Tommy Dobczyk explains why RV parks take 7 to 10 years to reach 80-90% occupancy and positive cash flow. Most owners waste money on unnecessary amenities like pool slides while ignoring marketing, creating a deep cash-flow dip. Prioritizing visibility early and strategic amenities later flattens the curve.
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One of the biggest things that we discovered and do in RV parks is that it takes seven to 10 years to become fully amenitized. Meaning like all your amenities are on the property. Once all your amenities on the property, you're probably close to your 80 to 90% occupancy rate. That then makes you a cash flowing business. So a lot of RV parks built have to be built with a 7 to 10 year J curve, meaning that you start out high, but you go into a really low period and go into depreciation, you go into negative, you know, negative cash flow. You're paying to work there, you know, all that crap to then come out the other side and go up. When my partner and I analyzed this, back when we had independent concepts, Roman and I worked together on discovering how we could flatten that J curve, right, and make it more of a just an accelerant, just go straight up versus a J curve was done by fully getting fully amenitized. Because what was happening was, is these owners own this place. They kept adding to it to get people to come. They didn't realize that they were spending money that they didn't need to spend it. People didn't even know they were there. So they were adding like swimming pools and adding slides to the swimming pool and adding a. They would have a laundry room there and then they would add TVs to the laundry room because they thought people weren't coming because they were bored. No, people are not coming because they don't know where you're at yet. And so for the first three to five years they were just dumping money into the park to bring more stuff to get people to come when it was just a natural growth curve of let them know you're there.
