Author: Andy Zipser

A former newspaper reporter and campground owner, I and my wife Carin have lived in Staunton since early 2021. After three years of maintaining a blog about RVing (renting-dirt.com), I became concerned about the lack of affordable housing and started a new blog (StauntonAskance.com) to focus on that, and other, local issues.

Overpriced parks drag everyone down

It comes as bittersweet relief to learn, every now and then, that my generally skeptical view of the RV park and campground industry is shared by others, and that this dyspeptic outlook is based on a shared understanding of just how readily greed can overcome common sense.

One such affirmation came last week in the form of an email from a broker who’s been in the business for several decades, but who in recent years has seen a piling on of would-be competitors who know nothing about campgrounds, and who wouldn’t even have touched one just three or four years ago. Too cheap. Too déclassé. But now, lured by the promise of quick riches to be made in a hot new real estate market, these opportunists corner the market on new listings by “telling owners their park is worth twice what it really is,” according to my correspondent.

An over-priced campground will “just lay there, never sell and then it gets a stigma, there must be something wrong with it,” the broker wrote. “Plus other owners get the idea their park must be worth a 3-cap,” spreading the contagion of pie-in-the-sky expectations. The end result? Honest brokers get pushed aside, while unrealistically priced campgrounds languish in the listings for years—or worse, those campgrounds find starry-eyed, innumerate buyers who now must figure out how to make a financial go of it, with a ripple effect that drags down private and public campgrounds alike.

To understand why that is, let’s start with a little math. A “3-cap,” for those who don’t know, is shorthand for a capitalization rate of 3%, which is a lousy rate of return for the buyer but a windfall for the lucky seller. It’s also wildly unrealistic for any commercial real estate, where normal cap rates fall into a range of 5-12, but especially so for campgrounds and RV parks, which inherently are more risky than, say, motels or apartment buildings. 

Cap rates are calculated by dividing a property’s net operating income (NOI) by its current market value, or sales price. So if a campground has a net operating income (what’s left over after all operating expenses) of $100,000 and is listed for sale for $1 million, the cap rate is 10, meaning a buyer’s expected rate of return on that $1 million investment will be 10% a year. Buy that same property for $2 million, and the cap rate drops to 5. To achieve a cap rate of 3, the sales price will have to exceed $3 million—in other words, the seller expects someone to tie up $3 million in an investment that returns less than a CD.

Sound wacky? Indeed, yet there are numerous brokers out there doing exactly what my correspondent found so objectionable, peddling RV parks at eye-watering prices that will find a buyer only if that buyer is independently wealthy and looking for a vanity project. Consider, for example, a recently emailed broadside from Campground Marketplace, headlined “Opportunity Awaits,” in which one of the top two advertised “opportunities” is a 20-acre riverside campground in Arkansas with seven cabins. The property’s gross sales in 2022 were reported to be $130,769; the property itself is listed at $2.8 million.

Assuming a very generous NOI of 60% of gross, or $78,461, that works out to a 2.8% return on capitalization. You’d get a better return on passbook savings, if such a thing is even available these days. So why would anyone shell out millions for this property? And why would the current owner have any expectation that someone would pay so much for something with such low returns?

One possible answer, as suggested above, is that the seller hopes to attract a deep-pocketed buyer looking for a vanity project. Riverside property is a draw, and there are those seven cabins, which presumably represent sunk costs that the owner would like to recoup. With 20 acres there’s room for expansion, so there’s potential for top-line growth. But unless that mythical buyer has nearly $3 million in hand he’s going to need a loan just to get in the door, never mind building additional cabins or adding RV sites, and no reputable lender will touch this deal.

Or look at it this way. A married couple want their own business and this looks like a dream come true. They scrape together 25% of the purchase price, or $700,000, and through a stroke of good fortune find someone—maybe a rich uncle?— willing to lend them $2.1 million to clinch the purchase. Better yet, their lender will give them a 30-year loan at 6%, which really pushes this example into the realm of fantasy but serves to make a point: even with that impossibly generous deal, the Arkansas property would have a monthly mortgage of $12,590. Which means, in turn, that the nightly rates on those seven cabins will need an immediate 15% increase just to cover the rent, and let’s hope that occupancy rates don’t drop as a result of the price hike.

Operating expenses? Fuhgeddaboudit!

True, this 2.8 cap listing is an extreme example—but it’s real, and it’s not unique. Meanwhile, less extreme examples of campgrounds for sale at 4, 5 and 6 caps are abundant, and all pose the same basic financial quandary: they don’t generate enough cash to cover a buyer’s nut, never mind what it costs to run a business. Yet RV parks and campgrounds are selling like hot-cakes, despite these insane valuations, because everyone’s convinced that this is the new hot thing in real estate: supposedly recession-proof, with demand outstripping supply and apparently no upper limit on what the customer will pay.

No wonder, then, that the first thing buyers of such over-priced properties do is double their rates—followed quickly by slashing staff and cutting back on maintenance and upkeep. Their competitors, aided by the rapid dissemination of computerized and networked reservation platforms that allow them to determine “market rates,” quickly follow suit. And now even the public sector is getting in on the act, justifying increases at state and national campgrounds by insisting they’re simply keeping up with their commercial counterparts.

The predictable outcome has been for camping to become notably more expensive over the past three or four years, even as many properties are looking seedier and more run-down. The bubble is being inflated by the get-rich-quick scheming of hustlers breaking into a business they wouldn’t have given a second look prior to the pandemic. And once the bubble bursts, as bubbles always do, those hustlers will be just as quick to move on to the Next Big Thing, leaving a mess behind. Ain’t unfettered capitalism grand?

