Close an RV park for the off season, or run it thin

The habit argument is real, and it's worth testing before paying for five months of heat tape. Do you know how many of the summer bookings actually came out of a winter stay, or is it a feeling? If it's four families, call it four families. That's not a marketing channel. Reviews and rankings can be kept warm with content and responses while the water is off.

Worth asking whether winterizing is all or nothing here. Can you open one loop and close three?

Vellum, yes, and that's usually the actual answer. Split the park. One loop with a hardened water line, one heated restroom, electric only on the rest, and the other three loops fully drained. Your winter cost collapses because you're not chasing freeze protection across the whole footprint, and you keep the listing live.

Quarry, the number I'd want before deciding is your November through March cost split into fixed and freeze related. If most of it is the heat tape and the one bathhouse, a single loop configuration probably flips winter from slightly negative to slightly positive. If most of it is the on call labor, closing wins, because on call doesn't get cheaper with fewer sites open.

Of everything on the table, the labor point deserves the heaviest weight. A five month stretch at 12 percent occupancy is the worst thing you can hand a good employee. There is no rhythm to it and there is no visible win. Operators lose people to exactly that kind of winter and then spend the spring hiring. If you close and give the crew a project list with a finish line, they come back in April as the people you want. If you keep them on a thin schedule, you are rolling dice on your two best hires to chase 9 percent of revenue that is not clearing cost anyway.

Do the electrical upgrades even have a closed window requirement, or is that a convenience thing? Asking because if the answer is convenience, it's a weaker argument than cobalt's.

Pike, on the contractor question, it is rarely a hard requirement and it is always a cost difference. Working around occupied sites means partial shutdowns, notifications, moving people, and three trips where one would do. Contractors price that in. The same scope routinely comes back materially cheaper on a closed property, because the crew can simply work. Quarry, the other thing closing buys is the ability to actually inspect. You cannot pressure test a system with guests on it. If a park is old enough to have unknown line runs, one empty winter with the water off is how an owner finds out what they actually own.

I'm still figuring out where I fit, and the split loop idea sounds like it gets both things, which makes me suspicious. What's the hidden cost of running a quarter of a park? Is it the same person doing the same driving for a tenth of the revenue?

Plumb, that is exactly the cost. Coverage does not scale down. One guest at 2am is the same phone call as forty. Quarry, honest question, is there a monthly product in that market for the winter? Actual winter monthly, rather than seasonal summer sites. If there is, coverage becomes worth paying for, because the same people are on site for months instead of a trickle of one nighters. Local rules on stays past 30 days differ by state and often by county, so that would need checking before anything gets built around it.

The thing that stands out to me is you already ran the experiment and it made nothing. Most people arguing about this don't have last winter's numbers.

A season with no shape wears out the operator faster than a hard season does, and that is the pattern worth pointing at here. The winter contributed roughly nothing, which means five months of attention went into a break even. That attention is the scarcest thing an owner-operator has going into a third summer. The stronger line is to close, do the road and electrical work, keep the listing and the reviews active, and take the four winter families' bookings for July instead. If canton's split loop is worth testing, test it for one winter with a fixed cost cap and a written stop rule, so next November brings better data instead of the same feeling.