When Dan McDunn bought Trinity Alps RV Park in Weaverville, California, the place had four full-time tenants and did about $130,000 a year. Eighteen months later he is sitting at sixteen monthly tenants, three units rented on Airbnb, and by his own numbers a park on track to do $180,000 to $190,000 this year. He shot this update himself, walking the property site by site, and it is one of the most useful eight minutes you can spend if you have ever wondered what the turnaround actually looks like from the inside.
What makes this worth watching is that none of it came from a miracle. Dan is a general contractor out of Berkeley who bought a tired park in a small mountain town and started fixing the obvious things. He painted everything. He put up new signage. He cleaned up the office until it looked like a business instead of an afterthought. He put in horseshoe pits. April came in about 40% ahead of the prior year, and the months after it held in the teens and twenties. That is what deferred maintenance and basic pride of ownership are worth in this business.
Look at who actually fills an RV park
Walk the aisles with him and you will meet the real customer base of a working RV park, and it is not who most people picture. There is a crew of reforesters who take three sites and roll out at four in the morning. A fisherman with a boat who took a site that had never held a monthly tenant before. Three RVs in a row of river restoration workers on long-term stays. The manager of the local Burger King, parked there while he saves up to buy a house. A young guy in a Sprinter van who counts spotted owls for a living. A retiree who simply likes it there. Sixteen monthly rents, roughly $12,000 a month in stabilized gross, and almost every one of those tenants is somebody working a real job in a rural county.
The revenue nobody thinks to look for
Then there are the pieces most buyers walk right past during due diligence. Dan put a tiny home on the Airbnb circuit at $69 a night and rented it 27 nights in July. He took a shed, added a queen sleeper sofa, a TV, an air conditioner, a mini fridge and a microwave, and rented it at $200 a week to a river restoration worker who is happy to walk to the park bathrooms. And he figured out that he owns the only public sewer cleanout between Redding and the coast, roughly 200 miles of highway, so he put up dump station signs on both sides of the park and a QR code for self-serve payment.
The best marketing he does is free
This is the part we wish every new owner would copy. Dan cut a deal with the ice cream shop in town called “free poop with scoop.” Dump your waste tank, get a free scoop of ice cream. The shop owner loves it because it walks people through her door, and she sells a lot more than ice cream. He hosted the Trinity County Chamber of Commerce meeting at the park. He sponsored the fireworks. He sponsored the bike race. None of that shows up as an advertising line item, and all of it comes back as referrals, because in a small town the goodwill of being a real community member is worth more than any ad you can buy.
And he did it into a headwind
Be clear about the conditions. This is California, where gas is still running around five and a half dollars a gallon against a national average near four dollars, and the RV customer is watching every dollar of a travel budget. The California RV park market is strange right now by anyone’s measure. Dan grew anyway, from four tenants to sixteen, because occupancy in this business is won one site and one phone call at a time.
We can teach you how to do this
If watching a guy take an overlooked park in a beautiful place and nearly double its revenue in eighteen months makes you want to go find one of your own, we can give you the entire playbook. Our Virtual RV Park Investor’s Boot Camp covers how to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform due diligence on, renegotiate, finance, turn-around and operate RV parks, and you can take the whole thing from your living room. It includes the complete digital Home Study Course, twenty hours of audio training, the Due Diligence Manual, our own forms and contracts, deal evaluation software, two quick deal reviews you can use any time, lifetime access to the weekly Frank & Dave shows plus the full archive going back to 2009, and eleven full-length video modules. That is over $1,500 of products and services included at no extra charge, and it comes with a 90 day money-back guarantee.
Learn more about the Virtual RV Park Investor’s Boot Camp here: https://www.rvparkuniversity.com/rv-park-investment-books-and-courses/rv-park-investors-boot-camp.php
Conclusion
Dan McDunn is not a full-time RV park operator. He has a day job. He bought one property in a mountain town, did the unglamorous work, paid attention to who his customers really were, and turned a sleepy park into a real business in a year and a half. That is the whole opportunity in this industry, and it is still sitting out there in small towns all over the country. We’d like to help you find yours.