Tag: RV Park University

A handful of updates on past posts

The end of July marks the mid-point of the traditional camping season, although that term has become increasingly elastic and even meaningless due to the distorting effects of climate change. Nevertheless, this seems like an apt moment to hit “pause,” check back on what I’ve written in the past and provide updates where appropriate. Some stories actually do reach a resolution, but many more have a way of continuing with no clear end in sight.

Ghost Town in the Sky just won’t die

One such ongoing drama has to do with Ghost Town in the Sky, a now defunct amusement park in Maggie Valley, NC about which I last wrote nearly two years ago. The property’s greatest champion, Alaska Presley, had entered into a business partnership with a Myrtle Beach-based hustler, Frankie Wood, who sweet-talked her into naming him the managing partner of their joint venture despite his shady past. In addition to contributing the property itself, Presley apparently covered all of the venture’s operating costs; Wood’s end of the deal amounted to little more than half-baked ideas drizzled with snake oil.

Then Presley died, age 98.

Inheriting Presley’s 50% stake in the partnership was her niece, Jill McClure, who cast a notably more business-like eye on its affairs. It didn’t take her long to conclude she was holding one end of a snake—and not the business end of it, either. The upshot was a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the partnership, filed in North Carolina’s Superior Court, alleging that Wood had breached his fiduciary responsibilities and thus was putting McClure’s interests at risk. Given Wood’s history to date, that would have seemed like a slam dunk.

But no. Ruling more than 18 months after the case was filed—in part because of numerous filing extensions requested by Wood, earning a judicial rebuke for “litigation by ambush” that nevertheless had no effect on the final decision—Special Superior Court Judge for Complex Business Cases Adam M. Conrad concluded in mid-May that McClure didn’t have a case. The legal arrangement to which Presley had agreed, and which McClure had inherited, clearly specified that Wood “is the sole managing member of Ghost Town in the Sky and that it has unilateral authority under the operating agreement to manage the company’s day-to-day affairs without McClure’s consent.”

That “management,” as the decision also observes, includes four years in which the venture “did not secure financing, earn income or hire employees.” Since Presley’s death, it also includes non-payment of 2022 and 2023 property taxes. No matter. As Judge Conrad sees it, there is nothing extreme enough to merit an involuntary dissolution of the partnership—which leaves Wood still at the helm, Ghost Town in the Sky even more of a moldering heap than it was four years ago, and McClure gamely telling a local reporter, “I’m moving forward with a positive attitude.”

Stay tuned.

Cacapon locals knock out two RV parks

While Maggie Valley refuses to give up the ghost, a two-fisted attempt to put an RV park in or next to Cacapon State Park, West Virginia, finally appears to have been defeated.

The first such effort, as I wrote a year ago, featured an overly cozy relationship between state officials and Blue Water Development and their efforts to build an RV campground with more than 300 sites in the state park. The proposal quickly generated fierce local opposition from park advocates and local residents, who objected to its size and the amount of traffic it would generate in a rugged area notable for its narrow roads and rustic vibe. As more details emerged of Blue Water’s backdoor maneuvering, the whole idea became politically untenable and ended up getting axed.

But that only made way for a competing proposal that had already been floated as an alternative to the state facility: a 50-acre private development adjacent to Cacapon State Park, with up to 241 sites for RVs, cabins, yurts and tents, as well as such mega-park amenities as a swimming pool, bathhouse, mini golf course, sports courts, dog parks, several pavilions and food truck areas. Ironically, as local opponents worried that the “oversized RV campground” would scar a panoramic viewshed rated by National Geographic Magazine as “one of the top 5 scenic views in the East,” the developer of the proposed campground was . . . Scenic LLC.

Despite boisterous public hearings that divided the Morgan County Planning Commission, all needed permits were approved and Scenic LLC seemed set to proceed. But then the months rolled by and nothing seemed to be happening, encouraging the opposition to renew its battle. In late June, more than two dozen local residents showed up at a planning commission meeting to demand a reconsideration, with some accusing commissioners of “selling out” the community and the commissioners responding that the project had met all county guidelines for commercial development, so what else could they do.

And then, just like that, it was over. Two weeks ago, Aaron Bills, Scenic’s principal owner, announced that he is stepping away from the project. The plan had been to seek a KOA franchise for the property, but apparently the price tag was too steep. This is “shockingly bad timing for finances,” Bills told county officials, according to the Morgan Messenger. “As a family, we’ve decided we can’t deliver on a KOA-branded campground”–indeed, he added, would the county be interested in buying the property for itself?

Danville’s casino-related RV park craps out

A 333-site Roman-themed RV park in Danville, VA, proposed last year by  J. Cubas Holdings of Coral Gables, Florida—which, not incidentally, has absolutely no experience in operating an RV park of any size, much less an avowed “high end” operation—is no more.

