How RV Park Investing Created Massive Cash Flow and Legacy Wealth

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In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Mychele Bisson, an RV park owner and investor. They discuss Bisson’s journey from single-family home investments to RV parks, emphasizing the importance of preserving family-friendly campgrounds. Bisson shares insights on creative financing strategies, keys to business growth, and the significance of community building in the RV park industry. She also introduces her upcoming educational program aimed at helping others navigate RV park investments.

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Mychelebisson.com (00:00)
think everybody probably thinks it’s all the cash flow that we make but for us it’s honestly the connections that we get to see in the family like moments that we get to be a part of and seeing like all of the generations of people that come together. I’ve seen great-grandfathers taking their great-grandsons on their first fishing trip.

Michelle Kesil (01:51)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Mychele Bisson, who is an RV park owner, investor and industry educator who helps people find financial freedom through RV park investments. So excited to have you here today, Mychele.

Mychelebisson.com (02:14)
Well, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Michelle Kesil (02:16)
Of course, I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching investing in the RV business and continuing to create the family friendly and intentional communities through that. So lots to dive into.

Mychelebisson.com (02:33)
Yes, absolutely. That is one of our biggest things is just having those family-friendly places that people can just feel safe.

Michelle Kesil (02:41)
Absolutely. So first off, for those who are not yet familiar with you and your work, can you share what your main focus is?

Mychelebisson.com (02:51)
So I actually buy and preserve old campgrounds for mom and pops. And so what we do is we actually find mom and pops that are ready to retire whose children have decided that they no longer want to be in the RV space or have moved on to other things. They’ve seen their mom and dad work themselves to death and basically don’t want to do the same thing. When they are ready to exit, we are their safeguard to come in. We take over the park, but we continue their legacy. We do not change it into a cookie cutter park.

Michelle Kesil (03:22)
And what markets are you operating in?

Mychelebisson.com (03:25)
Currently, we actually own parks all the way from Alaska down to Florida. So we like to be very diverse. We kind of want to end up in a place where every three hours you’ll hit one of our parks so that you understand that you have a safe spot to bring your family, enjoy the outdoors, and just really kind of be part of the culture.

Michelle Kesil (03:46)
Awesome. How did you get started in this?

Mychelebisson.com (03:50)
Well, crazy enough, I actually started in single family homes about six years ago. I bought my first investment, which was the most terrifying investment I ever did. It was a single family home. was $325,000, about five miles from my house. So I purchased that as kind of a side gig. My husband had a beautiful W-2 that he worked, had great perks, was all the amazing things that you could possibly want, great health insurance, all of those things.

But COVID happened and when COVID happened all of the safety net of life just kind of fell out from underneath you and you just kind of start thinking well what if the world changes and we’re reliant on a job that relies on people going into restaurants because he was in franchise operations with ⁓ a spirits company and so when you start realizing that the whole world can shift in a way that you never thought that it could you start to look at other things and I stayed home with my kids like I was like

what happens now, like our way of life has been a certain way for so long and now all of sudden that changes. And that was a little terrifying for me. mean, it’s like, you know, I’m thinking my kids want to go to college. What if, you know, I want to help my, my daughters buy their first home? Like,

you know, what, what do we do with that? And so I actually met with a friend who actually told me,

that she had been investing in real estate for about 16 years and had built up this solid portfolio and they were able to fly all over the world and do whatever they wanted. All they had were these investments in these homes that they had bought that were producing rent. And I was like, well, I could do that. That’s super easy. And so I went out with zero knowledge, bought my first house, watched, I put in an offer, called my husband and said, hey, we’re investors now. We’ll talk about it later.

⁓ And that actually launched us into our first single family home. So went home, listed it on Zillow as a rental, had not closed on it yet. ⁓ Got my first contract and my first deposit within three days. Had them move in 30 days later on the day that I closed. And actually by that point, I had put in a second offer and a second house. And that actually launched us into single family homes. So we did that for about 18 months while my husband kept his W-2. ⁓

And really just kind of got comfortable in that. And when I was brought my first resort zone piece of land because we then ended up building for the first time, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. I wanted to stay in single family homes. I was perfectly safe and comfortable. I knew how they worked. ⁓ And my husband was showing me that more and more as the prices were increasing, that it was going to get harder and harder to make.

the returns that we were seeing and what I had bought at the perfect spot in 2020 where everything was low and the rates were low. And so we decided to jump into building this resort piece of land and we still own it to the States and Scottsdale Arizona does really, really well. ⁓ But it took us about 18 months to build that. And once we built that, my husband looked at me and was like, I don’t want to do my W-2 anymore. And I was like, then leave, like, we’re good. Like we can do this.