ARVC rebrand sees its first defection

It’s been less than a year since I published three successive posts taking issue with the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds—or, more precisely, with its misleading name. As I pointed out last January, ARVC was neither “national” nor an “association,” nor should it lean into the idea that RV parks and campgrounds are part of a larger hospitality industry that includes hotels, motels, resorts, inns, ski lodges, marinas, glampgrounds, bed and breakfasts and so on.

Well, sonofagun if ARVC didn’t toss in the towel on two of the three points I’d raised, even as it went all in on the third. Last month ARVC “rebranded” itself—its choice of words, telling you right there how much of a market research-driven organization it has become—by dropping the ARVC name and calling itself the Outdoor Hospitality Industry. That’s right—this membership organization is now claiming the mantle of an entire industry. And, it should be noted, by doing so is even more explicitly distancing itself from its campground roots.

The repercussions are just beginning to be felt.

Three days ago, the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Campground Owners Association voted to drop its state membership in OHI, explaining that OHI’s “mission and vision” no longer align with the state organization’s. Indeed, the board noted, the association’s campground members had become increasingly less engaged with the national organization over the past several years, a trend indicative of OHI’s loss of grassroots appeal. Moreover, PCOA’s executive director told a Woodall’s Campground Magazine reporter, Pennsylvania members had grown increasingly concerned about OHI’s lack of communications and transparency about the significant changes it was implementing, including adoption of industry standards, bylaws changes and even the rebranding itself.

The Pennsylvania association was one of OHI’s largest state affiliates, claiming more than 200 campgrounds and RV parks. Its departure, however, moves it into the column occupied by California, Texas, Florida and New York, whose campground associations are the largest in the U.S. but all of which have either dropped or never had ARVC/OHI affiliation. And while individual campground owners can apply for OHI membership in states that don’t have associations, or whose associations don’t belong to OHI, the evidence out of Pennsylvania suggests OHI will retain a fraction of the state’s campgrounds that ARVC had claimed.

Nor is Pennsylvania unique. The board of directors of the Virginia Campground Association, for example, will hold its biannual meeting this Tuesday. Among the agenda items: “We would like to have a discussion to see if the VCA membership is happy with the direction OHI is moving. VCA will then take your responses to OHI to let them know how our membership feels about this change,” i.e. the rebranding. No telling where that conversation will end, of course, but that it’s even taking place should give OHI’s leadership pause: that’s the kind of discussion that should have occurred before a major institutional change, not after.

But as with ARVC’s big surprise reveal last year, when it blindsided a significant proportion of its membership with a set of proposed “campground standards,” the OHI rebrand is the product of back-room discussions driven by industry “leaders” who believe they’re dragging a backwoods industry into the modern age. Such top-down leadership, however, works only as long as the leaders have invested in their followers. Pennsylvania, and possibly other states in the months ahead, are saying that hasn’t happened, and as a result they’re done following.

It’s questionable whether OHI will get the message. Just how out of touch it has become can be seen in a seemingly placating response by Paul Bambei, its president and CEO, to the Woodall’s story about Pennsylvania’s secession. “Our members are our most valued asset,” he began, in an unconscious flipping of the script—for who is the “our” in that false assurance? Once upon a time it would have been the campground owners themselves, and their most valued asset—one can hope—would have been Paul Bambei and his staff. To turn that around and say the campground owners are an asset of an unspecified “us” reduces them to mere enablers for Bambei & Co.’s agenda, whatever that may be.

OHI, in other words, is a membership organization that has been captured by its professional staff. And Pennsylvanians, at least, have said what they think of that by voting with their feet.

When glamping isn’t bougie enough

Architect’s drawing of one of the rooms planned for a revamped Prospect Lake “landscape hotel,” which all appearances aside purports to be a “recreational vehicle.”

Flabby use of language dilutes meaning, leads to sloppy thinking and invariably results in undesirable consequences. Consider, for example, the way we say the chief executive of a large corporation “earned” X million dollars. Nobody “earns” a million dollars—never mind $10 million, or ten times that amount—when the median working wage is $56,473. A CEO may be paid that amount, may be rewarded that amount, but to describe this remuneration as “earned” is to rob the word of all relevance.

Something similar is happening in the world of campgrounds and RV parks, where a deliberately sloppy embrace of “camping” has robbed the word of most meaning. One consequence is that affluent people—or people with access to capital—are free to invade rural areas and reshape them to their own liking, despite local efforts to maintain the character of their communities through zoning restrictions, land use plans and other attempts to limit unchecked growth. That tramples both local sensibilities and any meaningful understanding of camping per se.

Exhibit A: Prospect Lake in Egremont, Massachusetts, where developer Ian Rasch has started transforming a tired old 125-site RV park and campground into an affluent playground projected to have 40 high-end cabins, a spa, yoga classes, catered events, private saunas and hot tubs, evening cocktails and an upscale retail outlet. If a similar venture designed by the same architectural firm, Piaule Catskills, is any guide, nightly rates will start at $499 plus taxes and resort fees. This isn’t, in other words, anything like your grandfather’s campground, and even the latest window-dressing name for this sort of luxe indulgence won’t suffice: rather than call his project a “glampground,” Rasch’s documentation refers to it as a “landscape hotel.”

Yet as extensively documented in a 9,000 word article by Bill Shein of the Berkshire Argus, the well-heeled developer seldom utters the words “landscape hotel” in public. When it comes to seeking community approval for his plans, Rasch is all “camp” this and “campground” that, as in, “The campground will continue to operate as a campground but with fewer sites and upgraded amenities.” Which is like saying that a Maserati MC20 is just like your family minivan, but with fewer seats and an upgraded engine and aerodynamics.

