Can a small campground ever be actually passive, or is that a myth?
The goal for a lot of buyers looking at small parks in the 500,000 to 900,000 dollar range is income that does not turn into a second job, and the appeal is that the land is what is owned while the guest brings the vehicle, so there is supposedly not much to maintain. Take a representative example: 28 sites, 620,000 dollars, seller reports 96,000 gross and 52,000 net, seller and spouse manage it themselves while living on site. Run the numbers with an off-site manager and the deal usually stops working. A manager couple with a free site and a stipend tends to run 30,000 to 40,000 dollars a year all in, and 52,000 minus 35,000 leaves 17,000, which is not worth 620,000 of capital and the phone calls that still come in anyway. So either the passive version of a 28-site park does not exist, or there is a staffing model that gets missed. A local cleaning company paired with self check-in kiosks is one option worth testing, though it is unclear whether that model holds up for a property with a bathhouse, a septic system, and guests arriving at nine at night. Parks that have made a no-onsite-manager model work generally do it at a larger site count, where the fixed cost of remote staffing and technology spreads over more revenue, which argues against the passive case at 28 sites specifically.
