RV Park & Campground Acquisition Financial Model

A professional Excel and Google Sheets financial model built for RV park, campground and glamping investors. Underwrite the deal, size the SBA 7(a) loan and present bank-ready numbers to your lender or investor. Includes a site-mix and seasonality engine, ancillary revenue, DSCR and yield-on-cost, a 5-year pro forma, three scenarios and a one-page dashboard.

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Buying a single RV park or campground – and need to know whether the deal actually covers its debt through the winter? Every other campground template takes one annual occupancy and one nightly rate and multiplies, hiding the one fact that decides a seasonal deal: the summer is near full and the winter is nearly empty. A park lives or dies on its site mix, its season and a defensible ancillary line. This model builds your income the way an operator does.

Effective gross income is built bottom-up from three site categories – RV full-hookup, tent and cabin/glamping – each with its own ADR run through its own 12-month occupancy curve, so the summer peak and the winter trough are both visible, not buried in one flat number. An ancillary-revenue layer (store, propane, firewood, laundry, rentals) is shown twice: at full value to the P&L and at the lender haircut to the DSCR, because that is how a real lender credits volatile retail income. Then it underwrites the purchase like an acquisition: price from in-place NOI and the going-in cap, the capital stack sized on the lesser of LTV and DSCR on the haircut NOI, the unlevered yield-on-cost, the off-season cash gap, payback and a 5-year exit.

What it builds for your deal:

  • Site-Mix x Seasonality Revenue Engine – EGI built bottom-up from three site categories, each ADR run through a 12-month curve. The default settles at 100 sites (82 RV + 12 tent + 6 cabin), $1,157,252 of site revenue at a blended annual occupancy of 58.5%, while the peak month runs 96.8%.
  • Ancillary, with the lender haircut – the store/propane/rentals run about 20% of site revenue ($231,450 full to the P&L), but a lender credits only 75-80%; the model applies a 78% haircut ($180,531 credited) and underwrites the DSCR on it.
  • Off-season cash gap, shown – a 3-season park runs a real monthly deficit in the weakest winter month (-$23,267 at the default); the model surfaces it so you size the working-capital reserve to carry it.
  • SBA 7(a) / Conventional financing toggle – swap the LTV, rate, amortization and DSCR target, with the loan always sized on the LESSER of the LTV cap and the DSCR constraint, on the lender-haircut NOI.
  • 5-year P&L and NOI – NOI struck after a transient operating stack (about 55-59% all-in OER), at single-asset level. In-place NOI $573,733 rising to $705,164 by Year 5 (a sober +23%, no hockey stick).
  • Full acquisition underwrite – price from in-place NOI divided by the going-in cap ($6,556,949 at the default 8.75% cap, $65,569/site), DSCR 1.30x stabilized (1.23x going-in), debt yield 11.9%, an 8.50% going-in yield-on-cost stabilizing at 10.45%, and a 2.10x equity multiple.

What’s inside: a 10-sheet Excel workbook (works in Google Sheets too – no macros, no add-ins, no external links), a 19-page PDF user guide, a START HERE sheet, the Revenue Engine sheet, the Ancillary Revenue sheet, an editable SBA 7(a)/Conventional preset matrix, and a Benchmarks & Dashboard with sourced 2024-26 ranges.

Why this one: every formula is machine-verified – the full calculation graph is recomputed by three independent engines (including Excel itself) before release. Honest by design: with a 90% SBA loan the levered return is leverage-amplified, so the headline is the stabilized yield-on-cost, the DSCR, the going-in cap and the equity multiple, not a cash-on-cash flattered by leverage; the off-season winter deficit is shown, not hidden.

Educational planning tool – not financial, legal, tax or investment advice. ADRs, occupancy curves, the site mix, ancillary revenue, cap rates and lender terms vary by market and season and change over time; property tax is commonly reassessed upward on a change of ownership. Validate the seller’s reservation history, ancillary receipts and trailing financials and your loan terms before relying on any number.

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