As clearly inappropriate as it is, however, the campground label is hugely useful for Rasch or other developers who want to get around zoning restrictions that allow traditional campgrounds but not more overtly commercial enterprises, as in an otherwise residential area. Such end-runs are especially critical for existing campgrounds that predate existing zoning regulations, and therefore operate under grandfathered conditions that vanish if the use changes—as is the case with Prospect Lake. As summarized by Egremont’s board of health director, “What they’re going to be, as opposed to what they were, is going to be so vastly different. I’m thinking this is going to turn into a lodging. . . . It could be a ‘campground,’ but it will be a campground in name only.”

The irony here is that the traditional campground industry has been a key player in creating that confusion—why I referred to this as “deliberately sloppy” semantics. If Rasch wanted to build 40 cabins on his property, there’d be room to argue that he needs the kinds of permits and inspections that any permanent structures require. But because he’s planning to bring in cabins mounted on wheeled chassis, which the RV industry has successfully lobbied to have categorized as park model “recreational vehicles,” the fiction that this is a transient, non-permanent arrangement can be perpetuated with a straight face.

I’ve written repeatedly about the problems associated with the park model scam (here, here and here, for example), but the absurdity of insisting the emperor is fully clothed was summarized most unmistakably by Cynthia Zbierski, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Campground Owners. When Shein referred to park model RVs as being “permanently sited,” she quickly corrected him by observing, without a hint of sardonic self-awareness, “They’re not going to be permanent because they’re on wheels.” Shein, alas, failed to follow up by asking just how many of the scores of park model RVs throughout the state’s 75 or so campgrounds have ever been moved from their initial placements.

The upshot, thanks to such muddied semantics, is that Rasch can tell Egremont he’s just fixing up a dilapidated campground—even as he markets the same property as a “landscape hotel” to an upscale clientele that thinks a thousand bucks a person for a weekend stay “should cost way more.” He can get away with that misrepresentation because the campground industry has lost sight of its core business, turning a blind eye to its bougie competitors. And Massachusetts now has 125 fewer RV sites, even though there’s been no change in its overall campground census.

As ’23 winds down, so does the party

Easing into various seasonal celebrations, and from there into year’s end, various RV industry representatives have been spewing predictions for 2024 that are short on context and long on wishful thinking and data cherry-picking. Call it the holiday effect, an irresistible compulsion to make things merry by spiking the statistical punch, morning-after hangover be damned.

Consider, for example, the glowing news announced at KOA’s recent annual convention by CEO Toby O’Rourke that the franchise behemoth had crossed the $500 million mark in annual revenues, up 36% since 2019. Receiving considerably less emphasis was the news that camper nights in 2023 were actually down 4.8%, and up only 5% over 2019, an increase initially notched by a pandemic-driven camping explosion that now seems to be waning. Revenues going up even as camper nights decline can be explained only by higher rates—and, indeed, escalating fees may explain in part why camper nights are down. Camping is getting just too damn expensive.

Indeed, the annual Generational Camping Report, released by RMS North America last week, found that “price is still a driving factor in campground destination decisions,” with a third of respondents “selecting the cost of reservation as their top concern.” Contrasted with O’Rourke’s ambition to increase camper nights by 2% next year, even as she projects a further 5% annual growth in revenue, that concern appears to be a circle that can’t be squared.

Or consider the persistently upbeat outlook propagated by the folks who build RVs. In one trade show after another this fall, dealers and manufacturers conceded that yes, traffic was down—“attendance might not have broken any records,” “traffic was clearly off somewhat”—but that they were optimistic about 2024 and beyond. Precisely why was never made clear, but it might have something to do with an industry penchant for pulling numbers out of the air. On Sept. 1 of last year, for example, the RV Industry Association was forecasting wholesale shipments in 2023 of 419,000; as of Dec. 6, that had slipped only a bit, to 391,499. Today it looks unlikely that even 290,000 RVs will roll out the door in 2023—but that hasn’t prevented RVIA’s statistical geniuses from calling for a rebound to 369,700 units in 2024. Why? Well, why not?

There are a few—a very few—voices calling out this forecasting malpractice. Industry consultant John Spader, for example, has observed that as of June 30, the average North American RV dealer’s debt to equity ratio had ballooned from .97:1 in 2021 to 1.73:1 in 2022 to 3.64:1 in 2023. As he notes, the debt-to-equity ratio is “arguably the most important measure of a dealer’s financial health” and its ability to manage debt. Most lenders want to see a ratio of 4.0:1 or less, so as this trend continues in the wrong direction, expect to see a growing number of RV dealerships going belly-up as they fall afoul of financing covenants. Disappearing dealerships don’t do much to increase sales

A more extensive—and bleak—analysis of this trend by Gregg Fore, whose industry-friendly credentials include induction into the RV/MH Hall of Fame, was published by RVBusiness a week ago. “Margins on sales have dropped, costs of nearly everything has risen, and maintaining safety in cash flow is more critical than ever,” he wrote. “Some dealers will see the handwriting on the wall and close voluntarily rather than lose their entire personal asset base. Others will be forced to do the same as cash flow reaches critical levels.”

RV park promoters and investors tend to be cavalier about such developments, claiming that with so many millions of RVs already cluttering the landscape, a constriction in the supply pipeline will be immaterial to campground owners. But RV parks are part of a larger ecosystem; when any part of it is diminished, the greater whole will feel the effects. Or as Fore also points out, fewer RV outlets will result in a higher percentage of larger dealers, “meaning the consumer will be forced to work harder to make a purchase and to get service (emphasis added).” In other words, owning an RV is going to become more expensive and more of a headache than it already has been.

