Transcription
Hi, I'm Heather Blankinship. And if we haven't met before, I've been investing in real estate for over a decade. Twelve years ago, I bought my first RV park, and now I'm a mom of four and own over $30 million in real estate. Today, I help women invest in real estate, as well as run a mastermind for people investing in RV parks.
One of the first things I want to talk to you about is the difference in investing in RV parks versus mobile home parks. Because those two things are used interchangeably so often that a lot of people think they're the same things. In reality, they're totally different. It's the difference in apples and oranges, even though they're both still fruit.
Let's talk about the difference. RV parks are outdoor hospitality, and mobile home parks are affordable housing. When you're buying an RV park, you're buying something that people are going on vacation for an average of three days. The first property I ever bought has an average of 500 people there at any given time, and it's just like going on vacation. So they're going to be checking in, they're having a great time on vacation while they're there, and then they're checking out, and you're turning that over right again. So it's heavy on operation.
A mobile home park is affordable housing for people. They're choosing to live there for a more affordable option, so it's similar to operating an apartment complex as opposed to a hotel. Sometimes they own their own home in a mobile home park, sometimes they're renting the home and the lot from you. But those are sometimes associated with things like rent control, and you're going to go through the eviction process when people don't do what you need them to. It's similar to a long-term rental as opposed to an RV park. We're talking about a short-term RV park or a long-term RV park. Those long-term RV parks can operate a little bit more similar to the mobile home parks, but mostly what we're talking about today are short-term RV parks that operate like a short-term rental or a hotel.
Another big difference in these properties is when you're operating a mobile home park, it's going to be very similar to that mailbox money we hear about. People are simply just going to be paying you rent. Sure, sometimes you're going to be mowing the grass, maybe you've got to fix something to do with the water or the utilities every once in a while, but generally this is mailbox money and the most passive type of investment you're going to get when you own the real estate yourself. An RV park is going to be very active. You're going to have tons of employees, different people who are doing your landscaping, they're doing your reservations, they're helping customers check in, they're helping them with their different needs while they're on the property. You've got housekeepers, you've got a pool to keep up. It's a whole different range of operations as opposed to that affordable housing.
So now that I've convinced you it's super heavy on operations, the reason that I still invest in those properties is because they are the perfect mix between cash flow and appreciation. When you're buying something like the mobile home park or the more long-term options for RV parks, yes, they're going to appreciate well because they're stable assets, but they don't cash flow near as well as these short-term properties do. Similar to comparing an Airbnb property to a long-term rental where somebody's going to live. Just to give you an example of what I'm talking about, my original RV park that I bought 12 years ago brings in over $2.5 million per year because there's over 10 different streams of revenue. But we'll get to that later.
One of the first things you're going to have to decide when you're buying an RV park is what your park profile is. Similar to buying your long-term rentals, you're going to need to narrow down your geography, you're going to need to know what type of park you're looking for, you're going to need to know what your budget is. There's a wide variety of things you need to make decisions on, and one of the first things you're going to need to decide is what type of park are you going to buy because there's multiple different types of parks. So let's break those down.
First, we have the short-term parks that I was talking about earlier. Those parks are where people are on vacation. They have an average stay of three days, and you're really catering to that hospitality industry. Next, we have long-term parks. This serves as affordable housing. These are people who are traveling around the country in their RV, and they have truly made a lifestyle change and chosen to live inside their camper. But that means that you're going to be lighter on operations, but you're also not going to be able to charge as much because those people are paying by the month as opposed to paying by the night. It's that short-term, long-term thought process that we have with Airbnbs versus long-term.
Another thing that you're going to see when you're shopping for RV parks is something that we call a man camp. And I really want to discourage you from buying one of these and make sure that you don't end up in a bad situation. A man camp is a property that for a short term brings in a ton of cash, but then eventually has no value at all except for the land. And I want to make sure you're not buying that property based on the cash flow it's taking in and then that disappear shortly. These parks are in areas that have workers for a specific purpose that stay for a short term and then leave. Some examples would be a pipeline coming through or oil workers. Maybe there's a new factory being built and there's this influx of construction workers or a special skill that come into the area and need somewhere to live for a job. These jobs can last six months to say five years.
