RV park deal analysis is where deals die, and yesterday one died on my desk. I sat down with a package on a 23-site park asking $1.6 million and walked away. I am not going to name the park or the location. What I am going to do is walk you through exactly what I saw, because if you are actively looking at deals right now there is a reasonable chance something with the same fingerprints is sitting in your inbox.
I walked away. Here is why.
The financials on this RV park deal analysis told two different stories
The package came with what I can only describe as a handmade P&L. Not a formal financial statement. Not something pulled from accounting software. A document that someone built themselves, by hand, to present the park in the best possible light.
The numbers showed roughly $85,000 in NOI across each of the prior four years, then a jump to $199,000 this year. The seller presented that $199,000 as the number to underwrite to.
When NOI more than doubles in a single year after four years of flat performance, that is not a trend. That is a question. And it is a question that needs a verifiable answer before you go any further.
Any serious RV park deal analysis has to start by asking why that number moved so dramatically and whether the answer holds up under scrutiny.
When I adjusted the numbers, the story changed immediately
I rebuilt the NOI from what they gave me. Before I even got to management fees or real estate taxes, I had already adjusted the presented $199,000 down to $152,000. That $47,000 gap came from the numbers themselves, before accounting for the expenses that were missing entirely from the P&L.
Then I added back a market-rate management fee. It was not in the expenses anywhere, because the current owner self-manages. On a park this size that is a real cost that belongs in any honest underwriting.
Then I looked for real estate taxes. They were not there either. On a $1.6 million asking price asset. That is not an oversight. That is a choice someone made when they built the P&L, and it is the kind of choice that inflates NOI in exactly the way that benefits a seller and misleads a buyer.
By the time I added both of those back, the number I was actually underwriting to looked very different from $199,000.
That gap between the seller’s number and the real number is what the RV park deal analysis is supposed to find, and it is why the work matters before you ever make an offer.
November and December were estimated
For the last two months of the year, the P&L showed revenue listed as estimated based on an average of the previous ten months.
That is not how financials work. You do not average your way to a year-end number and present it as performance data in a deal package. November and December for most RV parks are slow months. Averaging them against peak season revenue inflates the annual figure in exactly the way that benefits a seller and misleads a buyer.
If the actual numbers were not available, the right answer is to say so. Substituting an estimate that produces a better annual total is not a financial statement. It is a guess dressed up as one.
This is exactly the kind of red flag that a thorough RV park deal analysis is designed to surface, and exactly why you should never accept a seller’s financial package at face value without rebuilding the numbers yourself.
The operations were, generously speaking, informal
This park took reservations by phone only. No online booking. No property management software. No digital payment processing.
Rent collection happened when people paid by cash or check. Sometimes the maintenance guy collected it. I say sometimes because the maintenance guy was also living in the one cabin on the property for free in exchange for his services, and his involvement in collections appeared to be, based on what was presented to me, somewhat optional.
There was no formal rent collection system. There were no documented processes. There was no way to verify that the revenue reported on the handmade P&L bore any reliable relationship to the cash that actually changed hands at this park over the past year.
When you cannot trace revenue to a reservation system, a payment processor, or a bank deposit pattern that holds up to scrutiny, you do not have verified financials. You have a number someone wrote down.
The occupancy told a different story than the revenue
Last month, six of the park’s 23 sites were unoccupied. That is a 26 percent vacancy rate on a small park that is supposedly generating dramatically higher NOI than it has in any of the prior four years. And that vacancy was not the outlier. The occupancy at this park swings wildly, which means the presented number is not a stabilized figure. It is a peak number being presented as if it were normal.
When I see occupancy swings that dramatic on a small site count with no formal reservation or payment infrastructure, I want to know what is actually driving the revenue spike this year. I did not get a satisfying answer.
The upside pitch did not hold up either
The seller’s position on the $1.6 million asking price leaned heavily on an adjacent acre with ten lots already laid out for expansion. The implication was that the development potential justified the premium over what the current financials would support.
I understand the logic. I do not agree with the math.
Undeveloped lots are not revenue. They are a capital project with an unknown timeline, unknown permitting risk, unknown infrastructure cost, and zero guarantee of the occupancy needed to justify the investment once built. You do not pay for lots that do not yet exist as if they were producing income. You price the asset on what it actually generates today and negotiate separately for any legitimate upside that can be quantified.
At $1.6 million, with a presented NOI that I adjusted down significantly before even accounting for missing expenses, with no formal reservation or payment system, with estimated months in the annual financials, and with a maintenance situation I cannot adequately describe with professional language, this deal was not priced on reality. It was priced on a story.
Why I am telling you this
Because someone is going to look at this deal when doing their RV park deal analysis. Maybe they already have. And if they have not done this kind of line-by-line analysis on the financials, they might see a park with a big NOI number, an expansion opportunity, and a motivated seller and think they found something.
They did not find something. They found a deal that needs to be priced correctly before it becomes a good investment, and right now it is not priced correctly.
This is the work. Not just reviewing the numbers the seller gave you, but pressure testing every line, identifying what is missing, understanding what the operations actually look like behind the headline number, and being willing to walk away when the story does not hold up.
I walked away yesterday. I will look at the next one tomorrow.
Read this next: The Seller’s Pro Forma Is Not Your Pro Forma
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