RV Park Cap Rates: How One Park Gets Two Asking Prices

From operator community research this month, anonymized the way we always handle it here. A Texas park, 39 sites and 2 cabins on 15 acres, appeared in several buyer groups at $1,400,000, with a stated cap rate of 9 percent. In another room, the same park appeared at $1,300,000, all cash, close by December 31, with occupancy claimed at 95 percent. Same dirt, same sites, same month. Two prices, a hundred thousand dollars apart, and two different deals described in the fine print: one reads like a yield story, the other like a speed story.

The reactions in those threads were the two reactions this market always produces. One commenter called the pricing insane. Another asked, honestly, what a cap rate even means. This note is for the second commenter, because the first one's instinct cannot be checked, and the second one's question can. We are going to do the arithmetic, hold the asking numbers up against the published market research, look at why one park can wear two prices at once, and finish with the reader who matters most in the end: the lender, who as of this month is required by a new federal standard to underwrite history instead of the seller's story.

The arithmetic first

A cap rate is a ratio, not a fact. The definition used in the CFA Institute curriculum and standard valuation teaching is simple: cap rate equals net operating income divided by price. NOI is what the property earns after operating expenses, before capital expenditures, debt service, and taxes. That is the whole formula, and everything in this note follows from it.

Run the case through it. A stated 9 percent cap on a $1,400,000 price implies NOI of about $126,000. That number is Calculated, from the seller's own stated figures, and it is the income the seller is claiming the park produces. Now hold that income constant and change only the price, the way the second listing did. At $1,300,000, the same $126,000 of NOI is a 9.7 percent cap. Nothing about the park changed. The ratio moved because the denominator moved.

Which means the two listings cannot both be descriptions of the same income at the same standard. Either the income story differs between the rooms, or the price is doing different work in each one: yield in the first, urgency in the second, where all cash and a year-end close are terms a seller offers when time matters more than the last hundred thousand. Per unit, the two asks come to about $34,100 and about $31,700 across the 41 rent-producing units. For a comparison point, NorthMarq's full-year 2025 research puts the national median sale price for manufactured housing communities at $52,200 per space. That benchmark is manufactured housing, not RV parks, and we label it as such because no equivalent RV park benchmark exists in the published research we found. The case park asks well under it. That is a checkable observation, not a bargain verdict.

What a stated cap rate is, and what it is not

The CFA curriculum names the cap rate's central limit in plain words: it ignores any subsequent increase or decrease in expected cash flows, which makes it a weak measure of market performance on its own. A cap rate is one year of claimed income divided by a price somebody chose. It carries no opinion about whether the income is real.

It also matters which year's income is in the numerator, and marketing materials are not shy about the choice. Practitioner guidance on offering memoranda makes the point bluntly: three different cap rates can appear in a single memorandum, and they are not interchangeable. The going-in cap rate uses actual trailing-twelve-month NOI. The pro forma cap rate uses projected income, after lease-up, renovation, or rent increases that have not happened yet, and a pro forma cap is a forecast, not a fact. When a listing posts a cap rate with no financials attached, a buyer does not know which of those numbers they are reading. In a Facebook post, they usually are not told.

So label the case honestly, the way the ParkProof Standard labels claims. Both prices are Broker-reported: they come from seller-side marketing and have not been independently verified. The 9 percent cap is Calculated, built from an unverified NOI, and a calculated claim is only ever as honest as its inputs. The 95 percent occupancy is Broker-reported. None of that makes the park a bad deal. It makes the deal unpriced, which is a different statement, and the one a buyer can actually act on.

Held up against the published market

Is a stated 9 percent cap out of line? The research houses publish transaction data, and it is worth noticing first that they do not agree with each other. NorthMarq's full-year 2025 report, built on CoStar sales data, puts the average manufactured housing cap rate at 6.0 percent for 2025, after 6.8 percent in 2024. Marcus & Millichap's national report describes the average cap rate as stabilizing around 8 percent from 2024 through the first half of 2025, and its second-half 2026 reporting puts the average close to 7 percent. Capright's September 2026 market update puts the manufactured housing REIT implied cap rate at 5.4 percent as of June 30, 2026. Three credible houses, three different answers, because the datasets and property mixes differ. That disagreement is not a research failure. It is the honest shape of this market, and it is exactly why one number on a social media post cannot carry the weight buyers put on it.

