Tag: RV Park Underwriting

The Thing That Kills Cash Flow After You Close (That Has Nothing to Do With Revenue)

Most RV park buyers spend the majority of their pre-close energy focused on revenue. What is the park generating. What could it generate. What does occupancy look like at different rate scenarios. What is the upside if you reposition the tenant mix or add a few glamping units.

That focus is not wrong. Revenue matters. But it is incomplete in a way that costs people real money in the first year of ownership, because the thing that most often kills cash flow after you close has nothing to do with revenue at all.

It is the expense side. Specifically, the expenses that did not exist under the previous owner and appear for the first time under yours.

The seller’s expense structure is not your expense structure

This is the part of the underwriting conversation that does not get enough attention. When you review a seller’s T12 and rebuild the expense side, the standard advice is to add back a management fee if the owner self-manages and normalize owner compensation if it is understated. That is correct and important.

But there is a broader issue underneath it. The seller’s entire cost structure reflects how they ran the park, not how you are going to run it. And in many cases, especially in mom-and-pop acquisitions, those two things look very different.

A seller who has owned the park for twenty years has vendor relationships, insurance rates, and operational routines that took two decades to build. Their maintenance costs are low because they know every system in the park and fix most things themselves. Their insurance premium reflects a long claims-free history with a carrier who knows them. Their accounting costs are minimal because their nephew does the books. Their marketing spend is zero because they filled the park on word of mouth and a Good Sam listing they set up in 2009.

None of that transfers to you at closing.

What the new expense lines actually look like

When you take ownership, the cost structure resets in ways that most pro formas do not fully capture.

Professional management, if you are not self-managing, adds 8 to 12 percent of gross revenue. On a park generating $400,000 a year that is $32,000 to $48,000 in annual expenses that may not exist anywhere in the seller’s numbers.

Insurance will reprice at renewal under new ownership. If the previous owner had a long claims-free history and a multi-decade relationship with their carrier, your first-year premium may be meaningfully higher than what the T12 reflects.

Bookkeeping and accounting at a professional level costs money. So does a property management software upgrade if the previous owner was running on a spreadsheet and a handshake reservation system. So does a new website if theirs was last updated during the Obama administration.

Staffing often changes. If the seller handled maintenance themselves or had a family member doing it informally, you are adding a real labor cost that did not show up in payroll records.

And then there are the vendor contracts. The landscaper who gave the previous owner a longtime-customer rate. The propane supplier with the legacy pricing agreement. The pest control company the seller’s brother-in-law owns. Those relationships do not come with the park. The rates you negotiate as a new owner may be different, and not in your favor.

The cash flow impact in year one

Individually, each of these items feels manageable. Collectively, they can add $40,000 to $80,000 or more in annual expenses to a park that the T12 made look leaner than it actually is under new ownership.

If your pro forma was built on the seller’s expense structure with a management fee added back and nothing else adjusted, you are likely looking at a year-one cash flow that is materially worse than you projected. Not because the revenue disappointed. Because the expense side was never really your expense structure to begin with.

I see this consistently when I underwrite acquisitions for buyers. The revenue holds. The occupancy holds. The cash flow does not, because nobody rebuilt the expense side from the buyer’s cost structure rather than the seller’s.

How to protect yourself before you close

The fix is not complicated but it requires intentionality. When you are building your pro forma, do not just normalize the seller’s expenses. Rebuild them from scratch using your actual cost structure.

Get insurance quotes before you close, not after. Talk to property management companies if you are not planning to self-manage and get real numbers. Price out bookkeeping, accounting, and software at professional rates. Talk to vendors in the area and understand what new-owner pricing looks like. Model staffing based on what you will actually need, not what the seller needed.

Then compare that rebuilt expense structure to the seller’s T12 line by line. The gap between those two numbers is the conversation you need to have about purchase price before you sign, not the cash flow surprise you absorb in month four.

Revenue gets the attention. Expenses win the year.

