What I Wish I Knew About Boat and RV Storage Before Getting Into the Mix

When people ask me about RV and boat storage, I usually start with the same line: it looks like self-storage's easier cousin. Less vertical construction, big chunks of land, a tenant base that mostly wants to drop something off and forget about it. Park 'em and forget 'em. That perception is exactly what gets people hurt — including, on more than one occasion, me.

I've owned facilities in multiple markets, bought across different parts of the cycle, and made just about every mistake I'm about to describe at least once. This isn't a cheerleader piece for the asset class. It's five things that went sideways on me and what I'd do differently if I were underwriting that same deal today. If even one of them saves you a quarter of lease-up or one totaled Mercedes Sprinter, the time it took to read this paid for itself.

Lesson 1: The lease-up clock is set by other people's plans, not yours

I closed on a boat and RV storage facility in the Dallas–Fort Worth area just after COVID demand spiked. The underwriting looked clean and I had done the feasibility study on it two years prior. I built a normal lease-up curve based on the market as it existed at close. Over the next three years, more boat and RV storage opened in DFW than in any other metro in the country. My lease-up didn't fail outright — it just got dragged out by months as every new opening reset the local rate sheet and pulled prospects away.

This pattern is specific to boat and RV. Vertical cost is lower than enclosed self-storage. The acceptable trade radius is wider — feasibility consultants typically underwrite to a five- to ten-mile ring rather than the three-mile ring used for self-storage. And after 2020, a wave of capital chased the same "underbuilt" thesis everyone read in the same trade publications. When a sector becomes consensus, supply follows fast. Yardi Matrix has reported that new RV and boat storage supply totaled just over 600 acres in 2022 and 2023, both ten-year highs for the property type. By the time it shows up in occupancy data, you're already behind.

Here's what I should have done, and what you can do. Don't rely solely on the broker's market summary or a year-old feasibility study. Keep looking for and verifying new supply-pipeline data with the local municipality. Pull local building permit data yourself for a ten-mile ring — permits lead deliveries by nine to eighteen months. Drive the trade area. Walk competing lots. Talk to brokers and HOA boards. Look for informal storage on private land, which doesn't show up in databases like StorTrack or Yardi but absorbs real demand, particularly in lower-density and price-sensitive markets.

Then build a supply-stress scenario into the underwriting. Ask the ugly question: if 200 acres of new product opens within seven miles before I'm stabilized, can I still service debt? If the answer is no, either renegotiate price or walk. And where possible, favor product types with higher barriers to entry. Uncovered parking is cheap to bring online, which is exactly why it's most exposed to new competition. Covered and enclosed creates a more premium experience with stronger retention and pricing power.

Lesson 2: Your tenant list is the asset — protect it like one

I bought a seasonal boat-storage facility in Illinois from a seller who owned two other facilities in the same area. He had run the entire business off his personal cell phone. No property management system, no clean tenant database, every renewal a phone call. When the next September rolled around and his phone rang with last year's tenants, he simply steered them to his other two facilities. We sent letters. We made phone calls. The phone the tenants knew — still his. The trust they had built — still with him. By the time we fully understood what was happening, the season was half gone and our occupancy was a fraction of what we'd underwritten.

The general lesson: in a relationship-driven, low-friction asset, the operator's contact channels are the goodwill. If you don't get those channels at close, you didn't actually buy the business — you bought the dirt and the fences.

What I'd do today is treat the handoff like the asset transfer it is. Make a clean, structured tenant list a closing deliverable — name, unit, vehicle description, phone, email, payment history, lease term. No list, no close. Port the business phone number. If the seller has used a personal cell, that number gets forwarded or transferred outright as a condition of closing. Same for the Google Business Profile, the website domain, listing accounts, and any email addresses tenants have ever seen on an invoice.

Use a non-solicitation clause with teeth, not just a generic non-compete. Specifically prohibit the seller and any affiliated facilities from accepting any tenant who was on the rent roll at close for a defined period — twenty-four to thirty-six months — with a per-tenant liquidated damages amount. A non-compete the seller can ignore costs you nothing to enforce. A non-solicit with per-tenant penalties gets noticed. Hold back a portion of the purchase price tied to tenant retention measured at the next renewal cycle. In a seasonal market, that means the next season, not thirty days post-close. Send a co-signed tenant letter before close, on letterhead, with both the seller's signature and yours, telling tenants who to call going forward and that the seller has agreed not to re-house them elsewhere. And get every tenant onto auto-pay before the off-season starts. A tenant on auto-pay does not call anyone next September.

