In this video, Frank Rolfe gives his tips on doing inspections of RV parks while driving out to do one himself. As you’ll learn, it’s more than just checking on your property – it’s getting a pulse on the entire market so you can make big-picture decisions, too.
How To Do a Periodic Inspection of an RV Park - Transcript
Frank Rolfe here, driving down the highway to check in on one of our RV parks.
What do you do when you go to check on your property out in the field? Well, let's go over the basics. First, you always want to arrive completely unannounced, it needs to be a complete surprise to everyone that you're there. Two reasons.
Number one, that's the only way you can honestly know what goes on when you're not there. And the other is, if you don't set a precedent of calling to say that you're on the way out, they'll always wonder, "Are they coming by today?" It'll keep keep people a little more on their A game, because they don't know when you may arrive.
Secondly, when you get there, you want to audit everything that's going on, you want to go around and count how many occupied spots you have, how many vacant exactly what is going on as far as the revenue. And then additionally, you want to go in and check all of your amenities. Walk the property thoroughly looking for any problems that may be there and get a general feel for the condition, property appearance, the types of things that customer will look at when they arrive. So put yourself in the customer's shoes from the very beginning, when you first pull in, ask yourself, Is this really what I would want to see? And if the answer is no, the make plans to fix it.
Another big part of when you're out in the field, checking on your property is of course meeting with your manager and or maintenance staff to get an idea of how they view things is going and to kind of continually build bonding with them. Of course it's a team. And even though you don't want to get too personal with everyone, you do want the team to have a good working relationship. So you want to go ahead and find out what they believe could be improved on what the problems are basically a general in person debriefing.
And then additionally, it's always important to go and drive all of your competition to see what they are doing. How are they? How are they faring? Are they improving their game? Are they making improvements? Are they not? What's their occupancy looking like? It's very important, you know how you fit into the food chain of all the other RV park offerings. So as a result, this is your opportunity to get a most recent pulse on the competition to see what they're doing.
And then finally, it's always important to just kind of generally get a feel for the market. You know, RV park business is a business, which means you want to buy and sell at the appropriate times, sometimes you can feel a market that is in decline. And that may trigger in your mind the desire to go ahead and get the property sold. And then other times you'll go through and you'll see that things seem to be getting better. You're seeing more businesses and attractions opening in the area. And it makes you more excited because you know that you've probably got higher occupancy and higher rents ahead. So choose that time to go ahead and get your gut instinct to go in on how that market is and what your timing is.
For example, if someone calls you tomorrow, do you want to sell or do you want not? And then what do you want to price it at? Either spur that sale, or maybe fend off a sale for the moment. These are all things that only you can get in the field. Now, you can tell a lot not in the field. HD videos are great! HD videos in the property are sensational tool, but there's nothing that can replace the human interaction of being right there on site. This is Frank Rolfe with the RV Park University. Hope you enjoyed this and we'll talk to you all again soon.