Read this next: Why Your RV Park’s Best Season Can Also Be Its Biggest Financial Risk

If you want the full framework for buying, managing, and understanding the financials on an RV park acquisition, I wrote 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗥𝗩 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿’𝘀 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 ($49) specifically for investors who want to get this right. You can get it direct here: https://wendipvifinancial.gumroad.com/l/kqmyb, or Amazon has it too, just search author Wendi Rook.

June 12, 2026
Why Your Occupancy Number Is Lying to You

If you ask most RV park owners how their park is performing, the first number they give you is occupancy. We were at 85 percent last summer. We ran 70 percent for the season. Occupancy was strong.

And maybe it was. But occupancy as a standalone number tells you less than you think it does, and in some cases it actively misleads you about the financial health of your park.

Here is why.

Occupancy does not tell you what you charged

A park running at 90 percent occupancy at $35 per night is generating less revenue than a park running at 70 percent occupancy at $60 per night. The math is not complicated, but the implication gets missed constantly.

Owners who track occupancy without tracking average daily rate alongside it are looking at half the picture. You can have a full park and still be leaving significant money on the table if your rates are below market. You can have a park that looks less full than your competitor and be outperforming them on revenue per available site because your rate discipline is better.

Occupancy is a volume metric. It tells you how many sites were sold. It does not tell you anything about what those sites were worth.

Occupancy does not tell you what kind of guests filled those sites

Not all occupied sites are equal. A transient nightly guest at full rate generates very different revenue from a long-term monthly tenant at a flat rate that has not been adjusted in three years. A seasonal camper who booked a package deal at a discount fills a site on paper but may be contributing significantly less to your bottom line than the occupancy number suggests.

When you blend all of those guest types into a single occupancy figure, you lose the ability to see what is actually driving your revenue. A park that is 80 percent occupied with a heavy mix of below-market long-term tenants looks identical to a park that is 80 percent occupied with transient guests at premium rates. They are not the same park. The financial reality is completely different.

Occupancy does not account for seasonality

An annual occupancy figure smooths over the peaks and valleys that actually determine whether your cash flow is manageable. A park that runs 95 percent occupancy in July and 15 percent in January has a very different operational and financial reality than a park with steady 55 percent occupancy year-round, even if the annual average works out similarly on paper.

The number that matters is not your average occupancy. It is your occupancy by month, tracked against the revenue each of those months actually produced, so you can see clearly where your cash flow is being generated and where it is not. That monthly picture is what tells you whether your reserves are adequate, whether your slow season strategy is working, and whether your peak season pricing is capturing the revenue available to you.

The number you should be tracking instead

Revenue per available site night, sometimes called RevPAS, is the metric that actually tells you how your park is performing. It combines occupancy and rate into a single number that reflects real financial output rather than just volume.

If your RevPAS is growing, your park is improving. If your occupancy is growing but your RevPAS is flat or declining, you are filling more sites but not getting paid more for them, which usually means your rates are not keeping up with your actual demand. That is a revenue management problem, not a success story.

Track RevPAS monthly. Compare it to the same month in the prior year. Watch the trend. That number will tell you things about your park’s performance that occupancy alone never will.

What this means if you are buying a park

If you are evaluating an acquisition and the seller leads with occupancy as the primary performance metric, slow down. Ask for the monthly revenue breakdown. Ask for the average daily rate by site type and guest category. Ask for the revenue mix between transient, seasonal, and long-term tenants.

A seller who can give you those numbers has a park that is being run with financial discipline. A seller who can only tell you occupancy is either not tracking the right metrics or does not want you looking too closely at the ones that would tell a more complicated story.

Occupancy is not a vanity metric exactly, but it is an incomplete one. The park that wins is not the one with the most sites filled. It is the one generating the most revenue per available site with a cost structure that lets that revenue flow to the bottom line.

Those are two very different parks. Make sure you know which one you are buying, or building.

Read this next: The Three Numbers That Expose Every Problem in Your RV Park Before It Costs You Money

If you want the full framework for buying, managing, and understanding the financials on an RV park acquisition, I wrote 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗥𝗩 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿’𝘀 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 ($49) specifically for investors who want to get this right. You can get it direct here: https://wendipvifinancial.gumroad.com/l/kqmyb, or Amazon has it too, just search author Wendi Rook.