The same economic forces that are crippling the RV industry are battering the camping public as well, with predictable results. Persistently high interest rates, two overseas wars, the ongoing threat of a federal government shutdown and a polarized, fractious political climate have soured consumer sentiment, which now has fallen for four consecutive months. Consumer spending has followed suit, dipping 0.1% in October, just ahead of the holiday season and the first decline since March. With two-thirds of Americans saying their household expenses have risen over the last year but only one in four saying their income has increased in the same period, it’s perhaps predictable that credit card debt is shooting up and retirement accounts are being ravaged through hardship withdrawals.

None of that adds up to a rosy outlook for next year—at the very least, it’s going to challenge the airy notion, advanced by some (I’m looking at you, Frank Rolfe), that the RV park industry is somehow immune to the economic forces that affect everyone else. Yes, people who already own RVs will want to use them—but not if they can’t afford ever-higher site fees, or if they can’t get their RVs serviced at a reasonable price within a reasonable time frame. Not if they can’t keep up with the outsized payments on their over-leveraged RV loans and have to unload their white elephants. Not if a tightening job market slowly makes that “work from anywhere except the office” lifestyle ever more fanciful.

The party was fun while it lasted, but they’re taking away the punchbowl and tomorrow you’ll wish they’d done so sooner.

Tossing a pebble into the OHI pond

The National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds earlier this month held its annual convention in Kansas City, at which its most prominently headlined action was to rebrand itself as the Outdoor Hospitality Industry, or OHI. Quite overshadowed by that announcement, and lost in the typically tepid shuffle of self-promoting panels and lectures, was a ground-breaking presentation by Michael Scheinman, CEO of Campspot—underscoring, yet again, that this is not an industry given to self-examination.

“Navigating the Camping-Hotel Crossover: Lessons for Success in Outdoor Hospitality,” if Campspot’s subsequent press release is to be believed, played to a standing-room only crowd. But the industry’s primary “news” outlet, Woodall’s Campground Magazine, couldn’t be bothered to provide more than a sketchy three-paragraph summary—although, to be fair, it did link to Scheinman’s white paper, so at least it can be read online [registration with Campspot required]. Other campground-oriented media, however, pretty much gave the presentation a pass.

That’s what happens when you swim against the current, even obliquely.

Scheinman’s apostasy was to challenge industry group-think by asking an obvious question, “Why are campgrounds increasingly considering hotel best practices?” As he summarized in an opening statement, the industry’s uncritical embrace of hotel industry tactics and tools “can lead to poor guest experience, sub-optimal revenue optimization and costly and unnecessary investments”—not exactly what a convention full of vested interests devoted to selling hotel industry tactics and tools wants to hear. Little wonder, then, that Scheinman’s tossed pebble sank beneath the pond’s surface with scarcely a ripple.

Long-time campers and RVers are well aware of this trend, which began in earnest with the pandemic but can trace its roots to the turn of the century, when a hotel and casino executive was tapped to become president and chief executive of the industry’s largest campground chain. As Jim Rogers told Forbes magazine a decade after assuming KOA’s leadership mantle, “the casino business is so cutting edge and the camping industry is so ‘back of the woods’ ” that he was having a lot of fun making the latter look a lot more like the former. Among his many transformative initiatives, for instance, was a full-court press to add cabins—many, many cabins—to RV parks, which Rogers explained “are just like a suite in a hotel except the interior is all wood.”

That myopic outlook has become even more prevalent today, Scheinman observed, thanks to the pandemic-driven flood of institutionally-backed investors looking for a more stable alternative to the volatile hotel-asset class. As those investors applied their hotel experience to their campground acquisitions, a similarly pandemic-driven class of new customers flocking to this alternative form of lodging brought expectations based on their experiences with hotel and vacation rentals. Meanwhile, hotel-focused managers, consultants and software vendors also piled into this “new” business opportunity, but in doing so “often needed to convince campground operators that they were ‘missing out’ when neglecting key tactics and tools used in hotels”—as good a description as any of most OHI convention content.

This perfect three-way storm of hotel-oriented pressure to change traditional campground culture and practices has been augmented by technology, which provides campground owners with labor savings while creating opportunities for new revenue streams. But as Scheinman wrote, “given the relative dearth of campground-specific software related to point of sale, loyalty, customer relationship management, accounting, and others, they were led to hotel-centric solutions.” In short, there now exists a hotel-based feedback loop that has pushed the campground industry out of Jim Rogers’ “back of the woods” to the front of the line, although that line may not be one you want to be in.

For campers, the application of hotel-centric solutions to campgrounds has meant significantly higher rates and add-on costs, less face-time with a shrinking number of campground employees and an ongoing shift in the ratio of RV sites to various forms of lodging. It also, arguably, has resulted in a shifting ratio between “nature” and physical comfort as fundamental aspects of the camping experience, requiring that nature’s less comfortable aspects be minimized, if not eradicated: more outdoor lighting, more paved surfaces, more hard-sided shelters, and so on. And as nature gets pushed to the periphery, a compensatory emphasis on “amenities” takes its place, from wifi to golf car rentals to organized programs such as movie nights or kids’ activities.

These developments, although widely discussed in campers’ forums, are largely unexamined by the campground industry itself, which continues lurching in a direction largely defined by the newcomers. Indeed, it’s notable that to the extent a spotlight has been trained on the subject, it’s being shined by a graduate of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, alma mater of a significant number of the new campground investors. Nor is Scheinman a disinterested observer, as much of his white paper’s conclusions lead to an explanation of why Campspot is ideally positioned to provide campground-specific—rather than hotel-centric—services that meet the industry’s unique needs. In that respect, Scheinman’s presentation was only a more sophisticated version of the usual self-serving OHI fare.