If you already have land in that area and you convert it to this, that's great. You're getting some crazy cash flow that you weren't getting before. But if you buy one of those based on the cash flow, because this is commercial real estate, so it's being purchased on a cap rate related to the people's net operating income. So if you buy one of those parks, eventually those workers are leaving because that job is no longer there, that project is no longer going on in the area. So it's eventually going to be worthless because the land isn't going to have the same value as it did based on the cash flow. So let's stay away from man camps. And for the rest of the course, we're going to be talking about short-term and long-term RV parks.
The next thing you're going to be figuring out is your geography. And there's a couple things to consider in this situation. First of all, are you going to be operating the property yourself or are you going to be hiring a manager? If you're going to be operating it yourself, obviously you need to be within driving distance of your home, or maybe you're planning to move to the property. So you're going to be thinking through that when you narrow down your search.
In other types of real estate, if we're talking about short-term rentals or long-term rentals, oftentimes you're looking at demographics of the area so that you're looking for where people live. But in this, we're talking about people who are traveling, and the data shows that people will travel within a 150-mile radius. So let's say that you have a park you've identified on the map. You're going to draw a circle of 150-mile radius in all directions, and you're going to identify how many cities and what the population is within that 150-mile radius to identify how many different people can be traveling to your area. An exception to this is if you happen to be in a tourist town or near a national park or some type of attraction that people are coming to already. But if you're building that park or buying a park that you're going to have people come to because you've got some great activities going on, maybe you're putting in a water park or some awesome activities for people to be out on vacation, we're looking at that 150-mile radius.
And if you're used to narrowing down your search based on single-family homes, you're going to be used to saying, "I want to buy in, you know, Nashville, Tennessee," or, "I'm really looking at Houston, Texas." RV parks don't really work that way. If you narrow it down to a specific city, it'll probably be 10 years before you end up buying a park. You really need to pick a state or a region because there's not going to be 100 RV parks in each city and one that happens to be for sale. There's going to be a few, so you need to really consider a specific state or region. For example, I buy in the Southeastern part of the United States. That is my buy box. When I first started out, I bought in East Tennessee, and as I grew and learned more and built my team, I expanded that a little more. So figuring out that area is going to be your next step.
Next, we need to figure out your budget. Your budget is going to be based on how you're planning to buy the property, whether you're getting a conventional loan, you're using an SBA loan, or you're using creative financing. You're usually going to have to have a down payment, and oftentimes with those conventional loans, your down payment is between 20 and 30%. Even if you're getting owner financing, those people are looking for a down payment. You might get lucky and find something with a lower down payment, but it's going to be something. So when you think about what your budget for a down payment is, calculate those numbers assuming that you're going to need at least 20% down, and in some cases, it's closer to 30.
One of the final things you want to consider within your park profile is your exit strategy. When buying any type of real estate, you always want to have your exit in mind because it's going to change the way you buy. So if you plan on operating this property as something for the long term, your buy and hold, and don't see selling anytime in the near future, your decisions are going to be a little different than if you're planning to buy it, add in some really great cash flow, and flip the property in order to exit to an institution. For example, you're going to need a minimum number of sites, you're going to need a specific location, as well as certain types of amenities in order for them to even consider your park.
Maybe you buy a park that isn't quite institutional grade yet. Maybe we have 50 sites and you've got, you know, 30 or 40 acres to expand on. That's still potentially an institutional grade park, but it's going to take some work for you to turn it into that, which is okay because that's where a lot of really great money is made. But if you bought that 50-site park with no room to expand, it would never become institutional grade, and the buyer pool for which you can sell to when you exit changes dramatically.
And if you aren't familiar with commercial real estate already, when we talk about institutions, institutions are people who get their money a lot cheaper than you and I do when they're purchasing a property. So they're usually willing to pay better cap rates because they're buying better properties than somebody who's purchasing on their own and buying maybe their first park or only own one or two. So if you want to get the maximum amount of money when you exit, you need to make sure you're buying a park that can someday become institutional grade. Now, it doesn't mean that that needs to be everyone's goal when they exit, but if it is your goal to build a portfolio and someday exit to a larger company, make sure when you buy the park, you're buying parks that can someday be institutional grade.