After the neighbors rose up in arms for any number of obvious reasons, Cubas switched gears and said early this year he’d build a bunch of new homes, priced between $300,000 and $350,000. Ironically, he’d held that out as a threat against the city if it refused to permit his RV park—only to have the city elders say that more housing is exactly what Danville needs. “Folks moving here, they need somewhere to live and there’s only so many places you can build new developments, so we’re happy to have this moving forward,” explained city councilman Lee Vogler.

Plus here’s another bonus: putting the kibbosh on Cubas’ “Palace Resort” also deep-sixed his plans for an annual biker rally that he promised would rival those of Sturgis, SD and Orlando, FL.

Reservation software getting regulatory stink-eye

As public officials learn about the price-fixing potential of algorithms used by centralized reservation software systems, first extensively detailed by ProPublica two years ago, they’ve started erecting legislative constraints at the national level. Now that’s filtered down to the local precincts: yesterday, the San Francisco board of supervisors adopted the country’s first local ordinance banning landlords from using certain software to set rents.

According to CBS News, the measure bans the sale and use of software “which combines non-public competitors’ data to set, recommend or advise on rents and occupancy levels.” Doing so, said the ordinance’s sponsor, amounts to “automated price-fixing.”

Yes, that’s only one city, and a decidedly liberal one at that. And yes, the ordinance applies to rental apartments only. But it’s not much of a leap to see how the same concerns can apply to widely shared campground reservation systems, like CampSpot, which aggregate user data and enable “individual campground owners to compare their metrics, such as average daily rates, occupancy rates and revenue per available site, with what everyone else is doing—and to make adjustments as desired.”

Sooner or later, the anti-trust police may take notice.

Frank Rolfe is at it again—but badly

Finally, scarcely more than two months after an email blast soliciting customers for his misleadingly titled RV Park University, Frank Rolfe is at it again, still hyping his “RV Park Investor’s Boot Camp.” This broadside, like the previous one, touts his 30 years of experience “building one of the largest portfolios in the U.S.”—experience that can be yours for only $997. “That’s for roughly 20 hours of video,” he writes. “And that’s a true bargain investment in your education on this sector.”

Okay. Pretty standard Frank Rolfe fare thus far. But embedded in the email is a link to a video that’s supposed to seal the deal, “Unlock RV Park Investment Success,” under the equally problematic headline, “The RV Park Boot Camp Is The Gold-Standard.” The first half of the two-minute video is Frank giving his sales pitch. The second half, without anything resembling an introduction, apparently is supposed to highlight one of Frank’s investment successes: the Mission Bell-Trade Winds RV and Mobile Home Resort, deep in the heart of Texas.

This is, as you might glean from the name, not an RV park but a long-term residential mixed-use development catering to retirees (“Homeownership Made Affordable”) and snowbirds. The residents, by all accounts, are a cheerful and welcoming bunch. The place itself is a dump, showing its age and in a generally run-down condition. Its website, where the only items under “news” urges readers to check out “the exciting events of the 2022-2023 season,” is just as outdated.

Judging by this example, Frank’s boot camp deserves the boot.

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‘Tis better to give than to deceive

This being the holiday season and all, Frank Rolfe is dressing up his miserly predations on the impoverished classes by claiming that higher prices are actually beneficial to them. That’s right: Frank Rolfe, who extolled “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap as the epitome of effective corporate leadership and who regularly notes that residents of trailer parks are fish in a barrel, is taking a leaf from George Orwell’s 1984 to convince us that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and black is white.

Writing on his Mobile Home University blog—cousin to his equally problematic RV Park University blog—Rolfe has presented a Yuletide parable under the headline, “The interesting story of why Dollar Tree raised their prices from $1 to $1.25.” The uninitiated might think the increase was forced by higher wholesale costs, or because Dollar Tree needed bigger margins to fuel its relentless expansion across the American landscape. But no. As Rolfe breathlessly (and without a shred of attribution or supporting evidence) assures us, “Dollar Tree raised prices to actually HELP their customers.”

This selfless act of charity, Rolfe goes on to explain, was prompted by Dollar Tree’s realization that it was “limited in what it can offer in its stores because of the $1 price point.” By raising its one-price-fits-all approach to $1.25 per item, “they found they could offer a substantially larger range of items to meet customers’ needs.” The moral of the story? “It’s not a case of the ‘evil business owner raising prices on the downtrodden’ but instead ‘progressive business owner expanding their product range at the request of customers.'”

