RV parks are rarely a by-right use; the dominant pattern nationally is a conditional use permit or special exception, which converts approval into a discretionary political hearing, and organized neighbor opposition is the most common reason a park dies there. The record is concrete: a seven-pad project in Washington County, Arkansas was denied in March 2025 after 37 written neighbor complaints about traffic, septic, and long-term occupancy; courts in Tennessee and Idaho have upheld denials and injunctions against unpermitted operation; a Custer County, Idaho permit was approved, revoked on public appeal, and reinstated only when a judge found the commissioners had ignored their own ordinance. The trend line points toward tightening: Greene County, Tennessee moved RV parks from by-right agricultural use to conditional use in 2024, and Putnam County, Florida eliminated RVs on vacant lots the same summer. The geography of permission is stark. Much of unincorporated Texas has no zoning at all, so a developer answers to state environmental rules for water, sewer, and stormwater rather than to a hearing room; rural Florida and Arizona are comparatively permissive; California coastal zones, Colorado mountain counties, and New England towns are effectively closed. That is the regulatory floor under the Sun Belt's construction dominance, and, per the moat logic of Section 4, every tightening ordinance protects the incumbents.

Glamping fits no existing use category, which is its quiet handicap: codes written decades ago map a safari tent onto "campground" or "transient lodging" or nothing at all, forcing a permit fight or a text amendment. The genuine workaround is agritourism preemption. Florida statute bars local governments from limiting agritourism on agricultural land; North Carolina exempts agritourism structures from zoning; Maryland added camping to its agritourism definition in 2021; and California's AB 518, signed October 2025, created a "low-impact camping area" category of up to nine accommodations, at most four of them RVs, capped at 14 consecutive nights per camper and sited at least 200 feet from any offsite residence (31). These statutes have limits, as a New Hampshire farm-wedding case demonstrated, but they are a real development pathway that most operators have never heard of.

Water is the overlooked recurring burden; wastewater is the expensive one. A park on its own well serving 25 or more people at least 60 days a year becomes a regulated transient non-community water system under the Safe Drinking Water Act, one of roughly 89,000 nationally, with routine coliform monitoring, annual nitrate testing, and a periodic sanitary survey (30). The licensure fees themselves are trivial, Florida caps its annual license at $600 and Montana charges $225 for a large park, but the plan-review calendar is not. Wastewater sizing drives real money: state design flows run 50 to 120 gallons per day per site, which determines whether the site works on conventional septic, needs engineered treatment, or requires a package plant that can exceed $1 million and, if it discharges to surface water, a federal NPDES permit on a five-year cycle. Inadequate septic was among the stated grounds in that Arkansas denial. In our feasibility work the wastewater question gets answered before the market question, because no demand study rescues a parcel that cannot treat its own flows.

Floodplain is the sector's most underanalyzed risk, and after July 2025 it is no longer theoretical. RV parks cluster on rivers and coasts because waterfront is the product. Under the federal floodplain rule, an RV in a Special Flood Hazard Area escapes elevation and anchoring requirements only if it stays fewer than 180 consecutive days or remains fully licensed and ready for highway use, on its wheels, quick-disconnect utilities only, no permanently attached additions (26). The moment a guest stays past 180 days or bolts on a deck, the unit becomes a structure requiring elevation, and the park owes a floodplain development permit. The insurance consequence is worse: FEMA states plainly that the National Flood Insurance Program does not insure recreational vehicles as buildings, because they do not meet the policy's definition of one (26). Waterfront RV collateral carries substantial uninsured flood risk. Every lender with river-frontage parks in the portfolio should read that sentence twice.

Then came the Guadalupe. The July 4, 2025 Texas Hill Country flood killed at least 135 people statewide, 107 of them in Kerr County including 27 at Camp Mystic, caused roughly $1.1 billion of damage, destroyed the Blue Oak RV Park in Kerrville, and swept RVs out of the Riverside RV Park in Ingram (28). A repeat event in the same corridor in July 2026 killed a man in an RV and forced more than eighty campground evacuations. The legislative response was the most consequential regulatory development in the sector's modern history: Texas Senate Bill 1, the Heaven's 27 Camp Safety Act, signed September 5, 2025, made Texas the first state ever to adopt NFPA 1194 as a statewide standard for RV parks and campgrounds, barred licensing youth camps with cabins in FEMA floodplains, and imposed real-time weather alert systems, staff evacuation training, emergency plans filed with local emergency management, and rooftop escape ladders on floodplain cabins (27)(29). When the least-regulated large state in the country adopts a statewide campground safety code, the direction of travel everywhere else is not in doubt. We now treat the SB 1 package as baseline best practice in every study regardless of state, and we treat floodway and V-zone siting as a go/no-go screen rather than a cost line.

Two operating exposures round out the rulebook. Long-stay tenancy law runs both directions at once: California's 30-day tenant and nine-month resident thresholds, Oregon's restructured rules for lots rented past 45 days, and local stay caps of 14 to 180 days all police the line between hospitality and housing, even as other jurisdictions actively recruit RV parks as workforce and emergency housing. And the workamper model, labor traded for a free site, is the sector's most common and least appreciated legal risk: the federal seasonal-recreation exemption is the shield, it is fact-specific, and where it fails, the imputed value of the site itself becomes wages, with double back pay and a two-to-three-year lookback attached (43). Section 8 runs the arithmetic on why that exposure is closer than most operators think.

6. Capital Markets and the Leverage Math

The first thing a borrower needs to hear is the thing most borrowers get wrong: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do not finance RV parks, resorts, or campgrounds. Freddie Mac's manufactured housing program says it in five words, "No RV resorts or broken condominiums allowed," and both agencies require HUD-code homes titled as real property, where RVs and most park models are titled as personal property, like a vehicle (26). There is no carve-out for a partial share of RV pads; a community whose income depends on transient sites is routed out of the agency box entirely, and no meaningful HUD or FHA program fills the gap. RV park debt comes from community and regional banks, the SBA, USDA Business & Industry, CMBS conduits, bridge lenders, and, unusually often for commercial real estate, the seller.

