Re: Eddie Walker, How\'s the Campground coming?
RobS,
Seasonals are the bread and butter of most parks. In my area, the very worse parks I've seen have around a dozen permenents living there and the better parks have as many as 80 percent of there spaced filled with monthly rentals.
The problem with the two groups, monthly and overnights is they clash on why they are there. There is also the apperance aspect. It will be a priority to inforce the rules on the monthly sites to ensure they don't start junking them up. As soon as you let them get away with a little thing, they will all start parking trailers or extra cars around there spaces.
I will have an area set aside by the highway in my "buffer zone" for storage. Anybody with a trailer or extra vehicle will have to keep it there or off the property.
To keep everyone seperate, I'm putting up an 8 foot deer fence on aproximately 10 acres. It will be over a thousand feet long and around 400 feet wide right down the middle of the park. On the right side will be monthly sites and on the left side will be nightly ones. The lake is on the overnight side.
Site layout is also different for them also. Overnight sites will have pull thrus 82 feet long. Including the pad and trees inbetween, each site will be 50 feet wide with the roads all being one way and layed out in a loop.
Monthly sites are all back in with parking in the front for two cars. They will be 70 feet deep with the front parking spade 20 feet wide. The overall site will be 50 feet wide.
Cabins will all be located in there area, but adjacent to the overnight sites and close to the part of the lake I'm working on right now.
Tent sites will be in there own area and close to the store. They will have there own bathrooms and level grassy sites with water and an outlet with 15 amps of power.
Unfortunatley this will all take time to realize. To open I'm going to build 100 pull thru sites only. I will have to put monthly guests on one side of those sites until I can justifly building their area.
I spoke with a rep from KOA who sent me a franchise packet that I reviewed. I also talked to some owners of KOA to see what they thought about it. Some said it was a good thing, but would never do it again and didn't recomend it. Others hated it and didn't make any bones about it.
It's very pricey to get the franchise. I think startup costs were around $300,000. That's just to join. You still have to build the park. Then there is a monthly fee you give them based on your sales level. I forget how many points it was.
Some people love KOA's and some avoid them. I've never stayed at one and always thought they were too pricey. They have a new CEO who is dropping parks that haven't passed there inspections and streamlineing there operation. My other objection to KOA is the number of closed parks I've seen with their destictive A shaped store building. It just seems every abandoned, empty, old RV park I've come across was a KOA. Thats not accurate or fair to them, but it is my personal observation.
I also spoke briefly to a rep from Jellystone to see what there franchise fee's were. It was even more then KOA!!!
Eddie