And that’s when we actually jumped in full time and said, OK, this is what we’re doing from here on out. From that moment was when we actually jumped into RV parks.

Michelle Kesil (08:04)
Awesome. And did you have any like training or mentorship or you just bought the RV park and started learning as you went?

Mychelebisson.com (08:13)
So everything that we have done, we have learned as we went. We slowly learned with single family homes, we understood operations, we moved into short term rentals, we started understanding the operations of that. And then we moved into the resort build and understood and started understanding the build process of all of that. ⁓ Once we opened that up, we knew, okay, it’s going to run like a short term, short term rental sort of, we placed management in it to make it easier.

And then we looked at all the numbers across the board and actually started looking at like mobile home parks or storage units. And an RV park kind of fell into our lap. When we started underwriting it, we realized that these were basically cash cows that nobody really knew were sitting around. And so we had jumped in at just the right time, right before everybody started recognizing that maybe this was a good move. So that was when we bought our first one. And then we actually joined a mentorship. ⁓

to learn creative financing. So our first park we actually bought within 45 days and we did it with zero money out of pocket. We did 30 % seller financing, a percentage in private money lending and 80 % in bank financing, which gave us all the money that we needed plus a capex and let us walk away from the closing table with $70,000 in cash.

Michelle Kesil (09:36)
Awesome. Can you expand on what some of these creative financing strategies look like for you?

Mychelebisson.com (09:43)
Yeah, so some of them are stacked like that one where we actually brought in different money from different places to end up getting all of the money plus the capex to reposition the park. That park in particular, we actually had to completely reposition, rename, rebrand everything. It was a scrap yard when we walked into it and had like a live in drug dealer. It was it was kind of a mess and we had to completely vacate the entire thing

reposition it back as a family park, which it is today. And we’re really proud of it because it was probably the hardest thing we ever did.

Our second park, actually 100 % seller financed. So we seller financed the main portion of the park and then we seller financed the down payment with the seller also. And so all of that was done so that we were able to walk in with zero money out of pocket and we actually paid the broker out of the park profits once we closed on the park.

Michelle Kesil (11:16)
Awesome, that’s so exciting that you were able to get all these creative solutions.

Mychelebisson.com (11:22)
Yes, so all of our parks have been done in some way, or form with some creative financing element. A lot of them are seller financing, a lot of them are stack methods. And then we also opened up a fund, is an accredited investors only fund where we raise money and capital and we use that capital to reposition the parks. But we try to get as much of the park done on seller financing with no money down as possible.

Michelle Kesil (11:49)
Awesome. What do you feel are some of the main keys that have made the biggest difference in allowing your business to be able to grow and run smoothly?

Mychelebisson.com (12:01)
I think that some of the biggest keys is that we always notice when there is a hole that needs to be filled. And so as we have grown, we know, okay, like with our single family homes, we put in management ⁓ when we were able to move on, when we were ready to move on to short-term rentals. With our short-term rentals, we then put in management when we were ready to move on to the resort. The resort, same thing. We were able to see that, you know what, we’re not going to be able to handle this on top of it. So we placed management and we moved on to RV parks.

In each of our parks, as we placed managers, we started to realize as we were growing larger, there were certain things that needed to be plugged in. So my husband took over the CFO, COO role. I took on the CEO role. We brought in somebody who specializes in all of our contracts and takeovers. We brought in an operations director once we got to about five parks. And then when we started bringing in marinas, we actually brought in a marina expert.

And so being able to sit back and see everything from one side of the business where I can like see it as a big picture, we’re able to place people where they’re needed so that our time is better spent either acquiring more assets, raising capital, bringing in new sellers, or being able to look at the RV park as a whole and find new ways that we can generate revenue streams. And so all of our parks across the country were pretty much up about 20 % this last year.