Most of us here who are listening to this are familiar with Brandon Turner, who used to be the host of the BiggerPockets podcast. Brandon owns, it's got to be close to a billion dollars in real estate at this point as he's built his fund out. And when he first started buying mobile home parks, he narrowed his buy box down so specifically that there were only 600 parks in the entire country that fit within his buy box. And the reason I'm telling you this is I want you to get really specific with your park profile and figure out that geography, your budget, what type of park it is you're buying, and what your exit strategy is so that you don't waste your time and the owner's time when you go evaluating these deals and searching for properties. Because I don't want you to spend a ton of money on marketing and then not even be deals that you're willing to buy once you start digging in.
So the next thing we're going to talk about is how you source deals. One of the biggest questions I get on social media is people saying, "Heather, how do I find these parks?" If you're used to buying single-family homes, these types of assets are not going to be on the MLS. You're not going to likely find them with a local realtor. They're going to be in some very specific places, so I want to make sure we're sharing those with you.
The first thing you're going to look at is Crexi.com. And Crexi is a website that has a wide variety of commercial real estate. So you simply put the asset type in the top of the search and search for RV parks, and then you're able to narrow down that area based on your park profile. The next place you can look is a website called LoopNet. It also has many types of commercial real estate, and you can search in a similar way.
There's also going to be some niche websites that you can find these things on for people who have very specific websites for RV parks only. Their websites like RVparkstore.com, Parks and Places, Campground Connection. You're also going to find niche-specific brokers. Some of the largest commercial real estate firms in the world have their own divisions for this asset class. Companies like Colliers International, Marcus & Millichap, CBRE, they all have specific brokers geared towards this asset class. So if you build those broker relationships, just like you would a local realtor if you were buying single-family homes, you'll get on their list and start to get emails for deals that are already on the market. So those will be a quicker process that you can buy those instead of trying to buy them off-market. Typically, deals that are already on the market and the owners have made the decision to sell can obviously be bought faster, but you're going to pay a premium because you're usually competing with other buyers for those properties.
And your next option is going to be one of the best options: cold calling mixed with direct mail. Let's get real, most of these properties are being sold by mom and pops. Over 88% of RV parks in the country are owned by mom and pops, and they're people who've owned these parks for years and years, and a lot of times for generation after generation. So this is going to be a relationship play. You're going to have to build a relationship with these people. Most of the time, this is not like buying a house from a distressed buyer. So sometimes it takes many years to build these relationships. I had a park that took me three years one time to buy, and I contacted the owner once a month for the entire three years, and they finally decided to be willing to hear an offer from me.
So when you're thinking about marketing and how to generate your leads, you need multiple sources. If any of you went to business school, you probably had some sort of college class that talked about your marketing funnel and how all these different sources go into the top of the funnel and they all come out at different times. And this kind of works the same way. Those properties that are on the market are going to be able to be bought so much faster than the ones from cold calling and mail outs. But the ones that are cold calling and mail outs are going to be better deals. So narrow down that buy box and then get a list of all the parks in the area of that buy box and start your cold calling plan as well as your direct mail. I like to call the same people that I'm direct mailing so they're getting multiple points of contact for me.
This is one of the hardest parts about buying an RV park, but we're going to break it down so that it's a lot easier for you. It's more of an art than a science. There's quite a few details that you need to pay attention to. It's not going to be like a single-family home where you're looking at price per square foot and seeing if it has the same number of bedrooms and does it have a pool. It's so much more complicated than that because you're looking through a profit and loss statement of an owner who maybe included everything and maybe didn't, and possibly they've got a few personal expenses mixed in there. So the art of this is learning how to know what's missing from that profit and loss statement and what's in there that shouldn't be.
One of the most exciting things about owning an RV park is all the different revenue streams that you have the potential to bring into your property. That original park that I bought over a decade ago has 10 different streams of revenue. We have anything from a pizza kitchen to a laundry room. There's camping cabins, glamping tents, tiny homes, golf cart rentals. Your camp store is going to be one of the largest sources of income, as well as just your standard lot rent. So we're going to break this down in the profit and loss statement.