But self-serving or not, Scheinman dared raise questions that the RV park industry would benefit from considering. A little bit of critical thinking and discussion would go a long way in disrupting the relentless promotion of campground “modernization” —which, of course, explains why Scheinman’s white paper has received so little attention. And while his “solution” may be to Campspot’s advantage, that doesn’t make his observations less trenchant or the problems he highlights any less urgent.

RV park is really a cheap trailer court

RVtravel.com had a curious little story this past week headlined “Idaho: A little RV park draws plenty of opposition.” I call it “curious” because the article glided right over the central issue to fixate on the “tempest in a teapot” nature of a two-year battle waged by a developer to build a tiny 20-site RV park on 4.17 very rural acres. As the article points out, this is an extremely modest proposal that readily meets or exceeds all relevant county standards—so how come there’s a groundswell of local opposition, including a court challenge, in a state better known for its libertarian, live-and-let live inclination?

Maybe it has something to do with the ongoing trend of cheap housing developments masquerading as RV parks.

Not that there’s any mystery about what’s going on. When Idaho Land LLC filed its application with Bonner County for a conditional use permit, it was completely aboveboard about its intentions. “Our mission is to provide affordable housing for members of our community,” the application states. “With Idaho being the fastest growing state by population, and Bonner County growth projected to be 2.25% annually, the park will provide transitional housing for those migrating to north Idaho and provide a low income housing option for current residents who are combating rising housing prices in the area.”

As the application also notes, “The park is in alignment with the counties [sic] goal of providing affordable housing options in an area with adequate public and private services provided.” And, again: “The park will provide alternate low income housing options for residents in accordance with the goal of providing adequate shelter regardless of age, income or physical ability.”

There are at least a couple of problems with these frank assertions, starting with the obvious question of why anyone would call this an “RV park.” This is as bare-bones a “park” as one can imagine, the site plan showing little more than an oval gravel road with 20 full hookup back-in sites, a “laundry facility” and a dumpster. No bathhouse, no registration office, no campstore or playground or any other kind of structure or amenity, for that matter, and apparently no staff . This is basically a trailer park for RVs.

But Bonner County’s zoning regulations, while limiting occupancy of RVs on residentially zoned land to 120 days, specifically exclude RV parks from that limitation. Indeed, the county’s extensive rules about RV parks are inexplicably silent on that one question, even as the rules acknowledge that RVs are “primarily designed as temporary living quarters.” Meanwhile, the county’s zoning regs allow only one RV per residential lot unless a conditional use permit is granted. Opposition to the Idaho Land proposal is based in part on the contention that because it’s looking to provide a residential facility rather than a recreational one, the one-RV-per-lot limitation should be applied.

Not so, argue Idaho Land and its representative, Stephen Doty. “I’m not applying for dwelling units,” Doty was quoted as saying by Rvtravel, ignoring the application’s clear assertions about housing. “I’m applying for an RV park permit to operate an RV park.”

The idea that simply calling something an RV park makes it so, regardless of how the land will actually be used, is troubling enough. But the wider issue here—and one that should concern an industry that increasingly claims to be part of the “hospitality industry”—is the growing acceptance of RVs as residential options (as I’ve written before, here, here and here, among many, many other posts). As I’ve stressed before, and as industry manufacturers likewise feebly maintain, RVs are not built to residential standards. Think what you will about the cardboard walls and minimal insulation of house trailers, they at least have to conform to HUD standards that RV manufacturers can blithely ignore.

But trailer parks have acquired a disreputable reputation, which means no one is in a rush to build more of them, while RV parks still retain a feel-good image. Moreover, the campground industry clearly wants some of that action, too. Thanks to a real estate crunch that has made affordable housing increasingly scarce, demand for monthly RV sites has gone through the roof, convincing a growing number of RV parks to convert transient sites into long-term ones. And why not? Long-term sites mean predictable and steady income; with less turnover, they also allow for lower staffing levels and fewer amenities than are expected by a recreational customer base. The bare-bones Bonner County proposal is only the logical outcome of this trend taken to an extreme.

Yet as I wrote quite recently, this is a trend that will come back to bite the industry in the butt. The kicker is that the industry knows this—it just seems incapable of doing anything about the slow-moving train wreck it has created for itself. As Dyana Kelley, executive director of the California Outdoor Hospitality Association, recently acknowledged, “If we look like and act like low-income housing, then that is how we will be perceived and regulated.” Bonner County, in approving the Idaho Land application last week, simply pounded one more nail into that coffin.

O, hi! Did you know ARVC is no more?

The RV park and campground industry, increasingly dominated by investors with a background in hotel management, has for some time put on airs by claiming to be in the “hospitality” business. Today, it went one step farther: the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds has renounced its name and rebranded itself as Outdoor Hospitality Industry, or OHI.

Announced at a plenary session of ARVC’s annual convention, the name change was justified in a letter to members from executive director Paul Bambei as being more representative of “the breadth of the industry, where it is today, and—especially—where it will be in the future.” OHI, he added, “will continue to grow as the trusted voice of all outdoor hospitality businesses and will continue to be the organization that is at the forefront of a growing and dynamic lifestyle for the Outdoor Hospitality Industry and camping consumers.”

