What my broker said about seasonal tenants not actually leaving changed how I'm reading every lease

The eight months in New York tracks. I've been digging into exactly this for a parcel I'm watching in the Hudson Valley and the case law is genuinely messy because courts keep treating seasonal hookup sites like residential tenancies even when the lease says otherwise, especially if the tenant has been there multiple seasons and has mail going there or a storage shed on the lot. One case I read from Ulster County had a judge cite the duration of the relationship as grounds to extend tenant protections that the park owner thought didn't apply. That's not an anomaly, that's a pattern. The upfront payment thing is actually worse than it sounds because in some disputes the tenant argues the upfront amount was a deposit or partial payment and the calculation of what's owed gets litigated, which drags the timeline even further.

The thing nobody in these learning-exercise leases ever addresses is what the physical hookup situation looks like and who owns what's connected to what. If the tenant has run a line from your pedestal to their unit and also has a deck or an awning structure they built, removal gets complicated fast because now there's a fixtures argument sitting on top of the tenancy argument. Before you underwrite seasonal revenue on any specific park, the question I'd want answered is whether any current seasonal tenants have been on the same site for more than three consecutive seasons, because that's where the de facto property mindset your broker described really takes root and it's almost impossible to unwind without either paying them out or litigating.

Your broker is right but the part that actually kills you isn't the eight months, it's that the trailer itself becomes a separate legal problem. In Pennsylvania I was looking at a park outside Tunkhannock where two of the seasonal sites had trailers the tenants had basically abandoned mid-dispute, and the units were titled personal property, not attached to real estate, which meant even after you got the site back you couldn't just move the thing. You had to go through a separate abandoned vehicle or abandoned personal property process depending on how the county interpreted it, and in one of those cases the trailer had a lienholder who had a claim on it too. So now you've got three parties, a timeline that's already eight months on the tenancy side, and a rig sitting on your best waterfront site.

What I'd be looking at in every lease before anything else is whether there's a storage fee provision that kicks in the day the tenancy ends, because if you can document that the trailer is generating a daily storage charge against the tenant you at least have some leverage and a paper trail for eventual recovery. Most of the leases I've seen don't have that. They treat end-of-season like the person just leaves, which is the fantasy version of how this works. The reality is you need to underwrite some percentage of your seasonal sites as potentially illiquid in any given year, same way a residential landlord underwrites vacancy, except your vacancy here is involuntary and comes with a rig you can't move.