RV Park Boss

In this episode of RV Park Boss, Weston Wappler of Wappler Capital joins Jason Lafferty to discuss RV parks as affordable housing, the importance of Google reviews and guest experience, and how to identify promising markets for investment.

Rylan Blowers is the founder and CEO of Park With Us, a reservation software built to help RV park owners simplify operations. After starting the company from a Texas camper to solve his own travel headaches, he created the human-centric platform he wished existed for independent operators. He breaks down why technology must balance digital convenience with personal service, how AI is crowding the market with over-complicated software, and why keeping tools simple protects the guest experience. Park with Us at: https://www.parkwith.us/

Cameron Tope is an investor and the founder of Emerson Property Management, managing over 300 homes in Houston. After getting frustrated by unlicensed managers and massive corporate firms, he built the company he wished existed. He breaks down why investors must embrace the learning curve, how market shifts are creating accidental landlords, and how to properly vet a property manager.

Justin Boren is a traveling minister and former teacher based in Bandera County, Texas who has lived full time in an RV for years. He talks about what separates a park that feels like a community from one that just feels like a parking lot. His answer is simple: leadership sets the temperature, and guests feel it the moment they pull in. He also gets into selling his house, ditching the mortgage, and never looking back, and opens up about a serious health battle that included three heart failure diagnoses, a late MS discovery, and a three-month prognosis he beat. A different kind of episode, but worth it.

A conversation with Kevin Faulkner, founder of 3B Credit Health out of Waco, Texas. Jason opens up about a real situation where poor credit timing cost him 10% equity in a park refinance, roughly $150,000, because his utilization was tied up during construction and hard pulls had been stacking up. Kevin breaks down why most business owners treat credit like a nagging health problem they ignore until it bites them. We get into the five factors that make up a credit score, why the commonly cited 30% utilization target is not good enough if you want to be in the 800 club, and what people with 800 scores actually do differently. The number that stood out: people with 800 credit scores carry an average of 5.9% utilization on their cards. Kevin also touches on why closing a credit card before a deal is one of the more expensive mistakes investors make, and why three cards is the sweet spot for most people. Short but practical if you are trying to get a commercial loan, refinance a park, or just understand why the bank keeps saying no.

A conversation with Lance Riggen, an East Texas based investor who went all in on RV parks after years of flipping houses, running a granite and tile business, and trying just about every other real estate strategy. Lance talks about how he uses bird dogs to find off-market deals, including a retired guy named Bob who recently tracked down a 35-pad park sitting on top of the only hill in East Texas with 30-mile views, currently running as a long-term monthly park with zero marketing and no signage on the road. The deal is close to contract and Lance's plan is to convert the premium view sites to nightly transient stays and move long-term tenants to the less desirable spots. We also get into a deal in East Tennessee that fell apart at the funding stage, why getting under contract does not mean you have the park, and how he eventually solved the net worth problem by bringing in a key partner. Lance is honest about what he is good at, finding and negotiating deals, and what he is not, operating them day to day. Worth a listen if you are building a portfolio and trying to figure out how to put the right team around you.

A quick conversation with Duncan Waterman from Roomstay, a booking engine out of Australia and New Zealand, at the OHCI conference. Roomstay's focus is narrow on purpose: clean, fast, mobile-friendly checkout that converts browsers into bookings without the complexity of a full property management system. They integrate with RMS Cloud and New Book on the backend. Duncan also touches on SEO basics that still matter more than most park owners realize, specifically content marketing, blog posts, linking to local partners and tourist destinations, and building backlinks. His point is that the same fundamentals that drove Google rankings 10 to 15 years ago are now feeding the AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity that guests use to find places to stay. Short episode, but useful if you are trying to get more direct bookings or figure out where to start with your digital presence.

A conversation with Trenton Hinsley at the OHCI conference. Trenton started as a general contractor doing bathroom and kitchen remodels, got tired of the variety, and narrowed his focus entirely to decking for campgrounds. The product is modular, levels up to 4 feet to handle uneven pads, and comes pre-manufactured so a 400 square foot deck installs in about an hour and a half. The rental model is where it gets interesting for park owners: $100 a month for a 10 by 10 deck, no maintenance responsibility on the park side, free repairs if something gets damaged, annual cleaning and restaining included, and full replacement every three years. Parks that upcharge for premium sites with decks are getting anywhere from $10 to $20 extra per night, which makes the $3 a day cost easy to absorb or pass along entirely. It is also a 100% tax write-off since it is a rental rather than a capital improvement. Worth a look if you have pull-throughs or back-in sites you want to monetize a little harder.

A conversation with Alex from a campground Wi-Fi provider at the OHCI conference. Alex's model is straightforward: no upfront cost, no maintenance fees, no service call charges. Instead, parks pay a daily rate tied to active reservations, somewhere between $1 and $3 per day per site. Guests effectively cover the cost through their stay, and the park never writes a check for the infrastructure. We talk about why most Wi-Fi installs fail at the access point count, how his team puts units inside individual cabins instead of cutting corners with fewer nodes, and why having a 24/7 call center that handles guest troubleshooting directly takes a real operational headache off the park owner's plate. If Wi-Fi complaints are showing up in your reviews or your staff is spending time resetting routers, this one is worth a listen.

A conversation with Brian from InsiderPerks.com at the OHCI conference. Brian started in the industry by cold calling KOA's VP of PR back in 2011, talked his way into filming 90 corporate parks up and down the East Coast, and ended up building a marketing agency that now works with 400 to 500 campgrounds. These days he is hard pivoting into AI, specifically phone agents and chatbots that integrate directly with reservation software like CampSpot. The pitch is simple: most parks miss a huge volume of calls after hours or during busy check-in windows, and an AI agent that can answer questions, check availability, and take reservations is better than sending guests to the park next door. We also talk about why the real moat is not the AI itself but the reservation software integrations, which take real time and relationships to build. Brian also runs two podcasts, MC Fireside Chats and Outwired, if you want more of his take on where the industry is headed.