Let's talk about operations. I told you previously that this wasn't going to be the most passive investment if you're buying a short-term RV park, but it can be pretty easy if you get your operations down to a T. We're used to buying single-family homes where typically you close within 30 days. Commercial properties work a little differently, especially assets like RV parks because there's so many different things to inspect. It's pretty standard to have a 30 to 90-day due diligence period, and if you're not familiar with commercial real estate, we'll talk about that in just a second. And then an additional 30 days for closing, which is where you wrap up all of your loan information.
During due diligence, you're going to be doing things like inspecting the utilities, inspecting the pool, doing a Phase I study if that's needed. You're going to be digging through all of their financials. When you're digging through financials, you're looking for things like a merchant service report, which is the report they get for all the credit card transactions they have. You're going to be looking at their bank statements to make sure that the income matches what they told you they brought in. You're going to be looking at their software if they happen to have one to make sure that those reports match up with the occupancy they told you, as well as the income. This is all the things that are happening during that due diligence period.
So once you get to the closing day, you're going to need a few things that are not standard in single-family homes. Of course, we're going to want keys to all the different things that are on the property, whether it's bathhouses or an office or camping cabins. You're going to want keys to all of those. That's pretty standard. However, things like information for the website, the social media, all of the vendors that they're using for these different streams of revenue, make sure you're collecting all of those details because once that seller is gone, he's not going to be that easy to contact to get this additional information. I've even seen in contracts where people ask the seller to have it contracted that they're still available for phone calls up to 30 days after the closing for you to find some of this additional information that you may have forgotten or not realized that you need.
One of the most common things I see is that people forget to find where the shut-off valve is for their water, and then they have some giant leak or the water pipe freezes and they can't figure out how to shut the water off, and they really needed that owner to have told them where the shut-off valves were, and they're in a frantic panic trying to figure that out on 50 acres. So make sure you've gotten all of this information from the owner before closing.
There's two important ways to add value to your property once you've closed. And some of the lowest hanging fruit that are going to cost you the least amount of money are things like your software and your marketing. When I'm talking about software, I'm talking about the software you use to operate the property. When you're looking for softwares, there's some important aspects of that software that will really increase your income. One of the most important ones is dynamic pricing. Some of you have heard of it because you may own short-term rentals, but I promise you, in RV park software, it works significantly better than what you're used to. In dynamic pricing for RV park software, it increases the price as your occupancy increases. For example, that first park I bought, we keep talking about, my price increases 10% every 10% of occupancy. So as the park gets busier, the price gets higher and higher.
Another aspect in that software that you're going to be looking for is called occupancy optimization. It allows you to have the highest occupancy possible to bring in the most money at all times. Let me explain that to you. For example, if you were manually trying to optimize your occupancy, you're going to be moving reservations around and around as you stare at the screen all the time to try and fit extra people in. Because typically what happens with the software is you will have site numbers down the side and you'll have dates at the top. And let's say site one has Bob coming in for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and site three has Sally coming in for Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Now, let's say you've got a customer on the internet looking to book their site for a week. Site one and two are no longer available because you have two people that are next to each other. But the way that optimizes your occupancy is the software will automatically move Sally up to site number one so that she's checking in the same day Bob is leaving, which is now opened up site number two for a full week of a reservation, allowing you to make hundreds of more dollars. Now, can you imagine if you have a minimum wage employee sitting in the office making reservations? They're not going to sit there and do that for you. It's going to be something you personally have to stare at. So make sure your software includes a feature like this.
The next thing is going to be your website. One of the best lowest hanging fruit is going to be the ability to make your reservations online. I know, I know, this sounds like it's something that everyone should be doing, but it's not. A lot of these mom and pops have owned these parks for 30, 40, 50 years, and online reservations just weren't a thing then, and they've been kind of resistant to the change. So making sure that you have a really great website with a really good way to book their reservations online is going to increase your revenue dramatically.