Michelle Kesil (13:24)
Amazing. What are some obstacles or challenges that you faced throughout this journey that looking back in hindsight you now have the lessons on?

Mychelebisson.com (13:36)
Well, I wish I would have started earlier, a lot earlier. If I would have started when I was a lot younger, I’d be a lot further right now. But in the six years that we’ve done this, I think that we’ve been really good at being able to pivot and see when the market shifts and understand how that’s going. But we pay close attention to everything that’s going on around us. And so when we see a dip in one, we turn around and focus on another. And the nice thing is, that since our portfolio is so diversified, we’re able to take advantage of every

aspect of it from location to asset class to different revenue streams and everything at one point is doing well while something else is lacking. So we’re never completely lacking.

Michelle Kesil (14:20)
Amazing? That’s exciting.

Mychelebisson.com (14:23)
That is exciting.

Michelle Kesil (14:25)
Can you share more

about the educational program that you’ve created?

Mychelebisson.com (14:30)
Yeah, actually that’s going to get ready to launch in the next month. ⁓ So what it is is when I started there wasn’t a lot of education on how to buy an RV park, especially in creative financing. ⁓ We didn’t really know a lot. We kind of pulled different places and went to different people and asked different questions on how to underwrite them, how to evaluate them, what we should be looking at, how to improve them, what maintenance needs to be required, what due diligence looks like.

There’s a million different things that go into something like an RV park where like when you’re in a single-family home

you have a water pipe leak it’s a couple thousand dollars when you have a water pipe leak in a RV park it can cost anywhere from like two grand to ten grand depending on what’s going on and if you can even find it in the first place. ⁓ So this basically this education program will walk you through everything on how to buy find buy evaluate.

a park all on your own. We also have a second tier where you can come in and it’s called Blueprint Cash Flow, where we actually walk you through. So we do an interview with you to make sure that we all mesh well and we get along well. And then what happens is we walk you through the process of actually buying your first park. So we help you evaluate parks, we help you find parks, we help you underwrite, then you use our team. And then we help you go through the seller negotiations, understanding creative financing.

and then going through to closing. At the end of closing, we also give you the opportunity to bring in our operations directors to actually train your operators.

Michelle Kesil (16:45)
Awesome, that’s so cool. Is it like a course or mastermind or what’s it the structure?

Mychelebisson.com (16:52)
So

this is actually more of a one-on-one. ⁓ Our biggest thing with selling these parks is we build relationships with our sellers, which is how our creative financing works so well, is that we have relationships with all of our sellers. I mean, basically, when you sell or finance something, they’re our bank. And so we kind of get married for this period of time. And you have to have a lot of trust and transparency. And we’re very, very big on that. And so if we build a relationship with a seller where they want to sell us their park seller finance,

We want ensure that whoever we’re going to pass that on to is going to have the same ideas and values that we have, and they’re going to continue that relationship with our seller. And so we want there to be clear transparency. We want them to be very open and able to talk. And we want them to be able to have a relationship with us also so that if they have questions, it’s easy for them to get those questions answered. And that way, keeps the trust and transparency as open as possible for everybody that’s involved.

Michelle Kesil (17:50)
Yeah, amazing. That’s so important.

Mychelebisson.com (17:52)
It is important, especially when you’re seller financing. There’s a lot of trust that goes into that.

Michelle Kesil (17:57)
and how do you mitigate the risks that come with that?

Mychelebisson.com (18:02)
Well, by mitigating the risks, one, we’re ensuring that they do have access to our educational platform, so they will have all that education. They also have direct education ⁓ access to us, so if they have questions or need or anything. We also keep a small equity portion in the campground, so we have just as much vested interest in them being successful as they do. And so ensuring that we’re part of the process.

Make sure that you know what our operators are involved, we’re involved, we want to know that you’re being successful. We want to understand how you’re running your books. We want to understand how you’re running your operations. We want to add value to your park. We want to make sure that you make it as successful as possible because we have a vested stake in it just like you do.

Michelle Kesil (18:46)
Yeah, that’s important and amazing. What are you most focused on solving or scaling to next in your business?