June 11, 2026
The Reserve Fund Mistake That Turns a Good RV Park Deal Into a Nightmare

There is a version of this story that plays out more often than most people in the RV park investing space want to admit.

A buyer finds a solid park. The numbers work. The due diligence gets done. The deal closes. And then, somewhere in the first twelve to eighteen months, something goes wrong. Not catastrophically. Not all at once. But the cash position starts tightening in ways that were not in the projections, and suddenly every decision is being made from a position of financial pressure instead of financial confidence.

In most of those situations, the deal was not bad. The reserve fund was.

What a reserve fund actually is

A reserve fund is not a savings account you contribute to when things are going well. It is a dedicated, non-negotiable capital account funded from day one of ownership, sized to absorb the normal variability of running an operating business on a seasonal cash flow cycle.

Most buyers understand the concept in theory. The problem is in the execution. The reserve gets underfunded at close because the down payment stretched capital further than planned. Or it gets raided in month three because a piece of equipment failed and the operating account was already running thin. Or it never gets funded at all because the buyer assumed the first season’s revenue would build it up organically.

None of those approaches survive contact with reality.

The three things your reserve fund has to cover

When you are sizing your reserve, you are not just planning for one type of risk. You are planning for three that can hit simultaneously.

The first is capital expenditure. Equipment fails. Infrastructure ages. The septic pump that was fine during due diligence develops a problem in month six. A reserve fund that is not sized for capital events is not a reserve fund. It is a checking account with a different name.

The second is operating cash flow gaps. RV parks are seasonal businesses. If your park generates most of its revenue between May and September, your reserve fund is what carries you through October, November, February, and March. The fixed costs do not stop because the guests do. Insurance, loan payments, utilities, any year-round staffing, and basic maintenance continue regardless of occupancy. If you do not have reserves sized to cover that gap comfortably, you will be making decisions under pressure during every slow season you own the park.

The third is the unexpected. Not the dramatic unexpected, just the normal unexpected that every operating business experiences. A key employee leaves. A major OTA platform changes its algorithm and your bookings drop for sixty days while you adjust. A regional weather event cancels a peak weekend. These are not disasters. They are the cost of operating a hospitality business. Your reserve fund is what keeps them from becoming crises.

What underfunded reserves actually look like in practice

When a buyer closes without adequate reserves, the signs show up fast. Deferred maintenance starts accumulating almost immediately because every dollar of operating cash is needed for operations. Capital projects get pushed to next season, and then the season after that. Reviews start to reflect it before the financials do.

The pressure compounds. A slow month creates a cash shortfall. The shortfall gets covered by skipping the reserve contribution. The next unexpected expense hits a reserve account that is already depleted. The buyer is now making every financial decision reactively instead of proactively, which is exactly the operating posture the previous owner was in when they decided to sell.

I have seen buyers in this position within six months of closing on deals that were genuinely good acquisitions. The park was fine. The capital structure was not.

What an adequate reserve actually looks like

There is no universal number, but there are reasonable benchmarks. At minimum, you should close with three to six months of total operating expenses in reserve, separate from your down payment and closing costs. On top of that, any identified CapEx from due diligence should be fully funded before you close, not planned to be funded from operating cash flow after the fact.

If your park has meaningful seasonality, size the reserve to cover your worst-case slow season cash flow gap with margin to spare. Model that number at the monthly level before you finalize your offer, not after you close.

A good rule of thumb for ongoing reserve contributions is a minimum of five percent of gross revenue deposited monthly into a dedicated capital reserve account, treated as a non-negotiable operating expense rather than discretionary savings. That account does not get touched for operating expenses. It exists for capital events and genuine emergencies only.

The conversation most buyers do not have before they close

The reserve fund conversation almost never happens with the broker. It rarely happens with the lender, whose job is to get the loan closed, not to stress test your post-close capital position. It sometimes happens with a CPA, if the buyer has one engaged early enough.

What it requires is someone looking at the full capital picture before you commit: down payment, closing costs, identified CapEx, operating reserves, and slow season cash flow requirements, all on one page, sized against the actual cash you have available to deploy.

