RV Park Occupancy Benchmarks: What's a Good Rate?

The most common question new park owners ask is what occupancy rate they should be hitting, and the honest answer is unsatisfying: there is no single number, and you should be wary of anyone who confidently sells you one. We say this as operators, not theorists. We own Blue Quail RV Park in Moore, Texas, and the occupancy number that means health at our park would mean something completely different at a destination park in the Hill Country or a snowbird park in the Rio Grande Valley. What follows is how to actually think about occupancy, and what to measure instead of chasing a universal benchmark.

Why there is no universal number

Occupancy is an output of at least four things that vary wildly from park to park:

• Market. A park serving a pipeline corridor, a park near a national park entrance, and a park outside a mid-size city are three different businesses that happen to share plumbing.
• Season. A snowbird park can be near-full in February and quiet in July and be perfectly healthy. A summer destination park is the mirror image.
• Guest mix. A mostly-monthly park should run high, steady occupancy. A nightly park can run lower occupancy at much higher rates per occupied night and out-earn it.
• Supply. Your occupancy depends on how many other pads exist within twenty minutes, which is not in any national average.

When someone quotes an industry-average occupancy figure, ask where the data came from and which of those four dimensions it controls for. Usually the answer is none of them. An average across snowbird parks, work-crew parks, and destination parks describes no actual park.

Benchmark against yourself instead

The benchmark that actually drives decisions is your own park over time. Two comparisons do most of the work:

• The trend. Is occupancy this quarter better or worse than last quarter, and do you know why? Direction matters more than level.
• Same month, last year. Comparing March to March strips out seasonality, which is the biggest source of false alarm and false comfort in park numbers. March being slower than January might be normal; March being slower than last March is a question worth answering.

This requires keeping occupancy records consistently, which many parks simply do not do. If you cannot produce your occupancy by month for the last two years, that is finding number one, and fixing it costs nothing but habit.

Think revenue per available pad, not just occupancy

Occupancy alone can mislead you, because it treats a pad rented cheap the same as a pad rented well. The sharper lens is revenue per available pad: total site revenue for the month divided by total pads, occupied or not. A worked example, purely to show the arithmetic: a 50-pad park collecting 15,000 dollars in a month is earning 300 dollars per available pad. If that park filled ten more pads at deep-discount rates and collected 16,000, occupancy improved a lot while revenue per pad barely moved, and turnover work went up. Occupancy tells you how full you are. Revenue per available pad tells you whether being fuller is actually making you money. Watch both.

What our own numbers meant at Blue Quail

When we took over Blue Quail, 12 of 50 pads were occupied. Within 60 days we were at 30 of 50, and monthly revenue went from about 4,000 dollars to about 15,000 dollars. Two things about those numbers are worth noticing. First, revenue grew faster than occupancy did, because the growth came from getting rates and guest mix right, not just from filling pads at any price. Second, even at 30 of 50 we did not consider the park finished; we considered it functioning. The lesson we took is that the useful question was never whether 60 percent was a good number in the abstract. The useful questions were whether the trend was up, whether each new tenant was profitable, and what specifically was keeping the next pad empty.

Low occupancy: pricing problem or visibility problem?

When occupancy is lower than you want, the fix depends entirely on the diagnosis, and there are two main diagnoses that get confused:

• A visibility problem means demand exists but does not find you: your phone rarely rings, your Google listing is thin, you are absent from directories, travelers drive past without knowing you exist. The signature is silence. The fix is presence: complete listings, current photos, being on SpotFinder and the other places travelers look, and answering inquiries fast.
• A pricing problem means demand finds you and declines: people call, ask the rate, and book elsewhere, or your inquiries convert poorly against comparable parks nearby. The signature is inquiries without bookings. The fix is comparing your rates honestly against what nearby parks charge for similar pads and adjusting, or fixing whatever makes your park worth less than theirs.

Cutting rates to solve a visibility problem is the classic error: you earn less from the guests you were already getting and remain invisible to everyone else. Count your inquiries before you touch your rates. If you want a structured outside look at which problem you have, our free park checkup walks through exactly these questions.

The scorecard worth keeping

Skip the search for the magic number and keep a simple monthly scorecard instead: occupied pads, revenue, revenue per available pad, inquiries received, and inquiries lost with a reason. Review it monthly against last month and last year. Any owner who keeps that scorecard for six months will know their park better than any industry benchmark could ever tell them.

If assembling those numbers each month sounds like the hard part, LotRush tracks them as a side effect of running the park, and it is free to try for 14 days with no card required.