Although Bambei claimed that the rebranding is responsive to “surveys and interviews conducted this past year” that found 80% of “participants” felt a name change was warranted, he did not offer any particulars about who was surveyed or interviewed, nor exactly what they were asked. Nor is there any indication that ARVC’s current campground and RV park membership had pushed for a name change, or that it wanted its organization to represent a more generalized “outdoor hospitality” industry that presumably now includes many hotels and motels as well as bed-and-breakfasts, Harvest Host sites, inns, ski lodges, marinas, resorts, glampgrounds, and so on. This clearly was a top-down initiative, driven by ARVC’s leadership wanting to play in a bigger sandbox.

I’ve written before about this loss of focus and why it’s detrimental to ARVC’s core constituency. But grasping after a broader mandate isn’t just a disservice to existing members; it’s out of step with current events, coming at a time when “hospitality” at campgrounds and RV parks is becoming ever more elusive. These days, with institutional money piling into the industry, it’s really all about efficiency and return on investment, goals inherently at odds with a labor-intensive aspiration.

Hospitality, after all, requires interaction with one’s customers. It means face-to-face encounters. As one industry website summarizes it, it means “making your customers feel special and even spoiled,” which “is an art that only dedicated, trained staff can achieve.” Yet staff, dedication and training are in woefully short supply at all except the very largest and the very smallest campgrounds and RV parks, the former because of economies of scale and the latter because mom and pop are not being overwhelmed by a flood of customers.

Just how dire the situation has become can be seen in ARVC’s annual industry survey, released this week in ironic juxtaposition to the name-change announcement. As flawed as the survey is, as detailed in my last post, its less granular, more reliable findings reveal that many campgrounds are hard-pressed even to take the trash out, with the typical (median) campground of 90 sites employing just three full-time and two part-time workers during its main season—and that’s actually one full-time employee less than in 2022.

To call such staffing skeletal is generous. Consider, for example, that a campground with an office-store open 10 hours a day—or 70 hours a week—will require a minimum of two employees just to put one person behind the counter. Additional staffing during the busiest hours—say, 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.—will require at least one more full-timer or two part-timers. For the average campground that also wants its bathrooms cleaned at least once a day, its cabins and “glamping” accommodations cleaned at check-out, its swimming pool maintained and its lawns mowed and edged, the choice comes down to shorter office hours or not getting some things done—and don’t even think about hosting activities of various kinds.

Why not just hire more employees? Aside from the question of whether some campgrounds choose not to because they prefer a fatter net income, one very likely reason is because most people don’t want jobs that pay at or barely above the $15 minimum wage in effect in some of the biggest camping states, including all three West Coast states and Colorado. As the ARVC survey reports, the typical park pays general staff a median rate of $15.01 an hour, which in much of the country—issues of minimum wage aside—is barely competitive with fast-food restaurants and big box stores that also provide year-round employment. “Dedication” won’t be bought that cheaply. By comparison, hotel front-office managers get paid on average $42,740 a year, according to Glassdoor, while directors of housekeeping receive $55,266.

The National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds was always a mouthful, and the ARVC acronym didn’t even track, but at least the name conveyed whose interests the organization represented. Outdoor Hospitality Industry isn’t just awkward because of its lack of a subject noun (is it an association? a coalition? a cooperative, federation or guild?), but it borders on false advertising at a time when “hospitality” is found more in its rhetoric than in reality.

Another year, another flawed survey

When the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds holds its annual convention next week, among its featured presentations will be the release of a “highly anticipated” survey of the industry. The “in-depth look at the current state of park operations across the U.S.” will provide “valuable insights into the outdoor hospitality industry” that “will be an important tool for parks looking to gain a competitive advantage,” according to its advance press.

If that’s not enough to get your heart pounding, consider that the 2023 Outdoor Hospitality Industry Benchmarking Report “is not just a collection of statistics but a narrative of the industry’s pulse.” Campground owners consulting the report will find “the hidden potential in regional distinctions,” enabling them to turn those distinctions “into strategic advantages for success.” Or so we’re promised.

Well, maybe not. As in years past, ARVC’s attempt to paint a reliable statistical portrait of its membership suffers from several limitations, not least among them that same membership’s reluctance to share information. (This is not unique to ARVC, as other industry would-be profilers have encountered the same problem.) In this case, although the survey sampled 4,823 campgrounds, only 8% of ARVC’s members responded, as did a mere 4% of non-ARVC campgrounds. That left an acceptable 282 survey responses—enough for the report to claim a 5.6% margin of error at a 95% confidence level, which isn’t bad for the report overall.

Where that confidence breaks down, however, is in the report’s attempts to reach conclusions about various sub-categories, such as campground size or location or type of ownership. The report’s authors acknowledge as much, albeit only in general terms, by noting that “the margin of error for percentages based on smaller sample sizes will be larger.” How much larger? Your guess is as good as any, particularly because virtually all of the survey data is presented as statistics, not as hard numbers that would enable some independent crunching.

Indeed, almost the only hard data that we can calculate from the provided information is the number of respondents in each of four regions of the country: 45 in 12 western states, 51 in 14 northeastern states, 82 in 12 midwestern states and 104 in 12 southern states—or twice as many respondents from the south as from the west. Yet many of the survey’s charts run percentages side-by-side, inevitably prompting misleading apples-to-oranges comparisons between regions, not to mention making a mockery of “the hidden potential in regional distinctions.”

The confusion between statistics and hard numbers afflicts the survey designers themselves. For example, a question about available accommodations asks, “How many sites/units are available at this RV park, campground or glamping park?” Instead of providing a numerical answer, however, the survey lists percentages, such as 89% for full hook up sites or 18% for park model cabins, presumably letting us know what percentage of respondents provide that particular accommodation but not how many such accommodations are available.

