My accountant said "you're not buying a campground, you're buying a weather forecast" and I have been turning that over all week.

Confirm what percentage of those 210k gross bookings are reservations paid in advance and nonrefundable, because that number is the only structural answer to your accountant's point.

Your accountant is describing seasonal concentration risk, which means the property's ability to pay its bills depends heavily on a small window of time. When almost all of $210k comes in across three months, one difficult summer does not just trim profit, it can threaten the whole year's debt service in one shot.

The way experienced operators try to price this is by stress-testing the income rather than accepting the trailing average. Take the three-year revenue history and ask: what does the worst realistic summer look like? Not a catastrophe, just a cool wet July and a slow August. If you shave 25% off peak-season revenue, say $52k instead of $70k in that stretch, does the property still cover its mortgage and operating costs? If the answer is no without a meaningful cash reserve, the purchase price probably needs to come down until it does, or the reserve requirement needs to be built into your offer terms.

On a $1.1M purchase at a typical loan-to-value, you might be carrying $55k to $65k per year in debt service. Running that number against a stress-tested income statement, rather than the seller's optimistic one, is what gives you a defensible offer price. A seller may not accept it, and that is useful information too.

The thing your accountant's comment points toward is that you would want to know the fixed cost floor, meaning what the park costs to run even in a bad summer when you close early or run at half capacity. The strategy guide for this type of property notes that operational intensity and seasonality are the core constraints. Revenue upside is real, but the fixed costs do not shrink when the weather does.

A tax professional will not model this for you the way a real estate analyst would. For a deal at this size, a conversation with someone who underwrites hospitality or campground assets specifically would be worth the fee.

What does the debt service number actually look like on the financing you were considering? That would help me think through whether the stress-test gap is bridgeable.

The Michigan piece is what I'd want to nail down before anything else. There's a wide band between northern Michigan lake country, where a rainy June still pulls campers because they drove four hours and the reservation was made in February, and a park closer to a metro that people just skip if the radar looks bad on a Thursday.

What I'd actually want to know is the refund and cancellation history across those three years, not just the revenue. If gross held at 210k partly because the park had a strict 72-hour cancellation policy and collected fees even on cancels, that's a very different asset than one where every thunderstorm week showed up as a clean refund against revenue.

The offer price is exactly where you price it in. If the trailing three years are all good-summer years, I would pull NOAA data for that county going back fifteen or twenty years and find the two worst Julys on record, then rebuild the NOI using occupancy assumptions from those years instead of the seller's. That number is your floor, and if the math does not work at a purchase price that gives you a real cushion above it, the offer you can actually make probably is not a real conversation, and that is fine. I passed on a storage facility outside of Covington two years ago for a similar reason, not weather but a single anchor tenant, and the seller wanted a price that only worked if that tenant never left. Your accountant is not being clever about campgrounds, he is just doing what the seller's broker definitely did not do. What does the debt service look like at, say, 170k gross instead of 210k?