The price of that debt, mid-2026: community and regional banks at roughly 6.5 to 8.0 percent, 65 to 75 percent loan-to-value, 1.25x coverage, 20-to-25-year amortization with recourse; SBA 7(a) to about 90 percent of cost at Prime plus up to 3 points, capped near 9.75 percent with Prime at 6.75 percent, fully amortizing over 25 years; SBA 504 with a below-market fixed debenture near 6.2 percent; USDA B&I at negotiated rates with terms to 40 years; CMBS at 55 to 65 percent of value with a roughly 1.5 to 1.6x coverage floor and an 11 percent debt yield test; bridge money at 9 to 13.5 percent (21)(23)(25)(39)(44). Seller financing, per the sector's transaction tracker, is "making a comeback," and assumable low-rate debt is now a genuine competitive advantage in a bid (22).

Values sit on top of that stack at an 8.0 percent going-in cap rate for Class A and B parks and about 9.0 percent for Class C, per Newmark's 2026 survey, a 50 to 150 basis point premium over manufactured housing communities near 5.9 percent, reflecting the operating intensity and the transient volatility (19). Against a 10-year Treasury at 4.67 percent on July 31, 2026, that is roughly a 330 basis point spread at the institutional end and 430 to 730 at Class C and value-add, compressed from the 500-plus available in 2020 and 2021 but still real carry (44). The best auditable data point in the whole sector is a securitization: the Quality RV Resort portfolio in a September 2025 CMBS deal closed at exactly 60.0 percent loan-to-value, 1.59x coverage, and an 11.2 percent NOI debt yield, about $22,111 per unit across 758 pads and 303 storage units in the Houston area (21). When you want to know what disciplined institutional credit actually requires of this asset class, that is the print.

Now the arithmetic that governs every 2026 deal, shown rather than asserted. A 25-year amortizing loan carries an annual constant, debt service per dollar borrowed, of 8.68 percent at a 7.25 percent coupon, 9.26 percent at 8.0 percent, and 10.68 percent on SBA paper at 9.75 percent; a 30-year CMBS loan at 6.5 percent runs 7.58 percent. Subtract those from an 8.0 percent cap rate and every bank and SBA structure is under water on day one: minus 0.68, minus 1.26, minus 2.68 points respectively. Entry leverage on institutional-quality RV parks in 2026 is dilutive. The return lives in amortization, in NOI growth, and in repositioning, not in the spread at close. Positive leverage only reappears at Class C, plus 0.32 points at a 9.0 percent cap against the cheapest bank constant, and clearly at value-add cap rates of 11 to 12 percent. This is the mirror image of 2021, when cheap debt made almost any park accretive, and it is the cleanest explanation of why the syndication pitches built on that vintage's assumptions have gone quiet.

Which lender test actually sizes the loan? Work a $10 million stabilized park at an 8.0 percent cap, $800,000 of NOI. Seventy percent of value is a $7.0 million loan. A 1.25x coverage test on an 8.68 percent constant allows $7.37 million. A 10 percent debt yield floor allows $8.0 million. At those settings loan-to-value binds first, with coverage close behind. But tighten the coverage floor to 1.30 or 1.35x for a seasonal or transient-heavy park, or apply the CMBS-style 11 percent debt yield, and the coverage tests bind before value does; the Quality RV portfolio closed at 60 percent leverage precisely because the debt yield governed. The rule for a credit officer: on stabilized Class A and B parks, coverage and debt yield set the loan; on Class C and value-add, loan-to-value is the effective cap because the appraised value is lower.

The buyer map confirms the discipline. Sun Communities is a net seller of RV product, disposing of a portfolio for $92.9 million in January 2025 alongside its $5.25 billion exit from marinas (12). Equity LifeStyle is the patient buyer, 453 properties and 173,371 sites at the end of 2025, adding assets like the 252-site Meridian RV Resort in Arizona at about $46,000 a site (13). The growth engine is private: Blue Water at 60-plus destinations and third-party manager for institutional owners, Northgate at 40 properties behind the Camp Fimfo brand, Roberts at roughly 6,500 RV lots with 2,700 more in development, and RREAF, which entered with a $157 million five-park purchase. Distress exists but is idiosyncratic rather than systemic: a $2.6 million receivership action against an Arkansas resort filed in December 2025, a Colorado developer bankrupt before his park was built, and syndications raised at 2021-2022 valuations facing the squeeze that has already produced spectacular failures in adjacent asset classes. The public REIT and CMBS RV paper is performing. Insurance, meanwhile, has become a material underwriting line of its own: premiums keep rising in storm-exposed markets "even when operations remain stable and claims are limited," in the words of the sector's largest specialty broker, coastal named-storm deductibles run 2 to 5 percent of insured value, and the carrier list has thinned (37). Every study we sign now carries a bindable insurance quote and a stressed insurance line, not a placeholder.

7. Sixteen Years of Loan Tape: What the SBA Record Actually Shows

No public source publishes a default or charge-off rate for NAICS 721211. The industry rankings that circulate either cover only the top fifty industries, and RV parks are not among them, or aggregate to the two-digit accommodation-and-food sector, which buries campgrounds under hotels and restaurants (38). The best proxy anyone had offered was hotels and motels. So we stopped waiting for the number and produced it: a loan-level tabulation of the SBA's FOIA files, every 7(a) and 504 loan coded to NAICS 721211 from fiscal 2010 through the second quarter of fiscal 2026, data as of March 31, 2026 (1). The figures below appear to be the first of their kind in public. The full tabulation, with every denominator and confidence interval, is published separately; what follows is what a credit committee needs.

First, the validation, because a tabulation nobody can check is just another vendor claim. The only published figure for this sector is calendar-2025 origination volume of $90.4 million across 64 loans at an average rate of 9.47 percent. Cut our file to calendar-year 2025 approvals and it returns 64 loans, $90,412,700, and a mean initial note rate of 9.47 percent, an exact match. The same period on a fiscal-year basis reads 74 approvals and $116.3 million, so never compare the two bases.

