Investors Ready To Rev Up $9B Luxury RV Real Estate Market

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Investments are pouring into a new hospitality sector, seeking to capitalize on a recent trend to turn the dial on once-humble camping past glamping and all the way to full-on luxury.

Luxury RV campgrounds are about 20% of the entire outdoor hospitality industry, considered an $8B or $9B business today. But with dollars from investors and consumers flooding the space, the industry could grow to as large as $30B in the next five years.

For real estate players looking to get in the camping game, expecting a low-overhead land play, there may be some surprises when trying to cater to the high-end tastes of the luxury RV crowd.

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“Sure, it’s real estate-based, right, but I think a lot of people get into trouble — people from a real estate, private equity or syndicator background — if they don’t understand it’s very much an operations business,” said Matt Whitermore, an outdoor hospitality adviser.

The upscale RV industry is just one in a constellation of outdoor hospitality sectors undergoing significant growth and an influx of investment. Roughly 25.1 million RV camping trips took place in the U.S. in 2024, a new record. 

Marinas, camping, glamping and other forms of outdoor recreation have benefited from an American propensity to turn more affordable activities into more elaborate and expensive endeavours — and a hunger for investors to find niche asset classes that can offer outsized rewards to in-the-know early investors. These RV parks can cost near $100 a night, roughly double the cost of standard RV sites.

Decades ago, an RV campground might have skated by selling just firewood or s’mores ingredients to mobile-home owners. Today, the high end of the market boasts putting greens, coworking spaces and lazy rivers for owners of $1M rigs. 

Making one of these new parks work takes patient capital, said Nick Parker, vice president of RV park and campsite financing for Live Oak Bank, a sector specialist. It can take 12 to 18 months for a build-out and about four years for an asset to stabilize. The margins will be higher than many other asset classes at the end, but it takes longer to get there. 

It also takes good due diligence, especially for those buying older parks for renovation. Those built 20, 30 or 40 years ago might have acres of septic systems and water and electric lines that need to be checked. It is also important to find a good location, preferably near a highway interchange or national park, that conforms to zoning codes.

Investors and industry analysts say that low-cost existing campsites — many dating from decades ago, with a minimal online presence and few bells and whistles — and greenfield sites can quickly be turned into high-performing, high-end campsites with relatively minimal investment. 

That can include adding new pads or amenities such as putting greens, pet parks, clubhouses, water parks and lazy rivers, pickleball courts, nice gyms and professional workstations.

Industry consultancy RVParkIQ counts about 16,000 RV parks, campgrounds and glamping sites across the country, according to Alan Miles, a business development executive at the company. He said that number will expand “a great deal.”

The industry remains fragmented, with 88% of all RV campground owners controlling just a single property, Miles said. He compared the RV park industry to self-storage a decade ago: a mostly mom-and-pop industry with upside that will create larger portfolios and players and increasingly attract institutional capital. 

But much like industrial outdoor storage, another niche real estate class drawing outside funding, larger players look for portfolios. The high-end RV park projects can cost up to $50M for the most elaborate development, but many run much less.

New owners can split sites between transitory pads, which operate like hotel rooms and can be booked by the evening, and permanent sites, which can be leased or bought, with some elite resorts selling a pad for more than $1M.

Increasingly, investors are assembling larger portfolios, and developers with multifamily experience are trickling into the market, said Kristin Andersen Garwood, vice president of outdoor hospitality for Sage Outdoor Advisory. 

“Since the pandemic, we started to see investors and developers starting to look into this space, because the returns were so much higher than they were for office or retail,” Andersen Garwood said. “I would say 2021 and 2022 were just crazy in terms of growth.”

There are several large players in the market, including Northgate Resorts, REITs such as Equity LifeStyle Properties and Sun Outdoors, as well as The Jenkins Organization. Increasingly, sites are focused on generating bookings through specialized booking engines, including Campspot and Newbook.

In addition to investors and private equity groups, hotel chains have also begun looking into outdoor hospitality, including investments from and partnerships formed by HyattHilton and Marriott. As more data becomes available and reporting standards improve, there will be a larger push for institutionalization and institutional capital, Parker said.

The industry had a significant bump during the pandemic, when travelers sought space away from others, which helped catalyze interest in the sector. But some of that enthusiasm might lead to overexpansion. 

Andersen Garwood said she feels positive about the industry and consumer interest in the outdoors, but she said some markets have begun to be saturated, and development has slowed down. Sales of sites have slowed considerably this year due to the same interest rate and financial challenges hitting other sectors of commercial real estate.

Parker said many of the new crop of investors saw the explosive growth of 2022 and thought it would be there forever. But the market is undergoing a correction. 

“We saw a lot of folks come from the world of apartments and multifamily and self-storage and industrial folks,” he said. “They knew how to build and they knew how to entitle and they knew how to zone, but they maybe did not appreciate or understand what they were getting into from an operational standpoint. It’s called outdoor hospitality for a reason.”