If that number does not work, the deal does not work, regardless of what the pro forma says.

The buyers who close well-capitalized make decisions from a position of strength for the first two years of ownership. The buyers who close thin spend those same two years managing cash flow anxiety instead of building a business.

The park is the same either way. The experience is not.

Read this next: The One Financial System Every RV Park Owner Needs Before They Close

If you want the full framework for buying, managing, and understanding the financials on an RV park acquisition, I wrote 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗥𝗩 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿’𝘀 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 ($49) specifically for investors who want to get this right. You can get it direct here: https://wendipvifinancial.gumroad.com/l/kqmyb, or Amazon has it too, just search author Wendi Rook.

June 10, 2026
The Expense Category Most RV Park Owners Forget to Budget For (Until It Wrecks Their First Year)

You did the math before you closed. You looked at the T12, built your pro forma, stress-tested your occupancy, and felt confident in the numbers.

Then you got into year one and something started eating your cash flow. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just a slow, steady bleed that your pro forma never accounted for.

For a lot of new RV park owners, that bleed comes from the same place: deferred maintenance and capital expenditure they did not budget for because the seller never flagged it and the broker package never mentioned it.

This is not a due diligence failure. It is a budgeting failure. And it happens to smart, prepared buyers all the time.

Here is what tends to get missed.

The stuff that was already aging when you bought it

Every RV park comes with infrastructure that has a lifespan. Utility pedestals. Septic systems. Water lines. Roofs on any structures. Gravel roads. The electrical panel in the laundry building nobody has touched in fifteen years.

None of that shows up as a line item on the T12 because the previous owner was not replacing it. They were patching it, deferring it, or ignoring it entirely. That is often why the park was for sale.

When you close, you inherit every deferred decision they made. The clock does not reset. The pedestal that was already ten years old on closing day is still ten years old. And when it fails, it is your cash flow that covers it.

What a realistic CapEx reserve actually looks like

Most buyers who do include a CapEx line in their pro forma use a number that feels reasonable. Somewhere between one and three percent of revenue. Sometimes a flat number like $10,000 or $15,000 a year.

That is almost always not enough.

A realistic CapEx reserve for an RV park depends on the age and condition of the infrastructure, the number of sites, and what is due for replacement in the next three to five years. If the park has aging pedestals across 80 sites and each one costs $400 to $600 to replace, that is a $32,000 to $48,000 project sitting in your future. That is not a pro forma line item. That is a capital event.

The way to budget for this correctly is to do a capital needs assessment before you close, or immediately after, and build a realistic replacement schedule. Not a guess. An actual inventory of what exists, how old it is, and what it will cost to replace.

The operational expenses that only appear after you own it

Beyond capital items, there is a category of operating expenses that simply does not exist in the seller’s numbers because the seller was not running the park the way you are going to run it.

If you are adding a manager where the previous owner self-managed, that is a new expense line. If you are upgrading your booking software, adding a website, switching to a professional payroll service, or actually budgeting for liability insurance at a realistic level, those are new expenses that your pro forma inherited from a business that did not have them.

This is especially common in mom-and-pop acquisitions. The seller ran lean because they lived on the property, handled everything themselves, and had relationships with vendors going back twenty years. You do not have any of that. Your cost structure is different and your pro forma needs to reflect yours, not theirs.

What this costs you if you get it wrong

If you underbudget CapEx and operational expenses by $30,000 to $50,000 in year one, and your projected cash flow was already modest, you are not just short on cash. You are making decisions under pressure. Deferring maintenance you should be addressing. Skipping the reserve contribution because you need the cash for operations. Starting a cycle that looks exactly like the one the previous owner was already in when they sold to you.

I recently talked to a client who made this exact mistake. He is now selling a park he very recently purchased because he does not have the budget for the needed CapEx and the income will not come close to covering it. I cover this scenario in detail in my book, including it as one of the mistakes that cost people everything, because it is not a rare story. It is one I keep hearing.

The park is the same. The problem is the same. The only thing that changed is whose name is on the loan.

