Why would any RVer pay Frank Rolfe?

Frank Rolfe, with an assist from his sidekick, Dave Reynolds, is at it again, trying to cash in on the RV park acquisition craze by passing himself off as an expert on something about which he knows squat.

To be clear, Rolfe does have a lot of expertise in the trailer court/mobile home park industry. He’s garnered quite a reputation for buying up trailer parks and then squeezing his captive tenants for every last dollar, while also slashing amenities and maintenance to the bone—then selling his cut-throat tactics as nothing more than good business. That selling comes in the guise of something he unabashedly calls the Mobile Home “University,” which in fact is nothing more than a slew of CDs and printed manuals that explain how you, too, can rationalize predatory practices on the way to personal enrichment.

Okay. Repulsive though that may be, it nonetheless falls squarely within the parameters of modern capitalism, and the devil take the hindmost. But where Rolfe steps over the line is in his blurring of the differences between trailer parks and RV parks, contending that the latter are just a variation on the former and that both can be managed according to the same principles. (I’ve been repeatedly critical of this bait-and-switch in the past, but to be honest, the RV park industry has done itself no favors by increasingly converting transient sites into long-term rentals, not to mention its embrace of cabins, park models and other fixed dwellings.)

While Mobile Home University remains Rolfe’s flagship, he’s again touting its slighter sibling, the equally hubristic RVPark University. This past week he sent out an email-blast promoting an “RV park investing boot camp,” which from all appearances is just an online presentation of material that’s already contained in the “university’s” home study course. There is no boot “camp,” and as it happens, the CDs and printed materials in the home study course can be purchased on RVU’s website for just $497 (or $397 for an electronic copy); watching the boot camp, meanwhile, requires “an investment” of $997. You do the math. Then again, Rolfe claims that the materials in the home study course actually have a total value of $4,688, so any way you slice it you get a heckuva deal!

(You also can count yourself lucky not to be interested in mobile home parks: that online “investing boot camp” will set you back $1,749. Where do all these numbers come from? Apparently, it’s all a matter of what the marks can be convinced to shell out.)

But back to RV parks. Part of Rolfe’s sales pitch is a helpful section headlined “Why Invest in RV Parks?” followed by eight bullet points of varying truthfulness and questionable assertions. Among them, for example, is “low capital expenditure requirements,” explained with the notable phrase, “RV parks are—for the most part—just blocks of land that people park their RVs on.” Oh, sure, “there are other amenities such as clubhouses and pools,” Rolfe concedes, “but what’s lacking are sprawling time bombs of maintenance like roofs and foundations.”

All of which lets me know that Rolfe has never had to fix a broken water main, or snake out a sewer line clogged by RVers insistent on flushing wipes, or repair a pedestal laid low by an errant fifth-wheeler. And with average per-site RV park construction costs approaching $25,000, there clearly are a lot more capital expenditures going into an RV park than Rolfe understands, not to mention all the maintenance issues they will incur.

There are several other howlers of the sort in Rolfe’s pitch, but the one that really illustrates his cluelessness—and that attests to his utterly contemptuous approach to mobile home park management—is the sub-head, “low reliance on personnel.” As Rolfe notes, correctly, “owning a business that relies heavily on employees is becoming a nightmare,” but not to worry! As Rolfe goes on to explain, “The RV Park industry is basically a ‘parking lot’ model in which the customers park their RVs on your land and that’s what you get paid for. It’s not like trying to run a restaurant where just one weak link on your employee base can ruin your business.” Easy-peasy—when it comes to RV parks, no employees required!

Again: clueless. Completely. Because while Rolfe’s description may be apt for a (poorly maintained) trailer court, an RV park that isn’t given over entirely to year-round or seasonal campers is going to need at least some maintenance workers, not to mention desk clerks and housekeepers, plus activities directors, swimming pool attendants and assorted other personnel as those “other amenities” proliferate. But that hasn’t prevented Rolfe from repeatedly representing himself as some sort of authority on RV parks, subbing in his experience as a trailer park mogul to mask his ignorance. In that regard, for example, it’s telling that all of the glowing evaluations and testimonials that litter both “university” websites relate solely to motor home parks.

At a time when mainstream RV park leaders are in a full-throated embrace of their self-assigned role as “the hospitality industry,” with its emphasis on personal connections and personnel training, Rolfe sits at the other extreme. It’s an interesting bifurcation, problematic at both ends. But the Rolfe end of that spectrum, while seeming to offer a cheaper, more streamlined operating model, is a sure-fire guarantee of bad press, bad reviews and bad feelings. Caveat emptor, whether it’s $397, $497 or $997.