RV Park Question - would you do this deal

Hi-

I have an opportunity to buy an RV park in a very large and growing MSA in a good location. The owner is 85 years old and has neglected it. There are 40 lots with 23 occupied units of which 20 people are paying rents ($50 under market average). A local property management company just took over the management of the park a month ago and is fixing it up (painting, trimming, evicting the 3 non-paying tenants, etc…) The seller never marketed the park (he was a full-time surgeon and had his buddy run the park for him) and there is an RV park 1 mile up the road that is 100% full at $50/mth higher rents…

I hadn’t been considering RV parks and while i can convert some of the spaces to mobile home spaces, it seems to make more sense just to clean the park up and fill it up with RVs as the market seems to demand it with neighboring occupancy so high… and then potentially sell the park off.

It has an assumable non-recourse loan i can take over where i would only need to put ~$60K down on a $850K park with an $80K current NOI and large upside potential.(filling it up to 90% occupancy would get the value to ~$1.6M)

i am about to go under contract – based on the high level of what i shared, would you lock this deal up and investigate it further?

While there are a lot of similar real estate characteristics, I firmly believe that RV Parks are different businesses than MHP’s. I don’t have a grasp on what makes an RV Park successful because I predominantly deal with mobile homes, with an occasional RV here and there - instead of the other way around. The clientele’s motivations and demands are completely different - they will want laundromats and pools on site where MHP’s do not, for example.

I have for a long time been wanting to read Frank and Dave’s RV Park materials, but have not done it as have not been in your specific situation…but if they have the same quality of the MHP materials you can be sure it’s worth the expense.

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Thanks for the helpful feedback. i’m think i’m gonna stick to what my plan was and just focus on MHPs for now. Something about this RV parks seems sketchy to me and think i’m gonna pass on it…