Where to begin to address this logic-deficient defense of greed? The absurdity of claiming that Dollar Tree raised its prices to be helpful to “the downtrodden”? The equally absurd and unsubstantiated claim that Dollar Tree’s customers were seeking a broader product range, even if that meant higher prices overall? Why stop at $1.25? Why not $2? $5? Think how many more products Dollar Tree could offer if it became just like Kroger or Food Lion!

But why would Frank Rolfe care about Dollar Tree in the first place? Because he clearly recognizes that it pitches to the same demographic as do his own trailer courts and RV parks. And as he further asserts, what’s going on at Dollar Tree “is very similar to the mobile home park business, in which lot rents go up to allow for reinvestment in the worn-out property to bring it back to life, as well as to provide competent, professional management. It’s a win/win concept, not a win/lose concept.”

As if.

As one news story after another has documented, Rolfe and his kind have been steadily jacking up rates at their mobile home and RV parks because they can, not out of any sense of “customer service.” Such parks are the bottom end of a housing market that has been squeezed without mercy for several years, and especially since the onset of the pandemic, resulting in an unending supply of would-be tenants who will take whatever they can get at whatever price it takes. As Rolfe himself acknowledges, lot rents around Denver that were around $400 a few years ago have more than doubled, yet not only are mobile home parks full, but most have waiting lists.

As for having that extra income go to “reinvestment” in “worn-out” property, or to hire “competent, professional management”? The headlines are replete with stories of trailer parks literally falling apart from neglect, their residents coping with intermittent utilities and streets flooded because of improper drainage maintenance, while management—professional or otherwise—is either absent or nonresponsive.

Dollar Tree may or may not have perfectly valid reasons for upping its prices, but no one can reasonably conclude that it is preying on its customers. The same can’t be said of Rolfe, whose quick dismissal of “the evil business owner raising prices on the downtrodden” trope suggests what’s really bugging him: Frank Rolfe, meet Ebenezer Scrooge.

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Sell, sell, sell and cut, cut, cut

Frank Rolfe, already well-known for his predatory approach to mobile home park investing, has been preaching the same gospel to RV park investors in his RV Park “University” offerings and in regular podcasts and email broadsides. I’ve written about him before, mostly as a warning to others, but lately he’s upped his game to such an objectionable level that he’s worth a return mention.

His most recent screed is titled “The three best methods to improve RV park net income,” and it kicks off by turning to “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap for inspiration. Dunlap was “a well-known corporate raider and business efficiency stalwart,” Rolfe would have you believe, and Dunlap’s guiding motto of “sell, sell, sell and cut, cut, cut” is “not a bad mantra for RV park owners, as well.”

Rolfe goes on to write that there are three “key areas” that have maximum impact on the bottom line, the first being an unremarkable emphasis on improved marketing. It’s in the second and third key areas–“increase rents and occupancy” and “cut operating costs”–where Rolfe shows his true colors, and RVers should not be surprised to learn that in this zero-sum game, whatever benefits Rolfe and his acolytes will not benefit them at all.

Step one, “increase rents. Yes, it’s that simple.” Step two, “bring in extended stay customers,” taking advantage of “a large and growing category of customers who want to live in their RVs full time.” Moreover, Rolfe adds, there is a growing fleet of tiny homes “that can only be placed in an RV park by law,” providing campground owners “an extremely dependable (read: captive) source of income.” Step three, put more emphasis on park models and glamping, creating “more of a ‘hotel’ format, where the customer brings no RV of their own.”

Having thus jacked up rates while decreasing the number of transient RVing sites, Rolfe moves on to the expense side of the ledger, starting with “horribly bloated and completely unproductive” payrolls that must be slashed. That non-specific analysis is followed by the equally vague observation that a “simple line-by-line review of each cost item may yield huge dividends,” especially if approached with an “analytical and creative” mindset.

And there you have it: sell, sell, sell and cut, cut, cut.

Oh–but one more thing. Al Dunlap, who earned his “Chainsaw” moniker after cavalierly firing 11,000 employees at Scott Paper, for which he received $100 million in compensation, went on to try the same “analytical and creative” tactics at Sunbeam. He eventually got fired by Sunbeam’s board of directors– creating the memorable headline, “Board Cuts Chainsaw”–and subsequently settled a civil suit, filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing him of several counts of accounting fraud that misrepresented Sunbeam’s financial results. He paid a $500,000 fine and agreed to be barred from ever again serving as an officer or director of a company.

Three years after it fired Dunlap, Sunbeam filed for bankruptcy. Two decades after that, Frank Rolfe has found his mentor.

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Bubble, bubble: part two

Sometimes, it seems scarcely a week goes by without yet another announcement of an investment group with deep pockets jumping into the RV campground business, adding to a bewildering mix of players that can’t be kept straight without a detailed scorecard.

