Would you rather buy the park with a season or the park with a highway?

I'd take the corridor park and I'm aware that's partly temperament. Twelve months of cash means I can learn the business while it pays its own bills, and I don't have to be right about anything in my first year. At the destination park my whole year is decided in about ten weekends, and a rainy July or a bad boat season and I'm writing checks until May.

Neither of those is riskier in the abstract, it depends on what your fixed costs do in the off season. Ask the destination seller what he spends November through April. If the answer is taxes, insurance, and a little electric, seasonality is manageable because you can shrink to almost nothing. If he's carrying a mortgage plus a plowing contract plus keeping a bathhouse heated, the five silent months will eat the good ten weekends.

The corridor park's real risk isn't traffic volume, it's that the barrier to a competitor is almost nothing. Flat land near an interstate exit is cheap and anybody can put 40 sites next to you. The lake park has the lake and nobody's building another one.

Twenty years on I'd own the destination park, because what you're buying there is the land's relationship to something that can't move. The lake will be there in 2050. An interstate exit's value depends on it staying the place people stop, and that shifts with fuel prices, truck routing, and whatever gets built one exit down. I hold things for a long time and I'd rather my scarcity come from geography than from a traffic count.

What I'd have been embarrassed to ask: how do you even verify the July turn away claim? The seller says he's full and turning people away. Is there a report that shows attempted bookings that didn't convert, or is that just a story he tells buyers?

Compass, if he runs any real booking software there's usually a record of searched dates with no availability, and you can ask for it in diligence. If his answer is a notebook, the claim is a story. I'd also want the deposit ledger for the last three Julys, since prepaid deposits are harder to invent than an occupancy percentage.

On ember's actual question, I'd look at the insurance and the winterization documents on the destination park before I picked. Freeze damage to a water system that sits empty five months is a real line item and it shows up in the policy language.

I've spent a year comparing pairs of deals like this and the answer I keep arriving at is that they're different jobs, not different risk levels. The destination park is a hospitality business with a marketing problem. The corridor park is an occupancy machine with a competition problem. Pick the problem you'd rather work on for ten years.