The scale: 929 approved 7(a) loans, 772 of them disbursed, for $873.7 million; 374 approved 504 loans, 292 disbursed, for a $224.4 million CDC portion and $567.3 million of total project cost including the third-party first mortgages. Call it $1.44 billion of SBA-supported capital into RV parks and campgrounds since fiscal 2010. A small universe by SBA standards, and that smallness disciplines everything below.

The headline, with its denominators attached, because the same portfolio yields four different true numbers depending on which one you use. Across all vintages, RV parks charged off at 0.91 percent of disbursed 7(a) loans against 4.66 percent for the entire SBA book; 0.29 percent of disbursed dollars against 1.75; a 3.11 percent trouble rate, counting charge-offs plus guaranty purchases plus loans in liquidation, against 7.50; and 1.70 percent on a resolved-loan basis against 7.45 (1). All four are correct. Any figure quoted without its denominator is meaningless, and this sector's commentary is full of exactly that.

The all-vintage number flatters, though, because 48.3 percent of disbursed loans were approved in fiscal 2020 or later and have not had time to fail. The honest read is the seasoned fiscal 2010 to 2016 cohort, loans with a decade or more of life behind them: RV parks charged off at 2.63 percent of loans against 6.11 percent for all industries, and 1.07 percent of dollars against 3.14. Seven charge-offs on 266 seasoned loans yields a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.28 to 5.33 percent. The all-industry rate sits outside that interval, so the advantage is real and not a small-sample illusion, but the interval is wide, and no single-decimal claim about this rate is defensible. The statement that survives scrutiny: RV parks and campgrounds charge off at roughly half to two-fifths the rate of the SBA book as a whole.

The proxy question gets retired rather than dodged. The published guidance, ours included, had been to use hotels and motels as the nearest denominator-backed stand-in. On the seasoned cohort, RV parks read 2.63 percent against 2.54 for hotels and motels, with heavily overlapping confidence intervals: statistically indistinguishable. The proxy was sound. In credit terms an RV park is a lodging asset, and the tape says it behaves like one.

One spectacular-looking finding must not be published the way it invites. Four hundred and twenty RV park loans at 25-year terms have produced zero charge-offs. Before that becomes a marketing slide, run the control: 25-year SBA paper charges off at 0.01 percent across every other industry too, on 98,761 loans. Near-zero loss on long real-estate paper is a property of the collateral and the refinance dynamic, not of campgrounds. What does survive the control is the term-matched comparison on seasoned loans, 2.86 percent against 8.26 for the book at terms of seven years or less, and 0.00 against 4.37 at seven to ten years, plus the term mix itself: 54.4 percent of loans and 77.4 percent of dollars sit at exactly 300 months. This is real estate lending, not working capital lending, and that is much of why it performs.

Recent vintages carry their own required caveat. No RV park 7(a) loan approved in fiscal 2017 or later has been charged off, 506 disbursed loans across nine years, but fourteen of them are in trouble, a 2.77 percent trouble rate, and the eventual loss rate on those cohorts will not be zero. Quote the trouble rate alongside the charge-off rate or the picture misleads. The 504 program tells a subtler story: RV park 504 loans read directionally worse than the 504 book, but four charge-offs on 95 seasoned loans is not a statistically significant finding and we decline to publish it as one. What is worth publishing is the explanation for the direction: 55.5 percent of RV park 504 loans since fiscal 2018 went to startups building parks from the ground up, against 29.6 percent on 7(a). The 504 is the construction lane, and ground-up construction is the highest-risk profile in the asset class, exactly as the Section 4 arithmetic predicts. Similarly directional, and only directional: NAICS 531190, the lessor category where mobile home park operators sit and which the SBA declares ineligible, charged off at 5.39 percent seasoned, roughly twice the RV park rate, with overlapping intervals and a category broader than parks alone. Evidence consistent with the SOP's judgment, not proof of it.

The geography is genuinely new, because nobody publishes state-level RV park data of any kind. Texas dominates with 103 loans, 13.3 percent of the national count, and $172.9 million, consistent with its zoning vacuum. Then New York with 47, California 41, Michigan 39, Colorado 34, Missouri 33, Wisconsin 32, Utah 31, and Oregon and Minnesota with 27 each. The counterintuitive result: the four classic snowbird states, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California, hold just 24 percent of national loan count. Strip out Texas and the remaining three hold 10.6 percent, less than half the 22.3 percent sitting in New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Oregon combined. SBA park lending is a northern, seasonal, distributed business to a degree the snowbird framing in the trade press completely misses. Florida is the sharpest anomaly of all: only 20 loans, but the highest average loan in the country at $2.57 million, nearly double the national average. Few deals, big deals, which is what a mature, high-barrier, institutionally owned market looks like from the loan tape. Minnesota is the mirror image at a $411,000 average.

Two more cuts matter to anyone structuring a deal. Live Oak Banking Company wrote 41 loans for $116.9 million since fiscal 2020, 23.3 percent of all sector 7(a) dollars, at an average loan of $2.85 million, roughly three times the next lender's average size; the market is unconcentrated by loan count and concentrated by dollars, meaning one bank does the large deals and everyone else splits the small ones (1)(39). And the borrower mix is startup-heavy in a way few appreciate: about 43 percent of RV park 7(a) lending since fiscal 2018 went to startups and businesses under two years old, with startups carrying the largest average loan in the book at $1.89 million. The sector's strong credit performance is being achieved despite a risky borrower mix, not because of a safe one. The cleanest signal in the entire tabulation sits in that same table: change-of-ownership loans, buying an operating park with a track record, show a zero percent trouble rate. Building one from scratch does not.

8. Running the Park: Expenses, Seasonality, and the Tenure Paradox

Ask five sources what an RV park's expense ratio is and you will hear 35 percent, 46 percent, 54 percent, and 70 percent, all sourced, all "true." The spread is definitional, not operational, and decoding it is worth more to an underwriter than any single benchmark.

