Site count, season length, and rate position — outdoor hospitality is small-number underwriting where every site has to earn.
RV resorts are hospitality with the room count of a boutique hotel and the infrastructure of a subdivision: pads, utilities pedestal by pedestal, roads, amenity buildings. Small site counts make the revenue case rate-driven rather than volume-driven, so the analysis benchmarks nightly and seasonal rates against the comparable set the traveler actually shops, models the seasonality curve honestly, and quantifies the long-stay segment — snowbirds, traveling workers — that carries shoulder-season occupancy.
Location risk in this category is climate and water: coastal projects carry flood-zone determinations, named-storm insurance cost and availability, and elevation requirements that hit both the budget and the operating expense load — checked against FEMA flood mapping as a matter of course. Inland projects trade those risks for destination-draw questions: what, within an hour, fills the pads on a Tuesday?
Recent engagements include a 100-site, 55-acre Texas RV park at $4,839,570 total project cost — FAVORABLE WITH CONDITIONS, year-three coverage of 2.758x, 34.8 percent loan-to-value on an indicated value of $11,116,839, with dedicated capture-rate and leakage-analysis tabs — and a 34-site waterfront Florida property underwritten on premium-rate economics with the coastal insurance load modeled explicitly.
Outdoor hospitality applies a two-source demand model: destination demand from the traveling RV base and local-stay demand from the long-stay segment. The traveling base is sized from the addressable market: annual visitor-nights = RV-owning households within the origin radius × trips per year × nights per trip × destination share, each coefficient drawn from industry travel surveys and the destination’s own visitation data. The subject’s claim then follows fair-share logic against competitive pad supply: captured pad-nights = market pad-nights × (subject pads ÷ competitive pads) × positional adjustment.
Occupancy is expressed monthly, never annually: monthly occupancy = captured pad-nights in month ÷ (pads × days), because the seasonality curve is the underwriting object — the blended annual figure conceals the winter trough the working-capital reserve must carry. Long-stay demand is modeled separately from its own driver set (workforce housing gaps, snowbird migration) at monthly rates, with the mix constraint stated. Wert-Berater’s leakage analysis adds the cross-check: demand currently leaving the area for lack of supply, quantified from comparable-property origin data — the tab that carried a recent Texas engagement. The rationale: pad-night arithmetic ties every revenue dollar to a countable unit of capacity and a documented travel pattern, which converts a lifestyle thesis into a testable forecast.
RV files flag on seasonality denial first: annualized occupancy figures that average a 95 percent summer against a 20 percent winter and present the blend as stable revenue. Rate positioning copied from destination resorts onto overnight-corridor properties. Infrastructure budgets that price pads but not the utility plant — the lift station, the electrical service upgrade, the water system the county will actually require. Coastal projects with insurance assumptions from before the market hardened. And the amenity trap: clubhouse and pool budgets sized for a resort positioning the location cannot command, loading fixed cost onto a property that will earn corridor rates.
The long-stay assumption deserves its own flag: monthly residents stabilize revenue but change the regulatory and operational character of the property, and pro formas that take the revenue without the implications are telling half the story.
Our mitigation pattern in outdoor hospitality runs through structure and sequencing. Seasonality gets modeled monthly and the working-capital reserve sized to the documented trough — the recent Texas engagement carried dedicated capture-rate and leakage tabs precisely so the lender could see the demand mechanics rather than trust the blend. Where insurance threatens coverage on coastal sites, we obtain real quotes early and the determination reflects them; more than once the honest premium has redirected a project’s phasing rather than killed it. Where amenity scope outruns positioning, the value-engineering conversation happens with the sponsor before the budget locks — the study’s job is to find the version of the project that works, and in this category that version usually has fewer square feet of clubhouse.
Know which business you are building — destination resort, overnight corridor, or long-stay community — and let every decision follow that choice; mixed identities confuse both guests and underwriters. Secure utility will-serve letters before the study, since pad counts without sewer capacity are renderings. Get the flood determination and a real insurance quote on day one for anything near water. Phase where the site allows: a 60-pad first phase that covers its own debt de-risks the 140-pad vision. And document the demand drivers within an hour — the lake, the park, the event calendar — because a Tuesday-night occupancy thesis is what separates resorts from parking.
The category’s tailwind is demographic and durable — RV ownership broadened structurally over the past cycle — but underwriting has matured with it: lenders now distinguish sharply between destination assets and commodity corridors, and institutional capital’s entry has raised the product bar at the resort tier. Insurance is the live issue: coastal and wildfire-exposed markets have seen premiums become a top-five operating line, and studies that have not refreshed insurance assumptions within the year are stale. The long-stay segment keeps growing as housing costs push workers toward pad living — revenue-stabilizing, regulation-attracting, and worth modeling as the distinct business it is.
Engagements are typically initiated by the borrower, with lender or CDC confirmation obtained before work begins — institutions apply differing rules, so sponsors should confirm the required path with their lending contact — and are delivered in 10 to 15 business days from complete project data, and built to the program framework that governs the credit — SBA SOP 50 10 8 coverage minimums of 1.15x operating and 1.00x global, the 37-factor structure of USDA RD Instruction 5001, or the 1.20x convention of conventional credit policy — with a ten-year pro forma, sensitivity at ±5/10/15 percent, rate stress to +3.0 percent, and Monte Carlo analysis as standard equipment.
President, Wert-Berater, Inc. — independent feasibility study consultants since 1998. More than 4,000 feasibility studies completed across all 50 states and internationally, evaluating $40.2 billion in project value for SBA, USDA, EB-5, conventional, and institutional financing decisions. Fiduciary duty runs to the lender and agency in every engagement.
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Schedule a ConversationIndependent feasibility studies since 1998 — 4,000+ engagements, $40.2 billion in evaluated project value. Standard delivery in 10 to 15 business days. Fiduciary duty to the lender and agency.