RV Park Investing: Affordable Housing Meets Luxury Stays

Chris Biddle (00:00)
With a rental house, if you get real creative, might sneak a couple in there. You might sneak a storage building in the back and rent that to them too. You might, I don’t know, get creative and try to sell goods to them while they’re in there or something. But with RV parks, it’s basically a city. So any business that exists anywhere in the world, you can have an RV park. We just added a Hunt Brothers pizza. We got a…

fully licensed kitchen. So we’re selling pizza and wings. We got the store selling merchandise, hats and everything. We’re about to start selling those online as well. We’ve got storage buildings, which I know you’re a fan of, both lockable with roll down doors, conventional style and open storage for boats.

Dylan Silver (00:44)
Yep.

Chris Biddle (00:53)
and we’re wanting to add a commercial meeting hall where we can have family reunions, weddings, corporate events. We’ve got a few corporate events lined up already.

Dylan Silver (02:36)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is based in Athens, Georgia and is in the RV park space as well as some other alternative housing avenues. Please welcome Chris Biddle. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Biddle (02:53)
Thank you Dylan, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Dylan Silver (02:56)
We’re

seeing some some pop in the greater Atlanta area. it must be quite a lot of real estate investing happening in the Atlanta area.

Chris Biddle (03:05)
There is indeed. Yeah, it’s always an exciting area to work in. ⁓ When we started looking for RV parks, we cast a pretty wide net. Four hours, that’s the drive time we were willing to commit to. And the gem we found was three and a half hours away, right on the outside of our range in Summerton, South Carolina on Lake Marion. You ever heard of Lake Marion?

Dylan Silver (03:33)
I have not been to the Carolinas, but that’s another one. I don’t know if it’s north or south, but one of the two. I’ve had so many guests tell me it’s a really great area for families. So I’ve even thought about it. I’ve never thought about the Carolinas, but man, do I have to go check it out now that I’ve had so many guests tell me this. I wanna pivot a bit here, Chris, and ask you about how you got into the real estate space. I always like to start off asking guests how they got started.

Chris Biddle (03:59)
Sure. It’s a story, part of it will sound very familiar to a lot of the audience. ⁓ I was working, selling ⁓ parts and equipment and one of my customers and I got pretty close and he got me to read Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and that book started a lot of real estate journeys I know.

We started investing in mobile homes and renovating them and renting them out and we did some flips and we moved to the RV Park space because we wanted something that we could share with our families so we weren’t just searching for

parking lot on the side of the highway, although those will just absolutely print money, it just wasn’t our goal. We wanted something really special with natural beauty that we could share with our families. So that’s what we found.

Dylan Silver (05:45)
Now the RV park space, and I mentioned this before, ⁓ hopping onto the podcast here is, know, such an interesting space because it’s really two different realms. the one hand, you have it’s solving the housing crisis. And I mentioned before, hopping on here, I’m from Northern New Jersey. We definitely feel it in Northern New Jersey, very expensive, difficult to qualify for homes up there, especially for a lot of younger people. But then on the other side, you also have RV parks can be

and are ultra luxurious in many instances and you have all types of attractions which I’ve had multiple guests tell me you know if you have this preconception about what an RV park is you don’t know really what the space is like.

Chris Biddle (06:27)
Now you’re right, it’s a very broad range. There’s several RV parks in the world that I could not afford to stay in because they are just ultra luxurious. So we’ll get there one day. ⁓ But right now we’re on the more affordable side of things. We’re calling our place a fishing resort. It’s on Lake Marion, which is one of the Santee Cooper Lakes. They’re famous for fishing nationwide. They have some really large fishing tournaments there regularly.

but we have got kind of a hybrid model going back to what you said, where we’ve got some monthly guests, where we’re solving some of the affordable housing issues, especially with a lot of people travel for work. So they might be looking for a place for three, six, nine months maybe. It’s really hard to find furnished places that are decent besides a motel room. ⁓

Motel rooms get really old after a few days. So where it works…

Dylan Silver (07:27)
Yeah

I want to ask you about the concept of landlording or ownership in the RV park space versus other real estate avenues. I really like it. I’ll tell you my reasons here in a bit, but I’m curious what made it so that you zoned in or narrowed in on RV parks versus so many other verticals that people often find themselves in.

Chris Biddle (07:53)
Sure. So there’s two completely different aspects. There’s personal and business. Personal, as I mentioned, we want something beautiful that we can share with our family. Our kids love fishing there. It’s just awesome. We want to hang out together where you work and have a good time with the family. The business side, RV parks offer nearly unlimited revenue streams.

