Nobody talks about the month after they closed on their RV park.

They post the keys. They post the sign. They post the big smile in front of the entrance with the caption “we did it” and 200 people like it and leave fire emojis in the comments.

What they do not post is the phone call two weeks later when the manager who knew every single tenant, every quirky electrical panel, every vendor relationship, and every unwritten rule about how that park actually ran, calls to say she is not coming back. She was loyal to the previous owner. Not to you.

They do not post the septic inspection they skipped because the seller said it was fine and they were already two weeks past the deadline and everyone just wanted to close.

They do not post the moment they sit down with the actual financials and realize that the previous owner had been running that park on a handshake with the same three vendors for fifteen years. The landscaper who charged half of market rate because they were old friends. The electrician who came out at midnight for almost nothing because he owed the owner a favor. The insurance broker who had grandfathered them into a policy that no longer exists for new buyers. Those numbers were real. They just were not your numbers. And nobody told you that before you signed.

They do not post the moment they realize that what looked like a lean, efficiently run operation was actually an operation built entirely around one person’s relationships, one person’s sweat, and one person’s decades of accumulated goodwill that evaporated the day the deed transferred.

Nobody posts that part.

I have talked to buyers who are living that story right now. Not one or two. Several. And here is what they all have in common. They are not careless people. They are not inexperienced people. They did their research. They read the books. They listened to the podcasts. They underwrote the deal three different ways and it cash flowed every time.

But they made their final decisions while they were excited. And excitement is the most expensive state of mind in commercial real estate.

When you are excited you round up on revenue and round down on expenses. When you are excited the manager seems dependable and the infrastructure seems solid and the seller seems trustworthy and the market seems strong. When you are excited you see the upside and you file the concerns away under “we will figure it out.”

And then you close. And the excitement fades. And the business does not care about your excitement at all. It just needs to be run.

Here is the thing nobody tells you before you buy your first RV park.

The deal does not hurt you. The assumptions do.

You assumed the revenue would hold. You assumed the manager would stay. You assumed the expenses reflected reality. You assumed the NOI on the flyer was built the same way you would build it. You assumed the infrastructure was as solid as it looked on the surface tour. You assumed that what worked for the previous owner under their cost structure and their debt load and their management style would work the same way for you.

And every single one of those assumptions felt completely reasonable at the time.

This is not a story about bad deals. Most of the parks I see are decent assets. The land is real. The income is real. The demand is real. This is a story about what happens when someone buys a business without a clear and honest picture of what it actually costs to run it under new ownership, with new debt, and without the institutional knowledge that walked out the door at closing.

The gap between the seller’s story and your reality is where deals go sideways. Not at closing. After.

The buyers who do well are not smarter than the ones who struggle. They are not luckier. They do not have some special access to better deals. They just had someone in their corner before they signed who was willing to tell them the uncomfortable version of the story. Someone who rebuilt the NOI from scratch instead of accepting it. Someone who asked the hard questions about the manager and the infrastructure and the revenue mix before it was too late to walk away or renegotiate.

Someone whose job it was to be the calm voice in the room when everyone else was caught up in the excitement of the deal.

If you are looking at a park right now and something feels off but you cannot quite put your finger on it, that feeling is worth paying attention to. It is usually your gut doing the underwriting your spreadsheet missed.

And if you want someone to look at the numbers with you before you decide, that is exactly what I do.

~Wendi | PVI Financial | Fractional CFO and Bookkeeping Services for Small Business and Outdoor Hospitality

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