And the last thing that I want to talk about with you today as far as marketing goes is making sure that you're using a really great industry-specific marketing company to do your Google AdWords and pay-for-clicks. You've probably heard of this in some other industry. It's called PPC, and it's when a company creates specific ads for you on Google so that when people are searching for specific keywords, they're able to find your property. But the things that campers search for are going to be a little bit unique, no different than anything else when you're buying these types of properties. So make sure you use an industry-specific marketing agency so that they can do a really good job for you with those keywords, and this is going to increase your revenue and your occupancy dramatically.
The next way that you're going to add value to your park is going to cost you a little bit more money. It's going to be adding additional sites. So when you're buying that property, you're making sure you've got room for expansion. I'll tell you that the average is that you can put 10 sites on an acre. So if you've got an extra five acres that are unused, on average, you're going to be able to put another 50 sites in, as well as adding amenities like a swimming pool, miniature golf, any type of water feature. People are always crazy about. People love buying souvenirs, their kids are buying toys. They also forget tons of stuff for their campers when they're coming in, especially if they're first-time campers. So don't undervalue the additional amenities that you can add to your park and the amount of money that you can bring in from them.
The next thing I want to talk to you about is hiring. This is one of the hardest parts about owning any business, really. You have two options when you own an RV park. You can either hire what's called a work camper, which is usually work camper with a K for the word camper, or you can hire locally. Most RV park owners that you meet are utilizing the work camper option. There's a website called workcampers.com. There's also specific Facebook groups for these people that have tens of thousands of people in them who live in their RVs and travel around and work at different parks.
A couple of tips for that. First of all, they're going to want a place to park their camper, so you're going to be giving up a site for this. Most of them are going to try and negotiate for you to give them a free site in exchange for them working. This is not legal, so if you ever get audited, you will end up in trouble. And I was audited in 2013 and super grateful that I was doing everything by the books. So make sure that you are charging them something for the site. There's no reason you can't give them a discounted rate and that you are paying them for all hours worked, otherwise it is not legal. Also, be aware, a lot of them don't show up or they have kind of a gypsy mentality, meaning if you ask them to make the bed in a different way, they might get mad and be gone by tomorrow morning because they live in their camper. So in reality, they just get in and drive on to the next park. So make sure when you're hiring for your season, you hire a couple extra couples in order to make up for the few who don't show up, as well as the ones that don't work out within the first week. Typically, I hire 20% more than I actually need when I'm hiring work campers.
If you're choosing not to hire work campers and you want to hire locally, you have a couple different resources. First of all, you have your normal Facebook groups, as well as putting ads on normal sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter. However, sometimes you're going to need seasonal workers or you're going to need somebody to run activities, things that are a little more specific. What we like to do for that is contact the local schools, whether you have a university or you have a high school nearby. Sometimes their teachers are really great employees for after hours or during the summer, as well as their high school drama team. They make really good people for activities department.
One of my coaching students right now just got done with her fall activities for having a haunted forest, as well as a hayride and all of these things that she wanted people in costume in helping make the experience for Halloween for all of the people involved so much better. She contacted the local drama team at the high school and had the students come out and dress up as all of these different haunted characters inside the forest, and it made for an amazing experience as opposed to just trying to hire work campers who are great at helping operate your property, but they're probably not the best when it comes to acting out a Halloween scene. And this gives a really good experience for the kids because they don't get to do activities like this otherwise. So seriously consider contacting the local school. Some other people that I've hired for those types of things are local librarians. Sometimes they're really great in your activities department, as well as some of the Sunday school teachers. They do a really good job with the kids. So some of those you aren't going to hire from ZipRecruiter or Indeed because you need a more specific local type of person.
One of the most important people you're going to hire at your property is your park manager. Some of you may be planning to operate the park yourself, so you can forget about this part if that's you. But if you're planning to hire a park manager so that you are not at the park 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the rest of your life, you're going to need to hire that person. And I will tell you, hiring somebody who does not have a hospitality background is not the best idea. Even if it's your favorite relative or somebody you've known for your whole life, you really need somebody in that park manager role who has either A, worked at a campground before, or B, worked in a hotel. You need somebody who has that mentality, otherwise your property is going to crash and burn. I'm just being honest with you. So those are people that you can find in those work camper sites or on those websites that we talked about. Just make sure they have previous experience in that position.