The anchor is the strongest primary dataset in the sector: Newmark's RV Park Expense Analysis, built from the actual 2015-to-2021 financial statements of 62 parks totaling 10,682 sites across thirteen states, averaging just over 170 sites each, excluding distressed and high-permanent-resident properties (18). On a revenue base of $4,645 per site, it reports repairs and maintenance at 6.7 percent, professional fees 0.8, payroll 15.5, administrative 5.4, marketing 1.5, utilities 14.5, property taxes 4.1, insurance 2.7, and a 5.1 percent management fee, for total operating expenses of 53.7 percent of revenue, $2,611 per site, implying $2,034 of NOI per site at a 43.8 percent margin. Two absences matter as much as the lines: the schedule contains no replacement reserve and no franchise royalty, so both must be added in underwriting, and its 2015-2021 vintage predates the hard insurance market, making the 2.7 percent insurance line a floor, not an estimate.

Now the reconciliation. A 35-to-40 percent ratio is a mom-and-pop trailing statement with unpaid family labor, no management fee, and no reserve. Roughly 46.5 to 47 percent is the annual-heavy public-REIT model; Sun's RV segment ran a 46.8 percent same-property expense ratio in fiscal 2025, corroborating the Equity LifeStyle figure from Section 3 (12). Fifty to 55 percent is a market-managed park with paid staff and a reserve, where Newmark's 53.7 sits. Seventy percent is transient-heavy, amenity-rich, fully staffed franchise product. The variables that move a park across that entire range are only these: whether owner labor is priced at market, whether a reserve is charged, whether property tax is current, and whether the ratio is struck on gross revenue or effective income. Our own casework shows the mechanic end to end: a park showing a 38 percent trailing ratio was normalized to 58 percent for underwriting, adding market management and a real reserve, then earned its way back to a stabilized 52 percent through revenue growth rather than cost cuts (1). Any seller statement below 45 percent should be restated before a single coverage ratio is computed.

The two largest lines each hide a story. Payroll, 15.5 percent at benchmark, is routinely masked by the workamper trade, and the arithmetic of that trade is uncomfortable: a $600-a-month site exchanged for twenty hours a week values the labor near $7.50 an hour, at or below the federal floor, and when a couple both work twenty hours for one site it falls to about $3.75. The industry's own trade publication recommends a maximum of fifteen hours a week for a site at a for-profit business and states outright that the implied wage should meet minimum wage (43). Where the seasonal-recreation exemption fails, remedies are double back pay with a multi-year lookback. Utilities, 14.5 percent at benchmark, can hit 30 to 35 percent at older, non-submetered transient parks, and this is the one genuinely large operational lever: a big motorhome running two air conditioners on a 50-amp pedestal draws 60 to 80 kilowatt-hours a day, six to ten dollars of the park's money at commercial rates, and one documented Florida campground recovered $17,500 of a $70,000 annual electric bill from its guests. Submetering cuts consumption 20 to 40 percent at roughly $15,000 to $30,000 per hundred sites with payback inside two seasons (44). The legal ceiling matters: essentially every state permits passing electricity through at cost and prohibits reselling it at a markup, which is precisely why parks with bundled electricity are chronically under-costed at acquisition.

Insurance and property tax are the lines that move most between a seller's statement and a buyer's reality. Coastal named-storm deductibles of 2 to 5 percent of insured value, and past 10 percent on barrier islands, put six-figure sums on the owner's side of the first dollar; premiums are repricing whole regions rather than individual claims histories. Property tax is commonly assessed by income capitalization and, in many jurisdictions, reassessed to the transaction price on sale, so the tax line must be modeled to the purchase price, never to the seller's trailing bill. And the reserve convention needs replacing: the appraiser's roughly $75 per pad and the securitization market's $50 to $100 trace to conventions set two decades ago and never indexed, while the components actually consuming capital, pedestals at $1,000 to $2,500 a site on a 15-to-25-year cycle, roads on 12 to 20 years, a package treatment plant at a million-plus on 20 to 30, cabins at roughly $45,000 a unit, argue for a funded reserve of 3 to 5 percent of revenue (1)(18)(21).

Then seasonality, where this section earns its place in the report. Our case data on a representative northern-seasonal park shows about 62 percent of transient revenue landing in the five months from May through September, while the four winter months contribute roughly 14 percent of transient revenue and still carry 33 percent of the year's debt service (1). An annual coverage ratio of 1.57x can be entirely honest and the February payment can still bounce. The instrument that prevents that outcome is the contracted book: in the same casework, a healthy annual and seasonal roster covers 55 to 60 percent of every single month's debt service before one transient guest checks in. Which produces the reframe this report has been building toward: the industry-wide shift from transient to annual tenure, the one both REITs are executing as fast as they can convert sites, is not primarily a revenue strategy. It is a debt-service-coverage-shape strategy. It flattens the year so the loan survives the winter.

And that is the paradox. The tenure mix that maximizes income stability, flattens seasonality, and earns the best cap rates is the same mix that fails the SBA's eligibility test, because the SOP requires more than half of gross revenue from transient stays of 30 days or less (23). Convert too far toward the stable book and the cheapest government-guaranteed debt in the market, the 90-percent-advance, 25-year, fully amortizing 7(a), is off the table, and the borrower is repriced into conventional or USDA structures. Up to 49.9 percent of revenue can sit in monthly extended stays and the park remains eligible; one point past the line and it does not. We have found no other published analysis that states this tension plainly, and it is, in our judgment, the single most important structuring fact in the asset class: the underwriter's ideal park and the SBA's eligible park are two different parks, and every deal must decide, explicitly, which one it is building.