The fix

Before you close, ask for a capital needs assessment or hire someone to do one. Build a CapEx reserve into your pro forma that reflects actual replacement costs on a realistic timeline, not a percentage guess. And when you are reviewing the T12, ask yourself not just what the seller was spending, but what they were not spending that you will have to.

The expense categories that wreck year one are not usually surprises. They are just the things nobody put in the spreadsheet.

Read this next: Ignore This Number and Your RV Park Will Cost You Money Every Single Month

If you want the full framework for buying, managing, and understanding the financials on an RV park acquisition, I wrote 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗥𝗩 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿’𝘀 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 ($49) specifically for investors who want to get this right. You can get it direct here: https://wendipvifinancial.gumroad.com/l/kqmyb, or Amazon has it too, just search author Wendi Rook.

June 9, 2026
The Market Took My Retirement Once. Here Is What I Built Instead.

In 2008 I watched my 401K shrink in real time like a lot of people did. The market did what it did and there was not much to do about it except sit with the reality that the retirement I had been counting on was significantly smaller than it used to be.

I decided I was not going to let that happen again.

Not out of anger, just out of clarity. If I was going to have financial security in retirement, I was going to have to build it myself. I was starting over from scratch this time. There was no 401K left.

So I started a business. With an idea, a goal, and about $500.

The Part Nobody Talks About

I did not quit my job and leap. I am not that person. I stayed in my medical field career for two full years while I built the business on the side, because I was scared and because I was practical and because I knew that burning the boats sounds romantic until you have bills due.

When I finally did go full time it was because the business had earned it, not because I was feeling brave. That distinction matters. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is making the next right move anyway, carefully, with your eyes open.

For a while it worked. I got focused, I got traction, and the business grew.

And then the market shifted and someone else’s decisions nearly destroyed everything I had built.

When Outside Forces Burn It Down

The first time it happened I watched competition flood the online space and commoditize what I had spent years building. The model that had been working stopped working almost overnight. I had to pivot, rebuild, and find a new angle fast.

I did. And it worked again.

Then it happened a second time. Bigger money entered my space, the wholesale model I had built dried up, and I was staring at another moment of having to decide whether to walk away or go all in on something different.

I went all in. This time on a full retail strategy.

What I know now is that watching your business get undercut by forces completely outside your control is one of the most clarifying experiences an entrepreneur can have. You find out very quickly what you are actually made of. And you find out that starting over is not the same as failing. Starting over with the knowledge you have accumulated is actually a significant advantage if you are willing to use it.

The Decision That Changed Everything

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, after watching two near-destructions and knowing it could happen again at any time, I made a decision that turned out to be one of the smartest things I have ever done.

I started spreading my risk.

I became a private money lender. First trust deeds secured by real estate, earning consistent returns on capital I had worked hard to accumulate, backed by an asset I could evaluate and understand. It was not glamorous. It was intentional. I was not going to have all of my financial security sitting in one place ever again.

That lending business has now been running for over eight years. I have deployed more than four million dollars. And it generates legacy income that does not depend on me showing up and grinding every day.

How It Ended and What Came Next

The retail business I rebuilt after that second near-destruction became the strongest version of what I had been building all along. I exited with over 500 accounts and a multi-million dollar outcome.

I am not telling you that to impress you. I am telling you because in 2008 I was sitting with a depleted retirement account, and I knew the only person I could rely on to get it back was myself. And I chose myself. Scared, practical, deliberate, one move at a time

What I do now is help other entrepreneurs build the financial clarity and discipline that makes outcomes like that possible. The Fractional CFO work, the underwriting, the bookkeeping, all of it comes from having lived the version of business ownership where the stakes were real and the margin for error was thin.

I know what it feels like to not have visibility into your numbers and to be making decisions anyway. I know what it costs. And I know what changes when you finally have a clear picture of where you actually stand.

That is what PVI Financial is built on. Not theory. Not a credential on a wall. Thirty years of real decisions with real money on the line.

If you are building something and you want a financial partner who has actually been where you are, I would love to talk. The free financial health check at pvifinancial.com is the best place to start.