One of the biggest rule of thumbs in buying properties like this is that you know how to do these things yourself. And not everybody would agree with me, but I am going to suggest that if you have never bought an RV park before or you've never been an RVer, that you are willing to spend at least a couple months at your first property learning the ins and outs. Because I currently manage from 900 miles away, and I couldn't do that if I didn't know how every aspect of the property worked. I wouldn't be able to budget for my employees, I wouldn't be able to know how to handle maintenance when they're asking permission for different budgets and things like that if I hadn't actually operated the property before myself. I highly recommend that you spend a little bit of time at your first park before you totally turn that over to somebody else and manage from a distance.
As you're spending those months there preparing to turn over to a team, one of the most important aspects is building SOPs: standard operating procedures. You're going to want to have a giant file of how to do literally everything at your property step by step all along the way, and where you get any materials that are needed and a process for that. I'll give you a couple examples. Think about when you call a Holiday Inn. When you call the hotel, they are going to answer the telephone the exact same way every time you call, no matter who answers the phone. Think about when you go rent a car from a rental company. Every single time you go to that car rental company, you're going to have the same practice. They're walking you around the car to see if there's any damage, they're having you fill out the contract. It works the same every time. You're going to want the same thing at your property because your customers are expecting a specific level of service, and you need to give that same level every single time.
At all of my parks, when a customer arrives in their camper, they are going to be escorted to their site every single time, no matter what happens. What this means is, as the camper is coming into the park, my office staff is going to radio my maintenance team. The maintenance team comes up on their golf cart and meets the camper at their camper. The maintenance person introduces them, asks the camper their name, they get in the golf cart, and the camper follows them to the site they're going to be staying in. They get off the golf cart after they've parked in a specific place. They go behind the camper and they're motioning them how to turn their wheel, when to keep coming back, how to move over. This does a couple things. It helps the camper because a lot of people, let's get real, can't back up their campers. You would think this would be standard, it's not. And not only are they fighting with their spouse or the people with them trying to get parked and they're having a bad experience for that, they run over your stuff. We've had so many pedestals ruined, light fixtures ran over, and then they're mad at you, and in reality, it's their fault. So you're protecting your property and you're improving your guest experience when you're helping them park their camper every single time. And I do not mean get in their camper and park it. That will not work out on your insurance. But you're behind guiding them, giving them directions. And in order for my staff to be able to do this, I want it done the exact same way every single time. So each maintenance person as they're hired with us, that's one of the SOPs that they're given that they learn so that they park this camper the same way every single time.
So as you're building out your operations manual, you're going to have many SOPs like the one we just described related to your pizza kitchen, your reservation process, how to clean your bathrooms. Maybe you have glamping tents and you need to put in there exactly how to clean them, exactly how your beds are made. Think through everything and operations that happen in your property and make sure you have an SOP for that. It can be written out on paper, it can be done in a Loom video, and in reality, it's probably best that you do both because as people are running around outside doing operations, they don't always have access to the videos. So I like to have video form for when they're training and paper to help them along their way.
So I want to leave you with a motivating story and tell you how I bought my first RV park and where it's at today. Over a decade ago, I was driving across the country in a camper from Florida to California, and I kept looking around thinking, "Oh my gosh, these places have to be making so much money!" And I thought it was just renting parking spots. Side note, it is not renting parking spots. That would be buying a parking garage, and there's so much more to it than that. But by the time I had got to California, I had bought an RV park that was in bankruptcy that I had never seen. I was 26 years old, and the bank wanted $3.2 million. I didn't have any money at the time, and this was a different time in lending when banks still had things on their books from the collapse of 2008. They would do creative things in order to get rid of them, and honestly, any payment coming from me was better than the no payment that they were currently getting trying to operate it themselves. So they gave me a $3.2 million loan with no money down and non-recourse. If you're not familiar with non-recourse, that essentially means no repercussions. If I didn't want the property anymore, I could give it back to them, and I wouldn't have to file for bankruptcy or something like that.