Elsewhere, the survey simply throws in the towel—sort of—by acknowledging that it just doesn’t have enough responses for a trustworthy conclusion. This is especially notable in a section on rates, in which several charts leave blank any field that had less than 10 responses; fields with fewer than 30 responses provide the information but are shaded grey, apparently signifying that their numbers are not statistically meaningful. The alternative, it appears, would have been even larger swaths of empty space, attesting to the limits of a relatively small sample size.

There are other problems. One is the survey’s lack of a precise time frame, with responders asked for information about “the past 12 months” instead of a specific period, such as “calendar year 2022.” Not only does “the past 12 months” vary by approximately 15%, depending on when a survey was answered during the nearly two-month window before it was tabulated, but campground owners generally operate on an annual bookkeeping cycle and for many, that’s the information they’re most likely to grab. Moreover, a survey mailed out at the beginning of May means it was reaching its target audience just as that audience was heading into its busiest season—one possible reason the response rate was so anemic.

Then there’s the occasional creative approach to averages. A chart showing changes in nightly/weekly rates concludes that the median increase from 2022 to 2023 was 5%. But it turns out that median was not the midpoint of the increases that were made, but the midpoint for all rates: 29% of the respondents had no change in their rates and 2% actually dropped their rates. An additional 4% did not specify how much of an increase they instituted, but for the survey’s purposes were dumped into the low range of all the responses, further skewing the overall median downward. The actual median increase? Closer to 8% or 9% for those who did increase rates.

But here’s the survey’s biggest red flag: the 282 respondents claimed to have median annual revenues of $3.52 million, despite a median campground size of just 92 rentable units. That works out to more than $38,000 a site, which would require a nightly rate of $105 and 100% occupancy to achieve. Such numbers should tickle even the most insensitive BS detector—but that’s not all. The survey breaks down the $3.52 million as follows: $1.43 million in overnight site fees, $1.02 million in monthly and seasonal fees, $700,000 in camp store income and $0 for amenities/activities fees . Grand total? $2.52 million, or exactly a million dollars less than the headline number. Problems with addition? Maybe. Or maybe just bad data. What is clear is that no one thought to question such an off-the-charts number.

There are a few possibly insightful glimmers in the overall survey results, although without closer examination it’s hard to tell if they’re from iron pyrite or from the real thing. But overall, ARVC convention attendees should be wary of accepting any of this survey’s results at face value. That said, it’s virtually inevitable that various survey “findings” will be trumpeted by ARVC as gospel in the service of one agenda or another. The report is “statistical,” after all. Scientific. Irrefutable proof of whatever point is best served—and besides, no one wants to admit they spent a lot of money on something of such questionable value.

What we should learn from Otis

One week after eviscerating the tourist mecca of Acapulco, Mexico, Hurricane Otis is assured of long-term notoriety for two reasons. The first is its sheer ferocity: a Category 5 monster with gusts of up to 205 miles an hour, Otis ripped apart large high-rises, claimed at least four-dozen lives, severed all water, electricity and internet service and left a tattered landscape of denuded trees and streets jammed with mud and debris.

But the second reason for Otis’s historic significance is the speed with which it ramped up. When Acapulco’s residents went to bed Monday night, they expected no more than a tropical storm, with maximum winds of 60 miles an hour. Yet within 24 to 30 hours (Otis made landfall at 12:25 a.m. Wednesday) the storm’s winds had gained more than 100 miles an hour, a virtually unprecedented rate of strengthening that caught forecasters off guard—and a city of 800,000 flat-footed and unprepared.

In some ways, however, none of this should have been a surprise. Climate scientists have warned of just such rapid intensification for at least six years, starting with a 2017 paper titled, “Will global warming make hurricane forecasting more difficult?” Nor is this a problem limited to the Pacific basin, where El Niño gets a lot of blame for spawning Hurricane Hilary in August—the first tropical storm to hit California since 1939—and now Otis. Just two weeks ago a New Jersey-based researcher published a paper contending that “quickly intensifying tropical cyclones are exceptionally hazardous for Atlantic coastlines.”

The number of tropical cyclones (aka hurricanes) in the Atlantic that intensify from category 1 (or weaker) into category 3 (or higher) within 36 hours has more than doubled over the past couple of decades, according to the author, Andra J. Garner. “Many of the most damaging tropical cyclones to impact the U.S. in recent years have been notable for the speed at which they have intensified,” Garner added, in part because such rapid development “can create communication and preparedness challenges for coastal communities in the storm’s path.” Translation: hurricane-prone coastal areas that once could have a week’s advance warning of a brutal storm may now have only a day or two.

Public recognition of this changing reality, however, is sadly lagging. This cognitive dissonance is notably on display when municipal planners and private developers get to talking about RV parks and campgrounds, which all too often are seen as suitable for low-lying and flood-prone areas that would never get approved for residential development. RVs, goes the thinking, have wheels—what could be simpler than to pull them out of harm’s way? No harm, no foul, and otherwise “wasted” land can be put to productive use.

Just such a rationale was evident in Citrus County, Florida, where opposition to a proposed glampground was based, in part, on concerns about the low-lying coastal area’s vulnerability to hurricanes. Pish-posh, retorted Stephen Hill, a glampground supporter, who claimed in a letter to a local newspaper that “the tourist industry stays a week or more ahead of storms” and so has plenty of advance notice of a potential problem. “All visitors will be off the property well before locals, who tend to delay, decide to evacuate,” he added.