Lesson 3: Your security is only as strong as its weakest assumption

Our Fort Worth facility sits on a busy road in a neighborhood of $750k-plus homes with active construction on all sides — a target-rich environment. We've been broken into multiple times. So have our direct competitors. The first incident is the one I tell people about.

The thieves cut a hole through the chain-link perimeter and drove their truck through the fence. Once inside, they walked a row of enclosed boat and RV units with a crowbar, popping each pedestrian door one at a time. Each man-door was secured by a normal commercial lock plus a keypad — together those took seconds to defeat. Inside one unit, they found a Mercedes Sprinter loaded with high-end electronics. The tenant had left the unit's automatic-door fob sitting on top of the interior garage-door button, and the keys in the ignition. The thieves used the fob to roll the door up and started driving the Sprinter out. At the first interior access gate, they realized they couldn't open it — that gate is entry-only by design, and a code wouldn't have helped them. The cameras caught them visibly panicking as sirens got closer. They rammed through the interior gate, drove to the exterior wrought-iron exit gate, hit that one hard, and made it out. The Sprinter turned up two miles away later that day, totaled.

Five things I took away from that one night.

First, gates and fences are not necessarily covered in your insurance policy. Many policies cap "outdoor property" or "fences and signs" at a low sublimit — sometimes $5,000 to $25,000 — that won't replace a wrought-iron motorized gate, let alone two. Read your policy line by line before you need it. Schedule fence and gate coverage separately where your carrier will allow it, and price replacement at today's steel and labor costs, not the deductible math you did when you bound the policy.

Second, keypads on pedestrian doors don't survive crowbars. A keypad on a man-door creates the appearance of security and adds zero resistance to a physical attack. The lock, the strike plate, and the door frame are what actually matter. Upgrade to a steel door, anti-pry strike plates, a hardened deadbolt, and a contact alarm wired to your monitoring system. Better yet, eliminate the man-door entirely where the design allows. Every door is a door a crowbar can find.

Third, don't let tenants treat their unit fob and keys like loose change. A fob in the cup holder defeats every other layer of security you paid for. Bake "no fobs or keys left in the vehicle" into the lease, the move-in checklist, and signage on every unit door. You can't make tenants careful, but you can document that you told them, repeatedly, and that helps you, your Google Reviews and your insurer later.

Fourth — and this is the one I'd undo if I could go back — key fobs aren't even necessary. We already had electronic Noke locks at that facility. If you don't issue fobs in the first place, you don't have to chase them down when a tenant moves out, you don't have to replace them when they're lost, and you can't have one sitting on top of an interior garage-door button waiting for a thief to find it. The lock on the tenant's smartphone is the credential. Skip the fob entirely.

Fifth, exit gates should be free-exit, not code-required. This sounds backward at first — wouldn't a code slow a thief down? In practice, a code-required exit fails in every direction. Legitimate tenants get frustrated and write reviews about it. Emergency vehicles get blocked. And thieves who don't have the code just ram the gate, which is exactly what ours did. You lose the gate either way. At least don't also lose tenant goodwill and emergency-egress compliance. Free-exit, with a loop sensor or push-to-exit button, is the industry standard for a reason.

Lesson 4: A seasonal market is a different business than a year-round one

This is related to the Illinois story, but it's its own animal. A seasonal market doesn't just compress your revenue calendar — it compresses your recovery time from any mistake. Miss the September window for any reason (pricing wrong, signage wrong, phones not forwarded, website down for a week), and you're waiting twelve months to try again. There is no Tuesday do-over.

The underwriting implications are real. Don't blend seasonal markets into the cap-rate assumptions you'd use for year-round markets. Budget marketing dollars asymmetrically — the bulk needs to hit sixty to ninety days before season open, not spread evenly through the year. Operating expenses don't go seasonal even if your revenue does. Insurance, property tax, debt service, and (in the north) snow removal hit every month regardless. And even in seasonal markets, you'll find tenants who store year-round and only use their RV three weeks a summer — because supply scarcity for quality space means they refuse to give up the unit when they're done using it for the season. Price the year-round tenant differently from the seasonal one, and lean your unit mix toward whichever the trade area actually produces.

Closing

The throughline across all of these is uncomfortable to admit. Most of them were due diligence mistakes dressed up as something else. The supply problem was a market-data problem. The tenant-theft problem was a transition-documents problem. The seasonal problem was a model-assumptions problem. Even the security ones were design-assumption mistakes — the kind nobody questions until somebody with a crowbar questions them for you.

This asset class rewards the operator who treats it like a real operating business, not a passive parking lot. The brokers who pitch it as "low-touch self-storage" aren't wrong about the touch. They're wrong about the attention.

I still believe in the space. I just believe in it with my eyes open now, and I'd rather you go in with mine than your own.