Assembled into one statement, the benchmarks produce a composite worth pinning to the wall. A 150-site secondary-market park, sixty annual sites at $600 a month, seventy transient at a $55 blended rate and 45 percent trailing-twelve-month occupancy, twenty cabins at $150 and 55 percent, generates about $1,667,000 of site revenue plus roughly 16 percent ancillary for $1,934,000 of effective gross income, about $12,900 per site. Loaded honestly, Newmark percentages plus hard-market insurance at 3.5 percent and a 3 percent reserve, expenses run about 61 percent, leaving roughly $747,000 of NOI, near $4,980 per site. At the Newmark 8.0 percent cap that is a $9.3 million value, about $62,000 a site. At 65 percent leverage and a 9.25 percent constant, coverage is about 1.33x and the debt yield 12.3 percent: clears the SBA floor, clears the conventional floor, clears the CMBS comparable. But the 8.0 cap still sits below the 9.25 constant, so even this clean, honest deal is carried by amortization rather than day-one spread, and at the 85-to-90 percent leverage the specialty SBA lenders run, coverage compresses toward the floor and the whole credit comes down to the trough month and the contracted book. Which is exactly where this section began.

9. Geography, and What Actually Kills an RV Park

National averages govern nothing in this business. Below the national level, the honest starting point is an inventory of what data exists, because most of it does not: there is no authoritative state-by-state private park or site count, no tier A occupancy or rate series at any geography below national, no published sites-per-capita demand benchmark, and no performance series for national park gateway towns or rural markets at all. Directory counts of parks per state disagree by multiples because each defines its universe differently. When a feasibility question reaches the submarket level, published comparables simply run out, which is the structural reason lenders commission site-specific studies rather than a data pull.

What can be said with confidence: demand concentrates in California, Texas, and Florida on nearly every camper ranking, and the snowbird corridors are the one geography with hard destination-level economics. The Rio Grande Valley is the best-documented market in the entire sector: roughly 53,000 Winter Texan households delivering more than $1.9 billion of annual economic impact, 10,011 jobs, and an average of $15,600 per household over a 3.1-month stay, per the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley's recurring study, though the count has drifted down 1 to 2 percent a year from a 2009-2010 peak (36). Arizona hosts on the order of 100,000 Canadian households at winter peak per an advocacy-body estimate, with the last rigorous academic count now two decades old, and Florida has no current official snowbird count at all, because the state's own demographers exclude snowbirds from population estimates. Occupancy inverts by latitude: sunbelt snowbird parks run near capacity October through April and can fall to 25 to 40 percent in summer heat, while northern parks post 20 to 40 percent winters and live off a five-month season. The national park gateway economy adds a third demand engine, $44.8 billion of visitor spending across the system in the last full accounting, with public campground scarcity pushing overflow into private gateway parks, and a two-sided policy risk as timed entry expands at some parks and rolls back at others (32).

Saturation risk is real and it is local. Trade commentary states that "localized oversupply in key destinations is actively diluting transient site occupancy," and the sector's most candid published exchange captured both sides in a single 2023 feature: an operator warning that "a lot of lenders have gone home" and that the bottom had not been reached on "rural, overbuilt, overpriced parks," while a private-equity sponsor in the same article announced plans for 25 to 30 parks and an intention to dominate the space within 36 months (42). Both can be right, because the oversupply concentrates precisely where land is cheap and zoning is permissive, a single wave of new sites flooding a finite local camper pool, while destination and coastal-mountain markets stay protected by terrain and regulation. Community opposition now blocking new parks across at least five states is, for the incumbent, a moat.

Then there is the failure record, the most clarifying dataset we assembled, because RV parks are rarely killed by soft leisure demand. They are killed by five specific things, and the record names names.

Floodplain siting is the deadliest. The July 2025 Guadalupe River flood destroyed Blue Oak RV Park in Kerrville, roughly two dozen RVs swept away, not rebuilt a year later; Guadalupe Keys RV Resort in Center Point lost all but two units and remains closed (37). Hurricane Helene did the same across the Blue Ridge in September 2024: Mountain River Family Campground in Newland destroyed, Mountain Stream RV Park in Marion "totally destroyed" in the owners' words, and, in the single most quotable statistic in this report, all 38 of the Carolinas association's Blue Ridge member parks damaged, 16 forced closed, not all expected to reopen, with the association's executive noting that mountainside parks "didn't see a need for additional flood insurance" (37). The cruel irony from Section 5 completes itself here: waterfront commands the rate premium, the flood zone takes the park, and the federal flood program will not insure the guests' rigs as buildings.

Undercapitalization is the second killer: Dinosaur Ridge Resorts in Golden, Colorado filed Chapter 11 in May 2026 ahead of foreclosure, owing $6.5 million on a park that was never built, and a Kennebunkport campground went to foreclosure auction the same spring (37). Third, single-demand-source dependency, the most underappreciated 2026 risk because it looks like strength at underwriting: the Bakken oil-field parks around Williston emptied between 2015 and 2018 when the rigs left and the county stopped renewing temporary-housing permits, and the prospective analogue is being built right now in Abilene, Texas, where thousands of pads and units are rising to house data-center construction crews on demand that ends the day the projects do. Fourth, land value exceeding park value, which closes parks profitably, from the owner's perspective, in appreciating corridors. And fifth, regulatory action, from permit revocation to code enforcement shutting an unpermitted operation outright.

Three screens would have caught most of the named failures before a dollar moved: no rentable site in a Special Flood Hazard Area without treating its revenue as zero in the base case; no single-employer or single-project demand base underwritten past the life of the anchor; and no cheap-land rural market where two or more competing parks are under construction inside the trade area.

Which leaves the question every rural and small-market deal turns on: with no published comparables, what defines the market? The answer is the trade area, and the trade area is a method choice with teeth. In our own analytical work, the same site yielded 55,555 people of demand population under a three-mile ring and 21,343 under a five-minute drive-time polygon, a 2.6-to-1 difference produced by method alone, before a single assumption about capture or spend (1). A 25 percent error at the boundary stage does not stay 25 percent; it propagates straight through the revenue line and can move a coverage ratio across the threshold that decides a credit. There is no published trade-area standard for RV parks and no authoritative sites-per-camper benchmark, so the boundary is drawn by judgment, and the judgment should be shown, defended, and stress-tested in every study a lender relies on. That is not a sales pitch for feasibility work; it is the reason the discipline exists.