With a rental house, if you get real creative, might sneak a couple in there. You might sneak a storage building in the back and rent that to them too. You might, I don’t know, get creative and try to sell goods to them while they’re in there or something. But with RV parks, it’s basically a city. So any business that exists anywhere in the world, you can have an RV park. We just added a Hunt Brothers pizza. We got a…

fully licensed kitchen. So we’re selling pizza and wings. We got the store selling merchandise, hats and everything. We’re about to start selling those online as well. We’ve got storage buildings, which I know you’re a fan of, both lockable with roll down doors, conventional style and open storage for boats.

Dylan Silver (09:02)
Yep.

Chris Biddle (09:11)
and we’re wanting to add a commercial meeting hall where we can have family reunions, weddings, corporate events. We’ve got a few corporate events lined up already.

So just…

Dylan Silver (09:23)
That’s incredible.

think when people hear all this and they may not be familiar with the RV park space, they may be thinking corporate meeting halls and RV parks. How does that work? But there’s a real big community and it’s growing and it exists and it’s going to continue to grow around the RV park space. And then I’ve also heard this term digital nomad, know, people who effectively have RVs and then they travel all around.

Chris Biddle (09:47)
Thank

Dylan Silver (09:51)
And sure, the RV park, or the RV, excuse me, itself, if they’re a digital nomad, be more expensive than a vehicle, but it’s less expensive than a home, right? And they get to move wherever.

Chris Biddle (10:38)
Absolutely and we do have a few conventional RV sites but we’ve also got most of our sites are taken up by park model homes which are mobile homes that look like cabins so that affords us a lot more flexibility in our audience you don’t have to have an RV to come stay with us so and we’re also adding high-speed internet finally at the end of this month we’re kind of out in the middle

Dylan Silver (11:02)
How does that work

if you’re in the wilderness, right?

Chris Biddle (11:05)
Yeah, well we got Starlink as we were waiting for the broadband to come in from the local company. They’ve been backing that up month after month after month. So we finally got Starlink, so we got it going at the end of this month.

Dylan Silver (11:23)
There was a guest that I had on this show who is in an RV park and he was telling me that T-Mobile had one too. And I was living on a ranch in Dallas previously, greater Dallas area. And so we had Starlink and so I would use the Starlink for the podcast, but occasionally there would be issues. So I said, I really got to figure something out. So I had both a Starlink and then this T-Mobile home internet. And it was like when one would not be completely functioning, I would use the other.

and kind of juggle the Wi-Fi, but we made it work. I do want to pivot a bit here, Chris, and ask you about your perspective on the maintenance that’s involved and also the relative degree of difficulty of RV park ownership versus some other verticals. My perspective, having talked to guests who own RV parks and also ⁓ experienced investors who’ve done lots of flips or have done short-term rentals.

or midterm, longterm, so on and so forth is that with RV park specifically, people tend to be going there to have a good time. And so they, in many cases, are already in the kind of vibe of, okay, this is going to be enjoyable. They’re not looking to, you know, destroy things or, you know, cause a ruckus versus some other verticals, short-term rentals, for instance, where you could get one person new books and then

you know, 50 people show up and the Airbnb is now trash. So I’m curious to get your perspective on the maintenance and maybe some of the hassle that may or may not be involved.

Chris Biddle (13:00)
I’ll go into what you said a little bit about people trashing Airbnb’s. My wife and I actually had one that we were about to open and then the county regulations changed. We ended up selling the house and I’m thankful we went through all that because I did all the research on short-term rentals. We’re ready to open. So I’ve got all that knowledge to bring into the RV park world. But a lot of the times when people destroy houses for rent.

It’s because of a lack of communication and pricing. So you can actually price out a lot of chaos. You don’t… I’m not going to say you don’t want to. We don’t want to be the cheapest option available. That’s where people go to throw a party and trash the place. They want a one-night rental that’s cheap that they can bring all their friends to. That’s the ones that get trashed.

Dylan Silver (13:44)
True.

Chris Biddle (13:52)
So we are not this option. People often complain to us that, you know, we’re more expensive than a hotel. And we say, are absolutely right. We’re more expensive than a hotel. We’re a cabin on the lake where you can go fishing. This is not, you’re not looking at hotel parking lot. So we’re not in a race to the bottom. That takes care of a lot of that party issue that you’re talking about.