Mychelebisson.com (18:57)
⁓ Well, this next year we’re actually jumping into a brand new portion of how we’re going to do this. So we’re looking at building two large resorts with 55 plus communities. so with that, this will be new. We’ve built before in a stick build, but we’ve not and we’ve expanded RV parks, but we’ve never built a full RV park. And so this year we’re venturing into building a full RV park. I think one of the best things

when it comes to educating others is understanding the process yourself. You can only do so much on theory. And so while I spend a lot of time buying mom and pops and repositioning them and expanding them and working on those, I think it’s time for us to jump into a new aspect where we can now educate people on how to build RV parks, especially large ones that are over a thousand pads.

Michelle Kesil (19:50)
Definitely what’s been the most exciting part for you about doing the RV parks.

Mychelebisson.com (19:59)
say that as I have grown in this space the most exciting part is probably not what everybody thinks. ⁓

think everybody probably thinks it’s all the cash flow that we make but for us it’s honestly the connections that we get to see in the family like moments that we get to be a part of and seeing like all of the generations of people that come together. I’ve seen great-grandfathers taking their great-grandsons on their first fishing trip.

I have seen fathers

and daughters fishing at our fishing pond. I have seen mothers and sons racing and playing cornhole together. I’ve seen grandmothers and granddaughters boating together. I’ve had the most amazing time this last couple of years actually just seeing families in a safe space without screens, without other entertainment, without amusement rides, just hanging out together on a campground, roasting s’mores.

and telling family stories. And I think that that is probably the most exciting part of this entire journey that I’ve had. And it’s what made it solidify for me that this is part of my calling. And so I went from a luxury build into RV parks, which is such a huge, drastic change. But I can say that in my luxury build, I do not know anybody who goes there. I can tell you, I know the names and families of all of my legacy people who come to our parks. And that means more to me than

all of the other stuff.

Michelle Kesil (21:24)
Yeah, that’s really beautiful to foster those connections.

Mychelebisson.com (21:28)
it is, especially in this day and age when everything is so screen connected.

Michelle Kesil (21:34)
Definitely.

Mychelebisson.com (21:36)
So.

Michelle Kesil (21:39)
Yeah. What would you share as advice for someone that’s curious about investing in RV parks?

Mychelebisson.com (21:48)
I definitely would say get all the information that you can. You can never be too over-educated, but also don’t get stuck in analyzing. I think one of the biggest problems we have is that we always over-analyze ourselves out of things, and then we wait and wait and wait, and we never get to that big goal that we had. I think that there are people out there who want to help you. You just need to find them. We are definitely one of those groups. The RV park industry is actually a beautiful industry if you understand it and understand.

the connections and the people that you’re impacting daily. And I think that it’s here to stay. I think that it is the one safe place for families and friends to actually connect and to build real community and culture in. And I think that in this day and age with all of the screens and all of the things that we do and all of the ways that we disconnect from each other and stay in our rooms or hide in our houses, it is the one place where you’re out in nature and you’re kind of forced to just make connections with other people. And it’s not that you’re being forced in a bad way. It’s almost like you want to.

Michelle Kesil (22:48)
Right.

Mychelebisson.com (22:49)
You

want to meet the people in the camper next to you. You want to meet the people that are fishing at the fishing hole next to you. You want to find people who just want to have a genuine friendship. And I think that is one of the safest places that we can be in this world right now. And it’s the one thing that we cannot have taken away by AI or technology.

Michelle Kesil (23:09)
Definitely, I love that perspective.

Mychelebisson.com (23:12)
Yeah, thank you.

Michelle Kesil (23:14)
Yeah, so before we wrap up here, if somebody wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you and connect with you?

Mychelebisson.com (23:22)
Well you can always find me on my webpage at mychelebisson.com. You can also ⁓ DM me on Instagram at Mychele Bisson. I have a YouTube channel under the same name and I’m on Facebook. I also have a private community called Campground Cashflow where we talk about all things RV parks from deals to how we run them to answering questions. All of that you can find there.

Michelle Kesil (23:45)
Perfect. I appreciate your time, your story, your perspective. Thank you for being here.

Mychelebisson.com (23:49)
Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Michelle Kesil (23:54)
And for the listeners tuning in, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators who are building real businesses, and we’ll see you on the next episode.

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How RV Park Investing Created Massive Cash Flow and Legacy Wealth

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