Where the Opportunities Sit

The through-line of nine sections of evidence points at a fairly short list. Acquisition and repositioning of under-managed parks beats ground-up construction on risk-adjusted return almost everywhere: the yield-on-cost gap penalizes new resorts, expansion sites cost $3,200 to $29,000 against $30,000-plus for new ground, and the loan tape's cleanest signal is a zero percent trouble rate on change-of-ownership loans against measurable distress in ground-up startups (1)(16). The operational levers with proven paybacks are submetering, ancillary build-out toward the 15-to-25 percent band, disciplined dynamic pricing credited conservatively, and tenure engineering toward a contracted book that covers most of every month's debt service, executed with one eye on the SBA's 50 percent line if government-guaranteed debt is part of the plan. On the financing side, the July 2026 decoupling of the 7(a) and 504 caps into a combined $10 million is the largest expansion of financeable deal size in the program's history and materially changes what an owner-operator can buy (24); USDA B&I remains the natural home for the rural and annual-heavy parks the SBA cannot touch, with an 85 percent guarantee under $5 million in fiscal 2026 (25); and cost segregation on an improvement-heavy asset, with 100 percent bonus depreciation permanently reinstated for assets placed in service after January 19, 2025, routinely shelters more of year-one basis than buyers expect (40). And supply-constrained destination geographies, snowbird corridors, park gateways, coastal and mountain towns where opposition and terrain cap new sites, offer the incumbent a moat that the failure-prone cheap-land markets never will.

Where the Risks Sit

The honest risk list, in the order the evidence weighs it. Floodplain and catastrophe exposure first, because it is the documented killer, it concentrates exactly where the rate premium lives, and the collateral is partly uninsurable by design. Affordability stress second: record negative equity and loan-term extension in the vehicle-finance proxy data, and a lower-income household segment visibly pulling back from travel, pressing hardest on the commodity transient park (34). Transient normalization third, minus 9 percent at both REITs in 2025, guided to stabilize but not yet proven. The refinancing wall fourth: paper written at 2021's 5.25 percent median reprices into a 9.5-to-9.9 percent world, and syndications raised at that vintage's valuations own the problem most acutely (1). Insurance repricing fifth, a permanent step-change rather than a cycle, with regional pricing and named-storm deductibles rewriting NOI in coastal and wildfire markets. Single-demand-source concentration sixth, currently being rebuilt at scale in the data-center corridors. Regulatory tightening seventh, cutting both ways, as it raises costs on everyone and bars new competitors. And an honest eighth: the retention of the pandemic camping cohort rests entirely on self-reported survey data, and if participation rolls over for two consecutive years, the demand floor this report stands on needs re-testing. What does not belong on the list is the phrase the sector's promoters lean on. This asset class is not "recession-resistant"; it is recession-exposed at the transient layer and recession-dampened at the contracted layer, and the mix, not the slogan, is the risk profile.

Outlook to 2031

The base case through 2031 is a supply-constrained, demand-stable, capital-disciplined market. Net supply growth continues to run well under one percent a year, because the yield-on-cost gap suppresses ground-up construction until either cap rates compress below roughly 7 percent, destination rates rise durably above the $120-to-$130 range, or construction inflation reverses; none of those is the current trajectory, and Texas SB 1-style regulation spreading to other states raises the barrier further. Demand grows with the installed base and its usage, at low single digits, with the transient layer cyclical around it. Rates matter more than anything else in the capital account: the forward views on cap rates genuinely disagree, decompression as rates fall against compression through institutionalization, and the honest position is that a sustained 75-to-100 basis point drop in benchmark rates would restore positive leverage on Class A and B parks and unlock the volume that the bid-ask spread is currently holding back (19)(44). Consolidation continues from the top down, one REIT as the disciplined buyer, private platforms as the growth engine, and 90 percent of the industry still family-held, which means a decade of change-of-ownership deal flow, the best-performing loan category on the tape, as founder generations exit. The tenure paradox does not resolve; if anything it sharpens, as more parks convert toward contracted income for coverage reasons and more of the industry's highest-quality assets migrate out of SBA eligibility and into conventional and USDA structures. And the defining underwriting discipline of the next five years is already visible in the 2024-2025 record: the map, not the market. Flood zones, single anchors, and trade-area boundaries will decide more credits than national demand ever will.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many RV parks are there in the United States? It depends entirely on the ruler. The federal count of employer establishments under NAICS 721211 is 4,513 (2017 Economic Census); IBISWorld counts 17,037 businesses on a broader universe that includes non-employer operators (2026 edition); the trade's supply reference puts the private universe at 12,290 parks and roughly 1,520,000 campsites. All three are legitimate; they measure different things, and any count quoted without its universe named should be discarded. The "7,338" figure circulating as a Census count is a commercial directory list, not federal data (4)(5)(6).

How big is the RV park industry in dollars? Park-level revenue is $11.3 billion, or about $3 billion counting only employer establishments (Census, 2017). The $159 billion figure often quoted is the RV industry's total economic impact across manufacturing, sales, service, and travel, roughly fourteen times park revenue, and should never be presented as the size of the campground business (3)(5).

How much does it cost to build an RV park per site in 2026? About $30,000 to $40,000 per site for a good-quality 100-plus-site park with land excluded, and $40,000 to $70,000 all-in for resort product including land and amenities. The wider $15,000-to-$100,000 range you will see quoted reconciles on three variables only: whether land is included, the amenity level, and terrain plus utility distance. Sewer capacity and electrical service are the components that break budgets (16).

Are RV parks a good investment in 2026? The demand base is durable and supply is nearly frozen, but the entry math is unforgiving: at an 8.0 percent institutional cap rate against bank loan constants of 8.7 to 9.3 percent, day-one leverage is negative, and returns depend on amortization, operational repositioning, and eventual rate relief. Acquiring and improving an existing park pencils far more often than building one; ground-up resort development clears its hurdle only in genuine destination markets (16)(19)(44).