Last week, for example, Halmos Capital Partners announced the formation of Cedarline Outdoor, “an outdoor hospitality investment platform focused on the RV park industry.” Cedarline says it wants to create a “diversified portfolio of properties unique to the industry in terms of infrastructure, scale and visitor experience.” No telling yet what that means, but use of the word “unique” is always a grabber, especially in this context. We’ll have to stay tuned.

Just a couple of days later, NAI Global–a commercial real estate juggernaut that “maintains its competitive edge through a well-established culture of learning that informs decision making at all levels” and thereby demonstrates why it will never ace the SAT verbal section–declared it has “expanded its offerings” via a “brand-new service,” NAI Outdoor Hospitality Brokers. The Colorado-based “team” will specialize in purchasing and selling RV parks, campgrounds and glamping resorts across the U.S.

And so it goes, week by week.

What’s intriguing about all of this belated attention is that it’s coming just as interest rates have started an upswing, with inflation worries overshadowing the markets. For those with a cautious bent, this might be seen as a good time to pull back from any real estate investing, especially in as overheated a niche market as RV campgrounds, as briefly described in my last post. In times of economic uncertainty, goes the timeworn refrain, cash is king. Keep your powder dry, and wait for valuations to tumble.

Not so for the folks at the circus known as RV Park University, however, which mercilessly flogs a “home study course” aimed at middle class Americans yearning for a lucky investment break. Head ringmaster Frank Rolfe–who most assuredly is not speaking to the likes of Cedarline or NAI Global–contends that the stock market currently “is more overvalued than at any other moment in American history,” making this precisely the right time to invest in a niche “that is built on the fundamentals of income and cash flow and not PR and logo design”–that is to say, in “the simple RV park.”

The key to this great opportunity, Rolfe wrote in a recent broadside titled, “With the stock market collapsing, time to buy an RV park?” is that campgrounds are “a very simple business that anyone can understand quickly. You rent spots to park RVs–it’s simply renting land.” Even an idiot presumably could grasp that once you own an RV park you can just settle back and watch the money roll in–and to help you get there, Rolfe is ready to sell you a bunch of CDs and an outdated paperback for $400 or so.

Of course, nowhere in this come-on does Rolfe intimate that the campground biz is every bit as overvalued as the wider stock market. Or that whatever their other shortcomings, the rapidly swelling ranks of real estate investment pros are not going to leave much more than bleached bones for the small investor to pick over. That wouldn’t help his business one bit.

When a lot is not a lot

If you’re thinking about getting into the campground business and start looking online for resources, make sure you understand the background and possible motivations of those you encounter. While not necessarily underhanded or sleazy, those you find may have a different but not immediately obvious frame of reference that isn’t compatible with yours–especially if yours is still at an embryonic stage. You’ll save yourself some grief if you understand that before you begin wading in.

What brings this to mind is the latest emailed dispatch from Frank Rolfe, one of two partners (with Dave Reynolds) in the promisingly named RV Park University. “RV Park University” certainly sounds like it should be chockablock with hot tips and good advice for prospective RV park buyers and operators, and indeed its web site offers such resources as a $40 paperback book and a $400 “home study course” for anyone trying to learn the ropes. RV Park University is, in turn, affiliated with RVPark.com, which among other things operates RVParkStore, a bulletin board of campgrounds for sale. Sounds like a good place to start getting educated, isn’t it?

Yet it’s probably wise to understand that despite all the RV references, Rolfe’s and Reynolds’ main line of business is trailer parks and their entire perspective on RV campgrounds is deeply colored by that outlook. For Rolfe and Reynolds, RV trailers and fifth-wheels are just different incarnations of mobile homes, and RV parks are attractive investment opportunities as cheap residential facilities, not as recreational ones.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course–there are quite a few RV parks filled with long-term residents and only a smattering of short-term sites, if that. But a sea of asphalt or gravel without trees or even the most fundamental amenities is not what most people imagine when they think “RV park,” and an investment philosophy based on a “contrarian bet on a poorer America,” as Rolfe was quoted as saying a few years ago, is not what drives most prospective campground owners. For that majority, it’s prudent to take anything coming out of RV University and its various off-shoots with a large dose of skepticism.

Oh–and about the emailed dispatch that prompted these thoughts? It’s the red flags it was waving, starting with its reference to growing demand for “RV park lots.” They’re not “lots.” They’re sites. Trailer parks have lots, and people stay on them for a lot of time, for which they pay rent. RV parks have sites, and site fees. That may sound like a trivial distinction, but in fact it’s a fundamental difference that tells you volumes about the speaker’s attitude toward his business. As always, caveat emptor.