Inside NorthMarq's 2025 dispersion, a handful of deals did trade between 9 and 12 percent, and a handful at 4 percent or below. So a 9 percent asking cap is not impossible. It is, however, an asking number built on income nobody has verified, sitting above every transaction average the research publishes. The claimed occupancy deserves the same treatment. National manufactured housing occupancy ran 94.9 percent through 2025, and the South region ran 95.7 percent, so 95 percent is plausible on its face. Plausible is precisely why it stays a claim. A number that looks normal is the easiest kind to wave through and the most expensive kind to be wrong about.

One more discipline note, because this series would rather show its seams than hide them. Readers will meet the name JLT attached to manufactured housing data. JLT Market Reports, published through Datacomp and MHVillage across 187 markets, are rent and occupancy surveys. They are good at what they are. They are not cap rate benchmarks, and this note does not cite them as one.

Why one park wears two prices

None of this requires bad faith. It requires a fragmented market doing what fragmented markets do. The sector's own research tracks the mechanism by name: NorthMarq writes about the expectations gap between buyers and sellers narrowing as transaction volume recovers, and Skyview Advisors' second-quarter 2025 industry report carries a section on cap rates and the bid-ask spread, describing that spread decreasing. An asking price in this frame is an opening position in a negotiation the research expects to move. A second, lower ask in a different channel, with harder terms attached, is the same negotiation being run in parallel at a different speed.

The channels make it easy. Park listings syndicate: a live listing on MobileHomeParkStore carries Facebook as its traffic source in its own link parameters, which is the paperwork trail of the same inventory being pushed from a listing site into social groups. MHVillage describes itself as the nation's leading site for buying and selling manufactured homes and communities. Brokerages market off-market deal flow as a category of its own. A seller's park can be in five rooms at once, priced for the room it is standing in, and no one room ever sees the others. The buyer scrolling one feed sees a price. The buyer scrolling three sees a negotiation.

Economists have measured what that asymmetry does. In a study of nearly 100,000 home sales in suburban Cook County, Illinois, from 1992 to 2002, Steven Levitt and Chad Syverson found that homes owned by real estate agents sold for about 3.7 percent more than comparable homes and stayed on the market about 9.5 days longer, and concluded that greater information asymmetry leads to larger distortions. That is residential research, cited here for the mechanism, not the figure: when one side of a market can see more than the other, the price itself absorbs the difference, and the side that sees less pays for it unless it builds its own record. Two prices on one park is that finding wearing work boots.

The lender reads a different document

Suppose a buyer decides the $1,300,000 version is the real one and goes to borrow against it. This is where the story stops being about marketing. As of October 1, 2026, the SBA's updated standard operating procedure for business acquisitions, as reported in published reviews by Starfield & Smith and PilieroMazza, raised the required debt service coverage ratio from 1.15 to 1.25 and requires it to be demonstrated on historical performance, the last fiscal year or a two-year average. The reviews are explicit that projections cannot replace it. Every deal also gets an independent valuation, and the lender cannot finance any part of the price the valuation does not support.

Agency money is stricter still, and in this case it is not even available. The Fannie Mae manufactured housing communities term sheet, through its lender NewPoint, requires an existing, stabilized, professionally managed community with a minimum of 50 pad sites, caps loan-to-value at 80 percent, and requires a minimum DSCR of 1.25x. The case park has 39 sites. It does not reach the door of that program, which is a useful reminder that small parks borrow in a smaller, more personal market where the file matters even more.

What lenders ask for, per lender and underwriting guidance, is a trailing twelve months of income and expenses, ideally reconciled against bank deposits, with a current rent roll. Unexplained gaps between the rent roll and the trailing-twelve income are described as one of the most common deal-killers at prescreen. And lenders commonly floor vacancy at 5 to 10 percent even when reported occupancy is higher, which means the claimed 95 percent gets underwritten at something more conservative no matter what the post says. Read the two listings again through that lens. Neither price is a number a lender will underwrite. The lender underwrites the trailing income, the deposits, and the valuation, and prices the loan off those. A buyer who prices the deal off the asking cap is doing arithmetic the bank will redo from scratch.