What is a realistic operating expense ratio for an RV park? Roughly 50 to 55 percent of revenue for a market-managed park with paid staff and a real reserve; the best line-item benchmark reports 53.7 percent across 62 parks. Trailing statements showing 35 to 40 percent reflect unpaid owner labor and missing reserves and should be restated upward before underwriting; transient-heavy franchised operations run near 70 percent. The spread is definitional, not operational (18).

Can I get an SBA loan for an RV park or campground? Yes, if the park operates as an active hospitality business: SOP 50 10 8 requires that more than 50 percent of gross annual income come from transient guests staying 30 days or less. Up to 49.9 percent can be monthly extended-stay revenue. Parks dominated by annual and seasonal tenants are treated as ineligible passive real estate, like the mobile home parks the SOP bars outright, and must route to USDA B&I, conventional debt, or seller financing. Since July 4, 2026, an eligible borrower can combine up to $10 million of 7(a) and 504 financing (23)(24).

What is the default rate on SBA loans to RV parks? No public source published one, so we tabulated the loan-level FOIA files ourselves. RV parks and campgrounds charged off at 0.91 percent of disbursed 7(a) loans against 4.66 percent for the whole SBA book (fiscal 2010 through March 2026), and 2.63 percent against 6.11 percent on the fully seasoned 2010-2016 cohort, roughly half to two-fifths of the book, statistically indistinguishable from hotels and motels. Always note the denominator: the same portfolio reads 0.29 percent of dollars and carries a 3.11 percent trouble rate (1).

What is the difference between a park model RV and a manufactured home, and why does it matter? A park model RV is built to ANSI A119.5, capped at 400 square feet in setup mode, and titled as a vehicle; a manufactured home is built to the federal HUD code, can exceed 2,500 square feet, and is housing. The line decides everything financial: park models are personal property that generally cannot secure a real estate loan and are not insured as buildings by the federal flood program, while the mobile home parks that HUD-code homes sit in are categorically ineligible for SBA lending. Blurring this boundary is also the single biggest source of erroneous park counts (23)(26)(29).

What actually causes RV parks to fail? Rarely soft leisure demand. The documented killers, in order: floodplain siting (the 2025 Guadalupe River flood and Hurricane Helene closures), undercapitalized development that cannot reach lease-up, dependence on a single employer or project (oil-field and data-center parks), land value exceeding park value in appreciating corridors, and loss of permits or regulatory standing. Three screens catch most of them: no flood-zone site revenue in the base case, no single-anchor demand underwritten past the anchor's life, and no cheap-land market with competing parks under construction in the same trade area (37).

Methodology and Sourcing Note

This report is the synthesis of a ten-part research program conducted by MMCG Invest, LLC in July 2026: nine structured deep-research batches covering market calibration, demand, the revenue model, supply and development cost, regulation, capital markets, the SBA and USDA rulebook, operating benchmarks, and geography with the failure record, plus a search-landscape teardown, and a primary loan-level tabulation of the SBA's 7(a) and 504 FOIA files for NAICS 721211 (fiscal 2010 through the second quarter of fiscal 2026, data as of March 31, 2026), published separately and validated against the only public origination figure to an exact match.

Every figure carries a named source, edition, and date. Sources are tiered: primary documents and federal data, credible trade press citing primary sources, and vendor or consultant material, with the vendor tier flagged wherever used. National, state, and metro figures are never blended; public and private campground universes are kept strictly separate; every charge-off or default figure states its denominator; manufactured housing data is out of scope and flagged wherever a source blends it in; and no CoStar data appears anywhere in this report. Where a number could not be verified to a primary source, we say so rather than estimate. Figures that do not exist in public, a national private-site count, a sub-national occupancy series, a sites-per-camper benchmark, are identified as absences, because in this asset class the absences are load-bearing.

MMCG Invest, LLC is an independt consutlant, which prepares bank-ready feasibility studies for SBA 7(a), SBA 504, USDA B&I, and conventional lenders, including RV park, RV resort, campground, and glamping projects, alongside site selection, site plan intelligence, and RV and boat storage feasibility work. This report is general information, not legal, tax, investment, or lending advice.

Request a Feasibility Study https://calendar.app.google/EJzWEz3GCqLY2jU86

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

Contact: michal@mmcginvest.com

Phone: (628) 225-1125

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.

