[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to RV Park Boss. It's a podcast for RV park owners. I'm your host, Jason Lafferty. This is the show where we dive deep in the challenges and rewards of park ownership and some funny stories along the way. This podcast sponsored by RV Park Pros, 78% of all parks are self managed mom and pop operations. So aside from strong marketing, guest experience, proactive management, all those are key success and profitability for any park.
So if you're still trying to do this all yourself, there is a better way. RV Park Pros is a park management system that helps you maximize your occupancy and profits while optimizing your guest experience and retention, all with you having not having to be involved in the day to day. So if you'd like to hear more about that, you can reach
[email protected] and today's RV park boss is Weston Wappler. Hope I'm saying that correct. With Wappler Capital. How are we doing today, sir?
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Good. How are you today, Jason?
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Awesome, awesome. Appreciate your time and want to apologize again for screwing up our last meeting I missed.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Oh, no problem at all. I'm glad we're here today. So no complaints.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Yeah, wonderful. Well, I kick it off with a little question.
So here we go. Coming up on 2027, what are some changes you're seeing in this RV park space that you like or don't like?
[00:01:16] Speaker B: So I think one thing that I do like is just obviously we look at RV parks as an affordable housing play. And I think with just the macro headwinds of where we are as an economy, where we are as a country and a world, I think a lot of trends show through employment.
Population actually declined across the US different macro and micro headwinds here in Texas. And we also buy across the Southeast that are pushing more of the population to an affordable option. And for us, we've seen over the last couple of years an increase in travelers, increase in people staying in long term parks, increase in people wanting long term affordable housing.
So we have a lot of people actually in our parks today who might have been living in apartments, even some mobile home parks and unfortunately just got priced out and you know, for four or five hundred bucks can get showers, amenities, really nice place to live, great community, places for their kids to play. And so we think it's kind of a great solution to, I mean it's hard on everyone right now with this economy. So I think that's something that's exciting is I think the space is growing from the consumer Side and we've been super excited about that.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: So yeah, I love it.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Do it.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Do a lot of your parks focus on like communities or in transit or destinations or just a good mix or so?
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Probably 80% of our portfolio is long term. Other 20% is transient. For us, I mean we're, you know, it's an affordable housing play for us. We're hedging it against multifamily and so it made a lot of sense for us to go with a kind of long term approach.
We own a lot here in Texas, law in Alabama, also Louisiana, expanding to the Georgia area.
And so for us, you know, the ideal park has a little bit of both.
So like we have a park in Alabama where it's about 60% long term, 40% short term. And we love that mix because long term pays our bills and short term, you know, puts money in our pocket. So
[00:04:01] Speaker A: curious what interstate set off of 1020 or 6520.
Nice.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's beautiful when you have something off the interstate and you just, you know, keeping those folks happy. So I like that, that dynamic mix. 60, 40, it's pretty cool, right?
[00:04:17] Speaker B: Yeah, it's been a great fit that park.
Nice because we have people coming off the highway there and then we also are providing long term housing. So it's been a good, good mix of long and short term.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I was curious on you because marketing is always a big one is on your transit folks. How do you market to. You know I would think that park and I20 a lot of people head into Florida or Texas, you know, on their big family vacation or something or just seasonal traveling through. But how do you, you guys do anything different marketing wise or just try to keep a good Google my business profile and good management.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: So I mean we, we do a lot of marketing. Marketing super important.
Originally when we first started we were using like a third party for marketing and unfortunately really well known group in the space and they just weren't producing results for us.
We track cost of lead, our ROI on booking, lots of KPIs with SEO, Google Ads, some of that company.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Also the name, kind of of a semi the name of the marketing company.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: No.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:05:36] Speaker B: No it's not.
But we, so we actually came in, built that in house. We brought down full time marketing guy onto the team and we, I mean really focus on SEO.
Tracking trends, tracking our clicks, tracking our bookings. We have different websites for different types of ads.
So we market for long term and short term customers and then we also do reputation management and so we have ways to, you know, filter reviews and pretty much go to our consumer, our customer or our tenant per se and get reviews and then be able to put, you know, our five star reviews on Google. And so that's been a really effective way to add Google reviews. And we've had some parks, you know, we buy them with 15 Google reviews and we're at 2 to 300 in, I don't know, probably a year and a half.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Aggressive.
Those reviews are huge and people are so funny about them. Like, yeah, yeah, I'll fill them out. It's like, just fill it out.
Yeah, you know, fill out the review. Like, come on guys.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
We incentivize people to be able to fill out Google reviews because our thesis is when you're driving down the road and you're looking for a place to stay long or short term, you're going to go to their website, you're going to see if they pop up on SEO. It's the only way you're probably going to find them at least most probable way.
And then you're going to go and you're going to look at their reviews. And if they don't have any reviews, you're probably not going to stay there. You're probably going to go to the park nearby. That one picks up the phone and two has really good Google reviews. I know for me, ever since we, I mean since day one we started focusing on Google reviews. But every time I go eat at a restaurant, just from habit I look at Google reviews and I mean if there's not for a restaurant, you know, 8, 900 Google reviews, personally I usually won't eat there.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Because I don't want to eat not good food.
And I think an RV customer is not going to look at it any different.
So.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree, I agree. What are some ways that you said you incentivize them?
[00:08:24] Speaker B: So I mean we just give them costs off their either monthly rent, nightly rent.
Sometimes we'll do like a referral program where if they get someone else to give them a Google review, we'll give them a gift card.
We also incentivize our property managers to get Google reviews and if they get their name mentioned, we pay them extra.
And it was the first time we rolled that out. We have like just because we have like an email set up to our SEO for our reviews and our Google Ad campaigns or our Google business profiles and we just had a flood of emails and reviews with our manager's name. So it was kind of funny.