Similarly, in the North Carolina town of Leland, a proposal earlier this year to allow RV parks in flood hazard zones came with a suggestion that such sites “have a sign indicating that the RV shall be removed from the site within 24 hours of the town declaring a state of emergency for a potential flooding event.” The town eventually agreed to allow RV parks in the flood-prone areas—but also apparently decided such warning signs would not be necessary, perhaps because they would have created some liability for the town if it failed to give timely notice of “a potential flooding event.” Instead, caveat emptor!

The problem with both rationales, as Otis underscores, is that there is no longer any assurance that the tourist industry can stay a week ahead of storms, or that a town could declare a state of emergency more than 24 hours in advance of a cataclysmic rainfall or hurricane. Tropical cyclones, it’s becoming clear, can sweep in as suddenly as a forest fire, a week-long life-cycle compressed into mere hours. Wheels or no wheels, in such circumstances an RV can be just as much a sitting duck as any bricks-and-mortar dwelling.

None of this is to say that an RV is a preferred shelter anywhere when a Cat-Five storm hits; as photos of see-through high-rises in Acapulco attest, even the sturdiest of buildings can be stripped down to its skeleton by such winds, never mind a tin-can of a home that quite literally can be kicked down the road. But that doesn’t justify adding another layer of risk by putting those tin cans on land that we know will flood because, you know, they can just roll out of the way.

One likely reason site fees are up

Scarcely more than a year after ProPublica reported that algorithm-driven software was partly responsible for exorbitant apartment rents, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday (subscription needed) that two of the companies behind such practices are being sued by tenants in federal courts in Tennessee and Washington. The lawsuits come as the U.S. Justice Dept.’s antitrust division continues an investigation that started last fall and considers potential enforcement action against RealPage, the company at the heart of ProPublica’s reporting.

At issue is a pricing system, used by dozens of landlords when setting their rates, that analyzes giant amounts of proprietary data —provided by those same landlords—to come up with “suggested” rent increases. This amounts to collusion that is illegal, anticompetitive and keeps rents artificially high, the lawsuits contend, pointing to such evidence as a landlord saying the pricing software enabled him to “push rents more aggressively” and “quickly.” Marketing materials from RealPage, meanwhile, boasted of the opportunity for landlords to “outperform the market by 3% to 7%.”

Why should that matter to you? Quite possibly because a similar dynamic is developing within the campground industry, as I reported in broad strokes just days after the ProPublica story, and then more specifically this past July. That’s when Campspot, a leading reservation software company now serving more than 2,200 RV parks and campgrounds, announced its release of Signals, a computerized database that enables campground owners to see the competition’s aggregate rates, occupancy, revenue per site and other variables in real time.

As with RealPage, Campspot maintains it’s simply amassing “anonymized metrics,” so no proprietary data is disclosed. And as with RealPage, Campspot stresses that it’s only enabling its customers “to compare their performance against a recommended comp set”—what they do with that information is up to them. Indeed, in a consolidating industry that is seeing a rapid increase of investor-owned chains, Campspot sees itself as providing smaller operators with tools to offset their larger competitors’ advantages of scale and marketing resources. “Our goal is to level the playing field,” a Campspot executive assured me in August.

Well, maybe. Then again, Campspot is rapidly closing in on oligopoly status—it claims to be processing approximately 25% of all campground reservations in North America—and can fairly be said to occupy the “big data” niche within the campground industry that RealPage is accused of claiming among landlords. Indeed, a letter from four U.S. senators to the Dept. of Justice earlier this year raised concerns that RealPage’s software, YieldStar, was playing a significant role in driving rent inflation in some of the country’s biggest markets—even though YieldStar’s data base represents only 8% of all rental units nationwide, or less than one-third Campspot’s market share of campground reservations.

“Given YieldStar’s market share, even the widespread use of its anonymized and aggregated proprietary rental data by the country’s largest landlords could result in de-facto price-setting by those companies, driving up prices and hurting renters,” the senators wrote. Similarly, the algorithmic use of “big data” across industries as varied as grocery chains, ride-sharing companies and the pork and poultry industry has resulted in ever more widespread automated pricing across the economy, increasing costs, reducing market competition and fueling rising concern in the Biden administration.

The campground industry is neither as large nor as vital to social welfare as its apartment counterpart—although the balance keeps shifting, as more money rushes into the sector and campgrounds increasingly accommodate long-term residents—and therefore tends to fly under the regulatory radar. But that creates a conundrum for Campspot, whose business plan depends on attracting attention, even if some of it is unwelcome. For example, the Inc. 500 for 2023, a list of the country’s fastest-growing private companies, was announced just a couple of months ago—with Campspot weighing in at #341, up from its debut appearance the year before, at #487. The company’s three-year revenue growth rate? An astonishing 1,693%. Those are the kinds of numbers, when viewed in the context of market share, that can make antitrust regulators sit up and take notice.

But unless and until they do, the juggernaut keeps rolling along. The National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC) announced mid-October that it has a vaguely defined “new partnership” with Campspot, even though a fistful of other campground reservation companies also are ARVC associate members. Just what this new partnership entails isn’t clear, other than scheduling Campspot to lead a “featured breakout session” Nov. 8 at ARVC’s annual convention. (The session title, interestingly, is “Navigating the Camping-Hotel Crossover: Lessons for Success in Outdoor Hospitality,” attesting to Campspot’s founders’ hotel industry roots.) But it does attest to Campspot’s increasing influence and agenda-setting capability within the industry.

Ultimately, being successful in business is neither a sin nor illegal. The point at which it becomes questionable, however, arises when “success” flows from unfair advantage. The lawsuits in Tennessee and Washington, as well as any Justice Dept. action against RealPage, may well signal whether big data has crossed that line—and if it has, whether Campspot has something to worry about.