Sources

(1) MMCG Invest, LLC. Primary tabulation of SBA FOIA loan-level files (7(a) FY2010-FY2026 Q2; 504 FY2010-present; AsOfDate March 31, 2026), NAICS 721211; MMCG feasibility study archive, normalized case studies, and analytical briefs, including the trade area methodology brief of July 1, 2026. (2) RV Industry Association. Year-end wholesale shipment reports, 2021-2025; RV RoadSigns, Summer 2026 forecast (prepared by ITR Economics). (3) RV Industry Association. RVs Move America economic impact study, released June 1, 2026. (4) US Census Bureau. 2017 Economic Census, NAICS 721211 (Table EC1772BASIC); Service Annual Survey, NAICS 7212 (2022). (5) IBISWorld. Campgrounds & RV Parks in the US, 2026 edition (with May 2025 edition noted for revision history). (6) Woodall's Campground Magazine. Private park universe estimate (2022: 12,290 parks, ~1,520,000 sites); new park and expansion development tracker, 2024 to early 2026; KOA system reporting, 2024-2025. (7) RV Business (Jeff Crider). New campground pipeline, 2023-2027, February 22, 2024. (8) Kampgrounds of America. 12th Annual Camping & Outdoor Hospitality Report (conducted by Cairn Consulting Group), April 14, 2026. (9) The Dyrt. 2025 Camping Report (March 2025) and 2026 Camping Report (March 10, 2026). (10) Go RVing. 2025 RV Owner Demographic Profile (Ipsos), February 2025. (11) Statistical Surveys, Inc. Retail registration data via RVBusiness and RV News (March 17, 2026). (12) Sun Communities, Inc. FY2024 and FY2025 Forms 10-K; Q4 2025 earnings call, February 25, 2026; Q1 2025 disposition release; Q1 2024 investor presentation. (13) Equity LifeStyle Properties, Inc. FY2024 and FY2025 Forms 10-K and quarterly reports; Q4 2025 earnings call, January 29, 2026; Q2 2026 earnings call. (14) OHI (formerly National ARVC). 2023 Outdoor Hospitality Industry Benchmarking Report (2022 operating data). (15) Insider Perks. Outdoor Hospitality Pricing Index, April-July 2026 issues; 2026 Pricing Report, January 2026. (16) Outdoor Hospitality Weekly (Matt Whitermore). Revenue-per-site analysis, April 2024; development cost build-up, August 10, 2024. (17) Kampgrounds of America. 2024 Franchise Disclosure Document. (18) Newmark. RV Park Expense Analysis, 2021 edition (62 properties, 10,682 sites, 13 states; 2015-2021 financial statements). (19) Newmark. 2026 Valuation & Advisory North American Market Survey, February 18, 2026, via Business Valuation Resources, March 11, 2026. (20) Marcus & Millichap. Sale announcements: Whistle Stop RV Resort, Abilene, TX, December 1, 2025; RV Midland, April 20, 2026. (21) BMO 2025-5C12 free writing prospectus, SEC EDGAR, September 15, 2025 (Quality RV Resort & SS Portfolio). (22) Leisure Investment Properties Group. 2025 RV & MHP Investment Report, March 2025. (23) US Small Business Administration. SOP 50 10 8, effective June 1, 2025; SBA Form 2234; 13 CFR 120.110 and 120.111. (24) US Small Business Administration. Policy Notice 5000-879058 (combined $10 million cap, effective July 4, 2026); Policy Notice 5000-876441 (ownership citizenship rule, effective March 1, 2026); Information Notices 5000-871532 and 5000-872051 (FY2026 fees). (25) USDA Rural Development. Business & Industry Guaranteed Loan Program, 7 CFR Part 5001 (OneRD); FY2026 guarantee levels. (26) 44 CFR 60.3 (National Flood Insurance Program floodplain management criteria); FEMA, Manufactured Homes and the NFIP fact sheet, August 2025; Freddie Mac Manufactured Housing Community program terms. (27) Texas SB 1, the Heaven's 27 Camp Safety Act, signed September 5, 2025; Office of the Texas Governor; Texas Association of Campground Owners via RVBusiness. (28) Associated Press; KERA, Texas Public Radio, and Houston Public Media (July 2025 Hill Country flood); KUT and CNN (July 2026 repeat event). (29) NFPA 1194, Standard for Recreational Vehicle Parks and Campgrounds, 2026 edition; ANSI/RVIA A119.5, Park Model Recreational Vehicle Standard, 2025 edition. (30) State licensure and health authorities: Florida Ch. 513 and Rule 64E-15; Michigan MCL 333.12506a; Minnesota Statutes 327; Montana MCA 50-52-202; North Carolina 15A NCAC 18E; Oklahoma DEQ RV park requirements; US EPA, Understanding the Safe Drinking Water Act (EPA 816-F-04-030). (31) California AB 518 (2025) and the RV Park Occupancy Law (Civ. Code 799 et seq.), with AB 1472; Florida ss. 570.85-570.87; North Carolina G.S. 160D-903; Maryland HB 558/SB 296 (2021); Kentucky KRS 142.400. (32) Congressional Research Service. R42757, National Park Service appropriations ten-year trends, including FY2025 deferred maintenance; National Park Service visitor spending reporting. (33) National Parks Conservation Association. NPS workforce analysis, January 1, 2026. (34) Edmunds. Negative equity and loan-term reports, Q2-Q4 2025; Bank of America Institute, Summer Travel 2026: Resilient, but uneven, May 13, 2026. (35) Thor Industries. FY2025 Form 10-K, September 2025; Lazydays bankruptcy and asset sale reporting via Woodall's and RVBusiness, November 2025. (36) University of Texas Rio Grande Valley / Welcome Home RGV. Winter Texan State of the Season economic impact study. (37) Failure and insurance record reporting: NPR, Texas Public Radio, KERA, and KLTV (Guadalupe River parks); CBS News, Woodall's, RVBusiness, and CARVC via Woodall's (Hurricane Helene, western North Carolina); BusinessDen (Dinosaur Ridge Resorts Chapter 11, May 2026); Seacoast Online via Woodall's (Sandy Pines foreclosure); E&E News and regional reporting (Bakken parks); Leavitt Recreation & Hospitality market commentary, February 2026; Garland County, Arkansas Circuit Court receivership filing, December 2025. (38) sbalenders.com. SBA industry charge-off rankings, 2008-2012 cohort tracked to June 30, 2023; GoSBA Loans, CY2025 origination summary from SBA FOIA data. (39) Live Oak Bank. RV park and campground lending materials; trade lender sources including SBA504blog, Jaken Finance Group, and Crestmont Capital (terms directional, tier B/C). (40) One Big Beautiful Bill Act, P.L. 119-21, signed July 4, 2025; IRS implementing guidance, January 14, 2026. (41) Mortenson Construction Cost Index, Q1 2026; Construction Analytics (Ed Zarenski) nonresidential inflation series. (42) Bisnow. Not Your Father's Campground, December 10, 2023; Modern Campground market commentary, 2025. (43) US Department of Labor, Fact Sheet 18 (FLSA Section 13(a)(3) seasonal amusement or recreational establishment exemption); Workamper News program guidance; state electricity resale statutes: Maine 35-A MRS 313, Texas Utilities Code 184.014, Florida Admin. Code 25-6.049. (44) Federal Reserve H.15 statistical release and July 29, 2026 FOMC statement; 10-year US Treasury yield as of July 31, 2026; Vutility and Wild Energy submetering case data with Campground Consulting Group.