Start with the number that owners do not like to say out loud. Across the country, RV park and campground occupancy runs at roughly 65 to 67 percent on an annual basis, according to the RoverPass industry statistics roundup at https://software.roverpass.com/blog/rv-park-industry-stats. That is the average of a full weekend in July and an empty Tuesday in February. A third of the pads are earning nothing, and the third that is empty changes with the calendar, not with your sign or your website.
The ceiling is structural. Transient RV traffic is a function of three things you do not control: who is traveling, what the fuel and the weather are doing, and whether your park sits on the route they are traveling. You can run promotions, list on every booking platform, and repave the entrance, and you will move the number a few points. You will not move the shape of the curve, because the demand itself is seasonal and pass-through.
The same source puts winter occupancy between 15 and 55 percent depending on region, which is the part of the year that decides whether the park makes money or just makes work. A park in the Sun Belt gets the snowbird season. A park at elevation, or anywhere north of the freeze line, spends four to five months near the bottom of that range with the utilities still running and the staff still on payroll.
Meanwhile the fixed costs do not follow the curve. The mortgage, the property tax, the insurance, the well and septic maintenance, the bookkeeping, the manager: these are the same in February as in July. A park at 65 percent annual occupancy is really a park that is oversubscribed for ten weeks and subsidizing itself for the other forty-two.
Here is the reframe the rest of this course is built on. Empty pads are not a marketing problem. They are an inventory problem. You have hookups, a slab or a gravel spot, an address, and a permit, and for most of the year that inventory has no product sitting on it. The transient market will never fill it, because the transient market was never going to be there in January.
The question is what else could sit on that pad and pay every month. The answer, covered in the rest of this module, is a local resident who needs a place to live and can pay rent that is a fraction of the nearest apartment. The unit they live in is where the $7,500 cap comes in. First, though, the second half of the demand story: the part of the market that is already moving your way.