What is a campground and RV park worth?

A campground or RV park is not valued the way a typical small business is, because a real estate component sits underneath the operating business and the two do not always move together. A buyer is pricing three things at once: a land base with its own market value, a set of site-rental relationships that are often booked and paid for months before the season even starts, and an operating business layered on top with its own store, laundry and amenity revenue. Two parks with the same number of sites and similar annual revenue can carry very different price tags once a buyer works through how much of that value is really land, how much is infrastructure, and how much is a going-concern business someone else could run next year.

What a buyer is actually pricing

Seasonal-site occupancy is the core of it. A park where a meaningful share of sites are rented on annual or seasonal leases booked well before the summer starts is selling a buyer something closer to recurring revenue than a hotel’s nightly rate ever offers, and that recurring base is priced accordingly. Site density and infrastructure capacity matter just as much — how many sites carry full service, what electrical capacity is available at each pedestal, and how much of the park has real water and sewer hookups rather than a shared washroom block. Land base and any expansion potential add a second layer of value that has nothing to do with this year’s bookings, and ancillary revenue from the camp store, propane, firewood, laundry and canteen rounds out the picture as a smaller but real contributor a buyer will still want broken out on its own.

The seasonality discount

Most Canadian campgrounds and RV parks earn the bulk of a year’s revenue in a handful of warm-weather months, and that concentration is itself a valuation factor, not a footnote. A buyer’s advisor will look hard at how the business carries itself through the off-season — fixed costs like property tax, insurance and winter maintenance still have to be paid whether or not a single site is occupied — and a park with no meaningful shoulder-season or winter revenue is priced with that cash-flow trough built in. This is one of the clearest places where a general small-business multiple simply does not apply without adjustment.

Water and septic infrastructure sets the ceiling

Potable water supply and sewage or septic disposal are capital-intensive systems specific to this sub-sector in a way a typical hospitality business never has to think about, and a failing well or septic field is a genuinely common and expensive surprise. A buyer’s advisor will want to know the remaining useful life of these systems and the realistic cost of replacing or expanding them, because that number comes directly off whatever the income approach otherwise suggests. In Ontario, the approvals behind that infrastructure run through the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks and municipal building-code permitting; every other province regulates the same functions through its own environment ministry or regional health authority. A park with a recently upgraded water and sewer system supports a materially different price than one with the same revenue sitting on aging infrastructure nobody has tested recently.

Land value versus going-concern value

A campground’s land base is large relative to the revenue it produces, and that land often has limited alternative commercial use if site occupancy ever softens — it is usually rural, recreationally zoned, and not easily repurposed. That creates a real tension in how the business gets valued: an appraiser may value the underlying real estate on its own terms and compare that figure against what the income approach suggests the operating business is worth, and the higher of the two often sets the floor. A park sitting near a growing town with real alternative-use potential can carry a different valuation profile than an otherwise identical park in a remote, single-use location, even with matching site counts and occupancy.

How earnings actually get recast

Recasting earnings for a campground starts with separating site-rental revenue — seasonal versus nightly — from ancillary store and amenity income, since the two carry different margins and different buyer expectations about how they grow. Seasonal-tenant deposits collected for the coming season need to be treated as a liability tied to service still owed, not blended into cash on hand. From there, normal add-backs apply — owner compensation, personal use of park equipment or a park-owned residence — but a careful recast also flags any deferred infrastructure maintenance as a coming cost rather than letting it sit quietly inside a clean-looking earnings number.

Why two similar-looking parks price differently

Put these factors together and the spread between two parks with matching site counts and similar top-line revenue starts to make sense. One has full-service infrastructure recently upgraded, a diversified ancillary-revenue mix, and seasonal tenants under documented agreements that renew predictably; the other has partial hookups, a well nobody has tested in years, and seasonal tenants who simply expect to come back every year without anything in writing — an informal arrangement that can complicate a new owner’s ability to reset rates or reassign sites. Who is actually bidding changes the number too: an individual buyer pricing a retirement or lifestyle purchase often weighs the land and the way of life alongside the cash flow, while a multi-property chain or a private equity-backed consolidator prices the same park purely against a standardized operating model and applies a harder discount to anything that does not fit it cleanly. The valuation gap between two similar parks is not about finding a different multiple — it reflects how much capital risk and revenue uncertainty a buyer is actually taking on underneath a number that, on the surface, looks the same.