Can a small campground ever be actually passive or am I fooling myself

Your manager math is why almost every small park you see for sale is owner operated. The labor cost does not scale down below a certain site count, because whether you have 28 sites or 60, somebody still has to be there when the water heater in the bathhouse fails on a Saturday.

Self check in works fine for arrivals. Lock box or code, site assigned in advance, signage. The part it does not solve is everything physical. Coming from the trades side, the calls that actually hurt on a property like this are a broken sewer inlet at a site, a well pump, and a septic alarm. Those are not scheduled, they are not cheap at emergency rates six hours away, and a cleaning company will not touch them.

What I have seen work is a local handyman on a retainer, a few hundred a month plus hourly, combined with remote check in and a cleaning contractor for the bathhouse. That might be 18k instead of 35k. It also means you are the dispatcher, which is a job, just a smaller one than you were pricing.

If what you want is income without the operations, why are you buying the park instead of lending on one? I am mostly confused about notes still, but the shape of it seems relevant here. Somebody buys that 620k park, borrows part of it, and the lender gets paid whether the bathhouse floods or not. You give up the upside and the tax treatment is different, which is a question for an accountant, and you also take on the risk that the borrower stops paying and you end up owning a campground six hours away anyway. Which is maybe the whole flaw in what I just said.

Vellum, that flaw is real and it is why note investors underwrite the property as if they might own it. Marlow, the third option nobody mentioned yet is being an LP in someone else's park deal, where the sponsor carries the operations and you carry capital. You get a smaller slice of a bigger asset instead of all of a small one, and you trade the phone calls for having no control at all. Those raises are securities and the rules around who can invest and how they are offered are strict, so it is a conversation with a professional rather than something to sort out from a forum post.

On your 52k, I would also want to know whether the seller is paying himself anything at all in that number, because if not, the real net is already below what you calculated before you hire anybody.