Why we still underwrite on a napkin.

We came out of institutional real estate, where you value a building off its net operating income. We still do that with campgrounds. What we don't do is assume the seller's numbers will be our numbers.

A seller's P&L tells you how the park ran under them. It doesn't tell you how it'll run under us — and on a family-owned place, it's often not even a clean read of how it ran under them.

That's not the seller hiding anything. It's that a family who's owned a park for thirty years never really separated the business from their life. The truck is on the books. So is the nephew. The roof they put on in 2019 isn't, because it got paid for some other way. The revenue is usually clean — people paid to camp, or they didn't. It's the expenses that are tangled, and the expenses are where NOI comes from.

So we don't start from their NOI. We start from revenue and build our own on top of it, off a margin we actually believe: about 30%, though our parks run closer to 35. Their number describes their park. Ours describes the one we think we'll be running.

The rest fits on a napkin. We'll pay up to around four times revenue. And we assume we'll put more in after closing — some for what we didn't catch, some for what we'd want to fix anyway: the roads, the pool, the rougher RV sites. Not always a lot. Never nothing.

Brokered parks have been trading closer to six times revenue lately. We're not sure how that works.

We've done this eighteen times now. Enough that the patterns have started to show — the things in a seller's numbers that tell us how the park will run once it's ours, not theirs. We read that better than we did at park three, and we'll read it better at thirty than we do today.

Most of what we buy is a good business that already works — open for decades, the kind of place people come back to, where the job is mostly not to mess it up. But some aren't. A few parks we bought for the location, knowing they needed real work: one just outside downtown Columbus, another a couple of hours from New York. Those are turnarounds, plain and simple.

How we price them doesn't change. We pay for what the park does today, not the version we think we can build. We'll take on a turnaround for the right location — we just won't pay the seller as if it's already fixed.

Every underwriter calls that conservative. Maybe. It still doesn't save us as often as you'd think — the thing the inspector blessed gives out a year later, or we buy closer to the top than we meant to. We're wrong plenty.

It's not a clever way to buy real estate. But it keeps us honest about what we don't know going in.