And if you have not grabbed a copy of my book yet, 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗥𝗩 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿’𝘀 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 ($49), it covers the full financial and operational management framework for running your park with the discipline it deserves. You can get it direct here: wendipvifinancial.gumroad.com/l/kqmyb, or Amazon has it too, just search author Wendi Rook.

Read this next: “What is a Fractional CFO and Does Your Small Business Need One”

June 8, 2026
What a Lender Actually Looks at Before Approving an RV Park Loan

If you have ever tried to get a loan on an RV park and felt like the process was opaque, you are not imagining it. Commercial lending on outdoor hospitality assets is more specialized than a residential mortgage, and lenders are evaluating factors that are not always obvious from the outside. Understanding what they are actually looking for changes how you prepare, and how you show up to that conversation.

The Property Has to Make Sense on Its Own

The first thing a commercial lender evaluates is the property’s ability to service the debt from its own income. They are not primarily interested in your personal income or your net worth as a primary repayment source. They want to see that the park itself generates enough NOI to cover the debt payment with a reasonable cushion.

That cushion is measured by the Debt Service Coverage Ratio, or DSCR. Most conventional commercial lenders want to see a DSCR of at least 1.25, meaning the property generates $1.25 in NOI for every $1.00 of annual debt service. Some SBA lenders will go to 1.15. Below that, the deal typically does not work regardless of how strong everything else looks.

This is why NOI accuracy matters so much before you walk into a lending conversation. If your books are not clean, the lender cannot confidently calculate your DSCR, and an uncertain DSCR almost always gets discounted in your favor, not the lender’s.

Your Financials Need to Be Verifiable

Lenders do not take your word for income. They want to see at least two to three years of tax returns for the business, trailing twelve month profit and loss statements, bank statements that reconcile to your books, and in many cases a rent roll or occupancy history.

If your books have been kept inconsistently, if you have been running personal expenses through the business, or if there are revenue streams that show up in your bank account but not in your P&L, those discrepancies become problems. The lender’s underwriter will find them, and when they do, it raises questions about the integrity of everything else in the file.

Clean, consistent, well-organized financials do not just make you look professional. They reduce the friction in underwriting, shorten the timeline, and give the lender confidence that the income they are underwriting is real.

The Property Itself Gets Scrutinized

Beyond the financials, lenders look hard at the physical asset. Infrastructure condition matters because a lender does not want to finance a park that has a $200,000 utility replacement sitting in the near future. Environmental considerations matter, particularly for properties with on-site fuel storage, older septic systems, or adjacent land uses that create contamination risk.

Market position matters too. A lender wants to understand who your guests are, how competitive your market is, and whether your occupancy is driven by genuine demand or by unsustainably low rates. A park with strong occupancy at market rates in an underserved area looks very different to a lender than a park with strong occupancy because it is the cheapest option in a crowded market.

Your Personal Financial Profile Still Matters

Commercial lending on a small park is not purely asset-based. The lender is also evaluating you as the operator. They want to see a personal financial statement, a reasonable personal credit profile, and evidence that you have the liquidity to support the business through lean periods.

For SBA loans specifically, they will also look at your management experience. If you have never operated a hospitality business before, being able to show a management plan, an advisory team, or relevant transferable experience strengthens the file considerably.

How to Prepare Before You Apply

The best thing you can do before approaching a lender is build a clean, current financial package. That means up-to-date books, a trailing twelve month P&L, a current balance sheet, bank statements, and a clear narrative of the business that explains the numbers in plain language. If there are anomalies in your financials, a one-page explanation attached to your package is far better than letting the underwriter discover them without context.

The owners who move through commercial lending the fastest are the ones who show up prepared. Not just with the numbers, but with the story the numbers tell. That is where having a Fractional CFO in your corner before you apply makes a real difference. I have relationships with RV Park lenders, and help get you pointed in the right direction.

And if you have not grabbed a copy of my book yet, 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗥𝗩 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿’𝘀 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 ($49), it covers the full financial and operational management framework for running your park with the discipline it deserves. You can get it direct here: wendipvifinancial.gumroad.com/l/kqmyb, or Amazon has it too, just search author Wendi Rook.

How to Do Your Monthly Financial Review: A Step by Step Guide for RV Park Owners

June 4, 2026