The average length of time before an RV campground is put up for sale is just seven years---and as it turns out, there's a good reason for that. While campers are out to experience fresh air, bucolic surroundings and the easy-going camaraderie of fellow travelers, the people who create that environment are often over-worked, under-paid and stressed out. And to make matters worse, their efforts are too readily dismissed as just "renting dirt."
This first-hand narrative describes one couple's journey from wide-eyed occasional campers to full-time owners of a medium-sized RV campground in the Shenandoah Valley. Buying in early 2013, as the campground industry was just regaining its feet after the Great Recession, the Zipser family soon realized that their biggest challenge wasn't managing the property---it was managing the people involved with it: campers with diverse and often unrealistic expectations, a franchise system led by a brain trust with minimal boots-on-the-ground experience, and a transient workforce with employees stuck on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
Zipser, Andy: - There are a lot of people who will tell you I've been a pain in the butt for as long as they've known me. They could be on to something. Take the the picture that runs with my brief bio. It's cropped down from a group shot taken at a KOA convention not long before we quit the KOA franchise system and a few years before we sold the campground itself. Ever since, I've been pretty critical of KOA in particular and the campground industry overall, but I kind of like the picture because it makes me look all cheery instead of the grumpy old sourpuss I've become. Something about attracting more flies with honey . . . . In truth, however, I've come by my jaundice honestly, having spent nearly 30 years in the newspaper industry and another 10 in organized labor---two fields of human endeavor, you may have noticed, that are floundering on the edge of extinction. Some of the newspapers for which I reported don't even exist any more (The Port Jefferson Record, the Phoenix Gazette and, for all reasonable journalistic purposes, Phoenix New Times) and two (The Wall Street Journal and Barron's) are owned by Rupert Murdoch, which almost qualifies as a living death. As for organized labor? Ironically, the most successful unions today are those that look out for people already making a lot of money, like baseball players. And film stars. Newspaper reporters just got it all wrong. Still, the temptation to poke at vested interests with a verbal harpoon is not easily vanquished. Nor is the urge to natter on about those few things I actually know something about, which is how I came to write and self-publish a first book about campground ownership, Renting Dirt. I also maintain a blog (www.renting-dirt.com) that explores all aspects of the campground industry, and more recently I published Turning Dirt, which provides a step-by-step guide for anyone thinking about buying a campground---anyone, that is, undeterred by Renting Dirt who still thinks owning a campground is a swell idea. Meanwhile, my wife, Carin, and I live in Staunton, Virginia, just a few miles from the campground that we once owned and within spitting distance of our two grandsons, Anthony and Matthew. Thus far, no spitting has been involved. On summer weekends I volunteer as an engineer and conductor on the Gypsy Express, a G-16 1/5 scale train pulled by a 1947 model V-4 27 horsepower engine---another part of my campaign to convince readers I'm not entirely an old grump. Rides cost just one buck, so come on down!
