Seller had permits, had sites, had a buyer lined up. Macomb taught me to pull the payoff early, but I never thought to call the county health department before I put money down. Moratorium had been in place eleven months. Nobody mentioned it.
That is a real loss, and the lesson in it is worth laying out clearly for anyone reading this thread who has never heard the term.
A moratorium on new sewer connections means the county has temporarily stopped allowing any new hookups to the public sewer system. It does not cancel existing permits, and it does not show up on a title search. A seller with valid permits can be completely honest about owning them and still be selling you a property that cannot legally add capacity or, in some cases, operate new sites until the moratorium lifts.
The check that catches this is a direct call to the county health department or the local sanitation authority, before you put any earnest money down. Earnest money is the deposit a buyer puts up to show the seller the offer is serious. If the deal falls through for a reason the contract does not protect you from, you can lose it entirely, which is exactly what happened here.
The questions to ask on that call are: is there any current or pending moratorium on sewer connections at this address, what is the current permitted capacity, and is there anything in process at the county that could affect the property's ability to add sites. You want the name of the person you spoke with and the date, written in your notes.
A good real estate attorney reviewing the purchase agreement can also add a due-diligence contingency that specifically covers utility and health-department approvals. I would not rely on a general inspection contingency to cover this. That is a question for a licensed attorney in your state.
One thing your story points to that the strategy guide confirms: RV parks sit in hospitality territory, and that means the regulatory environment around utilities, health, and zoning is as important as the physical asset.
What did your purchase contract say about due diligence, and how long was your inspection period?
The assumption doing the most work in your pre-diligence was that issued permits represented current entitlement to connect. They represent past approval. A moratorium on new sewer connections can coexist with existing permits, and neither the seller nor the title company has a structural incentive to surface it unless you ask directly.
The specific call you missed is to the county health or environmental services department, separate from the planning or zoning desk, asking two things: whether a moratorium or capacity hold is in effect, and whether existing permits on the parcel are grandfathered or frozen along with new applicants. Those are different questions and you need both answers in writing, not over the phone.
For RV parks specifically, sewer and septic infrastructure is often the binding constraint on the whole deal because site count approved by zoning can exceed site count supportable by utility capacity. That gap is where the real operating value lives. A park permitted for 80 sites but capped at 60 by health department infrastructure approval is not an 80-site asset.
The risk you have not mentioned: moratoriums tied to municipal capacity have variable lift timelines. Some resolve in months when the regional authority completes an upgrade. Others sit for years and get extended. Before you re-enter a deal like this, the question is whether the moratorium has a statutory end date or is open-ended, because that determines whether you are buying a timing problem or a structural one.
Title work and permit pulls do not catch this. It requires a direct utility and health department conversation as a named diligence step, before earnest money is hard.
What county or region was the park in, and did the moratorium have a stated review date attached to it?
Eleven months in and still nobody flagged it, not the seller's agent, not the title company, not your attorney if you had one. That part is what bothers me more than the moratorium itself, because a county health department call takes maybe twenty minutes and should be on every checklist before a dollar moves. I had a different version of this with my Sevier County cabin when I was trying to understand what the short-term rental permitting looked like before I took over the booking calendar, and even that small thing had three layers to it that nobody volunteered.
The sewer piece specifically changes by county in ways that are genuinely hard to research from the outside. Macomb County Michigan and Sevier County Tennessee are completely different animals but both have had periods where connections were paused or throttled without much public notice beyond a meeting minutes PDF nobody reads. What I would want to know from you is whether any of the professionals in the deal had done RV park transactions in that county before, because I have a feeling the answer is no, and that is the actual gap. A local commercial agent who does parks and campgrounds in that specific region would have known about the moratorium the way a residential agent knows which subdivisions have HOA assessment problems. The expertise has to match the asset class and the geography both.