Dylan Silver (13:53)
True.

you

I want to ask you about the different, I would say, within this model. So you mentioned Cabana Lake RV Park. We were also talking about potentially alternative types of dwelling units, tiny homes, and so on and so forth. Are the spaces that you’re looking at or that you already invested in combining these in a lot of ways, or do you have to pick which one you want to go with?

Chris Biddle (15:26)
We jumped straight into the deep end with our very first try. It’s, it’s, I wouldn’t recommend getting into one this complex on your first try. We also rent boats. didn’t mention that. So that’s yet another business we’re running at the same time. the combination of maintaining 20 year old mobile homes, ⁓

and then dealing with all the different marketing for the different revenue streams is definitely a lot to handle for the first try. If I had known how hard it would be, I might not have done it. So I’m glad I don’t know how hard it would be because I feel like our next adventure as we keep expanding is going to be a whole lot easier. ⁓

Dylan Silver (16:01)
.

Now, when you’re looking at opportunities for investing, as far as a RV park, but you also mentioned these other opportunities within, I would call it the land space, know, land development opportunities. How are you underwriting these deals? Because each deal is going to be entirely different. It can be very tricky to understand how to evaluate a deal, especially if there’s not, you know, cash flow or a lot of active cash flow, if it’s distressed in some way.

And also, historically there’s not a ton of data, and I don’t know if there is or there isn’t, on some of these sites. It can be, I would say, trickier in many cases than some other investments. But maybe I’m off in that. What’s been your perspective on this?

Chris Biddle (16:53)
Now you’re dead on. parks, historically, it’s a pretty fragmented industry. There’s a lot of mom and pop operators that have been doing it for 30, 40, 50 years. And some of them don’t keep great records. Some of them keep records that are private only and not for public consumption. They might not want to share their taxes with you.

Dylan Silver (17:18)
Yeah.

Chris Biddle (17:19)
the records might be on a napkin with a crayon. So my advice for anybody would be to start a little small on your first one to learn. Maybe don’t get one quite as complex as we got. There was a whole lot of trial and error. We’ve only been here a year, but we’ve learned a whole lot in this year. So as far as the underwriting goes, it really helped us. ⁓

that we had started small by buying single mobile homes, renovating them, renting them out. So we got little bits of the business one piece at a time and we could build and build and build until we were more confident with our skills. So I wouldn’t just read a book and go out and buy a really complex mobile home park for your first investment or RV park. It is quite complex as you mentioned.

Dylan Silver (18:13)
I have kind of a niche question. Maybe don’t give away all the gold, but give us a nugget here. In this space, you were talking about RV parks, you’re talking about ⁓ some of the other different subsets in this space. Are there ever squatters and is it the same for an RV park as in a short-term rental type of situation?

Chris Biddle (18:38)
So, yeah, you’ll definitely have to plan for that. Every jurisdiction in every state is different how they handle that. So before you buy the property, you need to talk to the county government and ask them how they handle that situation. So RV parks are easier than mobile home parks generally in a lot of jurisdictions because you’ll have monthly agreements rather than year leases.

So it’s generally easier to get rid of somebody, but in our case, once somebody’s been there for multiple months, it is basically the same as an eviction process to get rid of somebody. But to answer your question about squatters, no, we haven’t had that issue yet.

Dylan Silver (19:18)
Hmm.

Okay, well, fingers crossed, but I mean, I was thinking about it because my head immediately went to, well, it’s not affixed to the land, right? So it would be considered, it has a VIN number, right? And so I’m not thinking as well, they would just move it off the property, but it’s not quite that simple. So I can imagine that.

Chris Biddle (19:37)
Rick.

It depends on,

yeah, the state and a lot of it is people will know if their state is landlord friendly or tenant friendly. That’s the key. South Carolina and Georgia, Georgia can go either way, depending on the county. South Carolina is generally pretty landlord friendly, which is nice for us.

Dylan Silver (20:04)
Chris, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go if they’d like to learn more about your business or maybe if they’re in the Athens area or if they’re in that area and maybe they have a RV park deal that they’d like you to take a look at?

Chris Biddle (20:18)
Yeah, and I’d be happy to help any young investors try to get started. So our website is relaxed retreat dot com. You can see it on my shirt right here. Relaxed Retreat dot com. The property we bought on Lake Marion is Relaxed Retreat at Carolina King. You can find us on Facebook, Relaxed Retreat Outdoors, Instagram, just Relaxed Retreat. We’re also on YouTube and TikTok.

and my ⁓ email you can find on the website is just info @ relaxedretreat.com

Dylan Silver (20:53)
Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Chris Biddle (20:56)
It was my pleasure. Nice to talk to you Dylan. Thank you.