What a park manager said about site 14 stopped me cold and I keep chewing on it

That $42 a night figure is low for anywhere with real shoulder demand, sites near me outside Hocking Hills were clearing $68 to $75 last summer even mid-week, so the actual hole in your NOI could be uglier than $3,000 if you reprice the park on acquisition. The handshake thing is the part I cannot get past though. No easement, no deed restriction, just an inherited social contract that the manager treats like a covenant. Four days is the right amount of time to sit on that because the question is not whether it is legally enforceable, it obviously is not, it is whether the neighbor makes your life miserable the first season you book it and what that costs in stress and reviews. Did you ask her what she thinks happens if the new owner just puts a booking link up for 14?

What you found is a real problem, and the fact that it stopped you is good judgment working correctly.

The assumption doing the most work in your underwriting is that every site on the rent roll is actually available. Site 14 is a clean example of how that breaks. The handshake is not binding on you as a buyer, technically, but enforcing that position means starting a relationship with a neighbor by telling them a promise made to them does not count. At a small park where the neighbor is permanent scenery, that is a different calculation than a city rental where you never see the adjacent owner.

The risk you did not name is that site 14 is probably not the only one. Informal arrangements between small operators and their neighbors, or longtime seasonal guests, tend to accumulate. A manager who treats one handshake as normal fact of life has almost certainly normalized others. The question is whether she is an employee you inherit or an owner who managed it herself, because the depth of the institutional memory changes depending on who you can sit across from.

On the underwriting side, the fix is to build a site-by-site availability audit into your due diligence, separate from booking history. Booking history shows you what rented. It does not show you what was held back, what was informally reserved for a returning seasonal, or what has a soft commitment attached. You want someone who knows the property to walk you through each site and explain why it performed the way it did. The manager already gave you a blueprint for that conversation.

Confirm with a real estate attorney in that jurisdiction whether a verbal restriction of this type creates any exposure you need to address before close. One sentence from counsel costs far less than the ambiguity.

What is the ownership structure on the management side, is she a hired manager or the outgoing owner, and how long has she been there?

What you found is a real problem, and you found it the right way: walking the property and asking questions until something felt off.

The legal term for what the previous owner made is a neighborly agreement or informal license. Because it was never written down and never recorded on title (meaning never made part of the legal property record at the county), it almost certainly does not bind you as the new owner. You would not inherit the obligation. But I am not a real estate attorney, and before you act on that, you need one to confirm it for your specific state, because property law varies and an attorney is the right person to answer it.

Here is the part worth sitting with before you get there. The neighbor believes the promise is real, even if it has no legal force. If you rent site 14 on day one, you may have a hostile neighbor with a story to tell future guests, local review platforms, or the county permit office. That is an operational risk, not a legal one, and it does not show up on a title search.

On the underwriting side, you have two choices. You model site 14 as permanently dark and decide whether the deal still works at that revenue. Or you model a path to activating it, which includes whatever goodwill or compensation it might take to resolve things with the neighbor, and you price that into your offer.

The strategy guide for RV parks flags operational intensity and location-specific complexity as the factors that separate skilled operators from people who bought a number on a spreadsheet. Site 14 is a small version of exactly that.

One thing I would want to know before going further: did the manager seem to think site 14 was just a quirk, or did she say it like there were other arrangements like it on the property?