Now you may be thinking, "Heather got so lucky, this is never going to happen to me." There's all different creative ways to get parks now. But I will tell you, my first payment was $18,500, and my first electric bill was almost $20,000. So I had to very quickly learn how to run an RV park. For the first couple years, it wasn't cash. It was a park that was in bankruptcy, and I had to make many operational changes in order for it to make money. That park is now worth $30 million, and I've been able to use the equity in that property to build my entire real estate portfolio. Like I told you earlier in the course, it brings in over $2.5 million per year and is my most profitable property today.
Because I operated that property myself for the first couple years, I now live 900 miles away in South Florida where it's warm all year and I can walk to the beach, and I'm living the exact life that I had dreamed up for myself. And I could run my team from here. I essentially manage my managers at this point. I have about 30 employees total across my entire portfolio, and I manage them on a daily basis from my house 900 miles away. The reason I'm telling you this story is I don't want you to think this is something that's unattainable or that I'm scaring you off when I'm telling you that the operations are pretty heavy. If you put your mind to it, it's not rocket science, it's totally something that you can do yourself. If you want to see more content on RV parks, mobile home parks, Section 8 housing, or multifamily, make sure you follow me on Instagram at HeatherBlankinshipX3.
As a bonus, we're going to quickly talk about glamping, because if you haven't noticed, it's all the rage right now when you see the different industry newsletters on what's happening in our industry. If you don't know what glamping is, it's glamorous camping. Oftentimes, it looks like people want to be able to post on social media that they went camping, but they really don't want to set up a tent and spend the night freezing to death or sweating to death, depending on where you're at, and they want this unique, glamorous experience.
The top two things when you're considering a glamping property are zoning and permitting. They will literally make or break your business. You might find this beautiful piece of land that has an amazing view of the ocean and this great view of the mountains, but if you can't get permitting to put glamping tents there, it's not going to matter. So make sure when you're considering a location, even if it already has a glamping structure in place, that you find out if it's properly zoned and permitted to have the glamping there.
The next thing that is the most important are your utilities. Sometimes those beautiful locations have a really hard time, whether it's physically being able to do it or the cost to get utilities there. And when I say utilities, we're considering your water, your sewer, and your power because you're going to need all of those at that property. So make sure you've looked into, "How will I have water, sewer, and electricity at this property for my guests?" Top two things, I could not harp on this enough. One of my students right now, I told her this a thousand times, she still bought a property that she didn't have proper permitting for. She spent a ton of money adding glamping tents to it. She had her first couple guests. It's a beautiful property in the city. Found out she had the tents and she hadn't properly had them permitted, and she's had to shut down now and wait for those permits, and she's been shut down for over six months. Do not skip this step when it comes to glamping.
There's tons of different types of structure options. You've got safari tents, you've got yurts and teepees and domes, remodeled train cars, you've got tree houses, as well as buses. People rent out campers and tiny homes. Skies the limit on your unique experience, just make sure you can get the proper permit.
And the last thing I'm going to leave you with as we talk about glamping is your avatar. The exact person that you want to stay at your property. I want you to think through what this person will be driving, what they're going to be wearing, what they're going to look like. Are they traveling with a family, or is it a husband and wife traveling alone, or is this a girl's weekend? Think through that really specific avatar that you want to stay at your property, and you're going to cater everything and every decision you make to this person.
Let me explain to you what I'm talking about. If you built a glamping property that had some really cool safari tents with the bare minimum on the inside, maybe it doesn't have any power, you've got some access to water and a compost toilet, and they're really just planning on hiking for the day and, you know, enjoying some fishing nearby, maybe you're going to rent these for $150 a night. I'm making that number up, make sure you check your area and see what places are renting for. But maybe you're going to rent it for $150 a night, and that is the type of experience this person who's hunting, camping, hiking is going to expect from you. But if you're in the Northeast and you're, you know, a couple hours outside of New York, and you've got this person driving in in their Tesla, they're carrying their Louis Vuitton luggage with their beautiful heels on as they come into your property, and they are expecting a luxury, unique stay, you're going to want to have locally sourced farm-to-table meals to serve them, and you're going to be charging like $500 a night for this fabulous experience as opposed to just a cool place to stay while they go hiking. Hopefully that explains you what I mean by choosing your avatar and making your decisions all around that person because that is going to provide the best experience for your guests, which will get you those repeat customers and keep them coming back year after year.