Yeah, that's Possible but I think really focusing on the customer experience and then also just you gotta come up on Google and most likely the first two people in the Mac pack are gonna be, I mean who people book with and I think there's ways to definitely ways to get higher on the backpack.
[00:09:45] Speaker A: So yeah, on the, on touching on the referral side, I think that's huge.
My eyeballs really went off when I got involved in my first park. There were some construction guys and I'm like how do I get your other workers, they're going to be here for six months to come stay at my park. Like do you want some beer? Do you want what? And they didn't want any, they want any money so I just gave them a couple cases of beer and the next thing you know I had six other monthly guests come the next day and I gave them a couple cases of beer and they were just happy. But we try not to focus on that. But you know we'll do like $50 referrals if they bring a friend or stuff. But, but just like having those little extra conversations with those guests, especially if they're transit workers or something like that, you know that that could be a big shift of five, 10 or 15 people that would stay at your park just because you made it cool, fun, kind or personal.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: Yep, 100%. And we also, when we get a Google review from a tenant, our manager same day better go knock on their RV and thank them, shake their hand and thank them because at the end of the day like that helps our business and something to be really appreciative of. And yeah, it's, I mean a reflection of how we run parks and how our managers operate. But ultimately, I mean those people are taking time out of their day to be able to leave us a review. So we're going to go thank them for sure.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: People are so, like I said before, are so weird about it but I hope you don't mind but I'm going to steal that kind of add that to, to our process for the on site team is that you know, go knock on the door and say hey, we noticed that that five star review, it really helps our business and we appreciate you.
Just little things like that can definitely have a difference especially when it comes time to pay rent as well.
But just I think any little thing you could do these days because I think some stat that I read that 20% of all RV sites were built in the past five years. I think that the OHCI said but what I'm getting at is that you're, you're seeing, I don't know about you, but I'm definitely seeing plenty of saturation in places. And we're past the gold rush of COVID like, like much other asset classes. So little things like that, when you compound them, Google reviews, your on site team and all that, just really taking care of your guests and going extra mile from knocking on the door and thinking of little things like that is kind of how you can either be successful or not or really set yourself apart or just give yourself the best opportunity for success.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Yep. And I, yeah, I agree with you on the saturation. I mean, at least dfw, Austin, Houston, South Texas, Brownsville area.
I mean Nashville has had a tremendous amount of new RV supply and we, I mean, own quite a bit in Texas. But we preferably for us don't buy in some of these larger metros because the supply wave is crazy.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: It's like Tyler, years ago, just next thing you know, you blinked and there was like a dozen more parks along I20 over there.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: And it's like, well, we could build them. So they're just, they just keep building them. It's like, stop, people.
You'll see like city of Willis, North Houston. They're like, the city was like, no more parks for five or seven years. We're not even going to think about it. Talk about it.
And you're finally seeing more counties are having more rules and regulations. That's I guess, good and bad. But it's definitely an industry shift.
So I'm curious if Texas is ever going to approve to where all counties have to at least adopt the national fire code 1194. They talked about it last year, but yeah, just good to pay attention to these changes.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Between freaking data centers and everything else that's popping around.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: You're not kidding. It's crazy times.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
So would if you just had to pick a state randomly that you really like for, for parks going forward to buy some more parks, what where would you say?
I don't know.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: I really liked Idaho.
I think there's low supply there. We're actually working on a deal right now there. I like Idaho and I think we should double down there because between Montana, Jackson Hole, Utah, just that kind of western states, there's just always been historically high travel there.
And also like from. We track it. I mean it doesn't. From our numbers, there's really not much new supply being built in Idaho. And I think, you know, there's something to be said for short and long term Parks. But for the short term I think we in Idaho and then probably for long view, not long view for long term parks. Excuse me.
We would probably look at Oklahoma and Alabama more.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So yeah, I would have never thought Idaho, but I haven't really paid attention to kind of RV tourism wise.
I would imagine Utah gets a little more eyeballs with parks with all their great national parks and everything.
But that's interesting.
I don't know, I feel like Texas and Florida gets. Gets a lot of the attention.
I don't know, I kind of have. I've reviewed a few parks in North Carolina and was working with a group to do a big development on the coast and.
But just looking at a lot of parks there, it's like it doesn't get all the attention of Florida. You still have similar weather and you still have similar snowbird travel and just the.
And it's not like Texas where you're just like if you feel like there's demand, they're just going to keep building, you know, so.
So I kind of like North Carolina.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I probably agree with that. I think that's very market over there.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
Well, awesome man. Well, I want to be respectful of your time. Uh, appreciate the, the insight. Look forward to catching up with you more in the future. Next month are you going to be at the OHCI conference here in town, Fort Worth?
[00:16:12] Speaker B: I think so. I will be there and definitely let's shake hands and say hello. Appreciate you having me on the show.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Pleasure.
Awesome, awesome, awesome. So folks want to reach out to you. What's a good way to do so social media wise or website or probably LinkedIn.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Just direct message me.
Be happy to talk to anyone just talking shop or talking deals, whatever it may be. We value our relationships and also you can reach out to us on our website and join our investor list or reach out and just email us directly. So.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Awesome, awesome. Well, in that investor list, do you guys host any events or anything?
[00:16:56] Speaker B: No. So probably next year we'll be hosting some Fort Worth events and probably Dallas events that will probably be rolling out late December.
But I mean in the past we've really never, never been event people. But I think going forward it's probably a change. We'll make sure.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Sure.
Awesome man. Well, thanks again. Enjoyed talking with you. I hope you have a great day.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Thank you.