What the two prices actually tell you

Here is the note's whole argument in one place. The $100,000 gap between the two asks is not a discrepancy to be embarrassed about. It is information. It tells you the price is a position, that the position flexes with terms and audience, and that the seller will trade price for certainty and speed, which is worth knowing before you ever make an offer. What the gap cannot tell you is what the park earns. Only the trailing financials, the rent roll tied to deposits, and the documents underneath the occupancy claim can do that, and until a buyer holds them, every number in both listings sits in the same two states: Broker-reported, or Calculated from broker-reported inputs.

The ParkProof labels make the discipline portable. Ask for the income, label its state, and price the state, not the story. A verified trailing income at $1,300,000 is a deal. An unverified one at $1,400,000 with a handsome ratio printed next to it is a claim with good graphic design. We have made this argument from the documents side before; the two prices are what it looks like from the street.

Next in Field Notes: the lender's version of your deal, underwritten on history instead of the story.

Sources and Limits

• Internal grounding: the evidence labels and the verification order in this piece come from the CrosstownOS ParkProof Standard. The case narrative is operator community research from October 2026, anonymized so no park, seller, or participant is identified.
• NorthMarq: Manufactured Housing Market Insights, Q4 2025 (full-year 2025; sales data sourced to CoStar), for the 6.0 percent average cap rate, the 9 to 12 percent high-end dispersion, the $52,200 median price per space, and occupancy of 94.9 percent nationally and 95.7 percent in the South; and Manufactured Housing insights, Q1 2025 (July 2, 2025), for the buyer-seller expectations gap.
• Marcus & Millichap / Institutional Property Advisors: National Report: Manufactured Home Communities, 2H 2025, for the average cap rate stabilizing around 8 percent from 2024 through mid-2025 and private investors at about 80 percent of dollar volume; and the firm's 2H 2026 national report as reported by CRE Daily (October 20, 2026), for cap rates close to 7 percent.
• Capright: Manufactured Housing Market Update, September 2026, for the REIT implied cap rate of 5.4 percent at June 30, 2026 (Nareit data).
• Definitions and limits: CFA Institute curriculum material on direct capitalization, for the cap rate formula and its stated limit; Corporate Finance Institute, Direct Capitalization Method; Adventures in CRE, A.CRE 101 income approach. Practitioner guidance on going-in versus pro forma cap rates in offering memoranda: Kelly F. Jones; InvestClearly; Willow Dale Equity.
• Bid-ask and debt: Skyview Advisors, Q2 2025 Manufactured Housing Industry Report (August 20, 2025), for the cap rate and bid-ask spread section; Fannie Mae manufactured housing communities term sheet via NewPoint (April 2024), for the 50-pad minimum, 80 percent maximum LTV, and 1.25x minimum DSCR.
• SBA standard: the October 1, 2026 business acquisition standards (DSCR of 1.25 demonstrated on historical performance; projections cannot replace it; independent valuation), as reported in published SOP reviews by Starfield & Smith and PilieroMazza and summarized by the Cantrell Firm. Lender underwriting guidance on T-12 reconciliation and vacancy floors: Capital Funding; CR Equity.
• Information asymmetry: Levitt and Syverson, Market Distortions When Agents Are Better Informed, Review of Economics and Statistics 90(4), 2008. Residential research, cited for the mechanism, not as a park market figure.
• Limits: every market benchmark in this note is manufactured housing community data, because no equivalent published RV park cap rate benchmark was found in this research; it is used as the nearest measured market and labeled as such wherever it appears. CBRE's cap rate survey publishes no manufactured housing or RV park line and is not cited. The SBA change is reported from law firm reviews of the updated procedure, not from the procedure document itself. Asking prices in the case are as posted in October 2026 and may have changed since. No figure here is a valuation of the case park, and nothing in this note is investment, lending, or legal advice.

Put it to work: run the Rent-Roll Truth Check on the income behind any asking price, or start with the free RV park due diligence checklist. When the deal gets real, the Acquisition Workspace carries the full record.

This note may use AI-assisted research and drafting. Sources, claims, and final editorial judgment remain subject to human review.