Camp & Park Accounting has developed its RV Park Deal Analyzer, a purpose-built tool designed to help buyers begin the due diligence process with greater clarity around value, risk and upside, according to a press release.
“The goal is not to replace legal diligence, lender underwriting or boots-on-the-ground inspections,” explained Michael Elliott, managing principal of the firm. “Instead, it is to give buyers a structured way to evaluate whether the asking price is supported by current performance, whether realistic upside exists, and where the most important diligence priorities should be focused first.
“As more institutional and crossover capital continues to enter outdoor hospitality, I believe this type of specialized buyer-side analysis will become increasingly important — not just for sophisticated investors, but for independent buyers who need confidence before moving deeper into a transaction,” he added. “The RV park market continues to evolve, and the tools buyers use to evaluate deals need to evolve with it.”
As investment activity in the outdoor hospitality sector continues to mature, one challenge has become increasingly clear: many RV park buyers are still beginning the due diligence process with tools and assumptions that no longer match the complexity of today’s transactions, noted the release.
“Historically, many acquisitions in the space have been evaluated through broker offering memorandums, informal benchmarking, and generalized real estate underwriting methods. While those approaches can provide a useful first look, they often fail to capture the operational nuances that make RV parks fundamentally different from other asset classes,” stated the release.
“At Camp & Park Accounting, our team works exclusively in the RV park and campground industry, which gives us a front-row seat to how buyers, sellers, brokers and lenders approach transactions in this space,” said Elliott. “One of the most common challenges we see is not a lack of interest in deeper diligence, but a lack of structure in how buyers begin evaluating whether a deal deserves that next level of time, capital and earnest money commitment.
“In this industry, the details matter,” he added. “Revenue mix between nightly, weekly, monthly and seasonal stays can materially affect both valuation and financing outcomes. Occupancy trends must be viewed through the lens of regional seasonality and transient demand drivers. Utility infrastructure, amenity depth, site expansion feasibility, and deferred maintenance reserves can all meaningfully change a buyer’s risk profile and long-term return. Yet many buyers — particularly first-time purchasers and operators expanding into additional locations — are still making early-stage decisions with fragmented spreadsheets and broad rule-of-thumb multiples.
“The reality is that the earliest stage of due diligence is often where the most expensive mistakes are made,” Elliott concluded. “If a buyer moves too quickly past questions around debt coverage, operational margins, deferred maintenance exposure or unrealistic seller addbacks, those issues can materially alter the economics of the transaction later in the process.”
