I'm in PA. and as a builder and avid RVer, I alway suspected that starting a new campground in this state would be somewhere between difficult, to impossible. The bottom line is that in many states you are going to go through years of aggrevation, battling the local government, and the state, just to get a permit to start the damn thing. In most rural areas you would need extremely expensive on-site water and sewage systems, storm water management, and other issues addressed before you could even start spending money on developing roads, campsites and ammenities. I got to know an owner of a small, seasonal campground in a very remote part of northern PA. Interestingly enough, he filled his bucket list by buying this particular property and moving up from Alabama to run it. Two years later he sold it. Anyway, I asked about the potential for starting from scratch. He repeated much of what I thought. He stated that he was an active member of the state camground owners association, and it was pretty much a concensus among the body that new, small owner operations, built from the ground up, are probably a thing of the past. One interesting trend that confirms this is the presence of corporate buyers adding desirable campground properties to their portfolios. It's common for outfits like Encore to buy out an existing property that was individually owned and independently operated. I'm not talking about $2-300K places in bumtwittle, but nice places in desirable areas, that sell for seven figures. It must be worth paying a premium for these properties, when compared to the hassle of buying a farm down the road and building a new facility. If a regional, or national, operator with deep pockets avoids trying to start from scratch, it says something.
Just to give you a bit of a feel for how ugly it's gotten in rural America when it comes to dealing with local and state governments, here is a recent experience of mine. My good buddy decides to divide a small family farm after a death in the family. This should be a stupidly simple task. The property is a long patch, with massive amounts of township road frontage and no issues at all. It is a matter of taking the long, thin field and dividing it into four square pieces with 4-500 foot of road frontage on each, then recording the new deeds. This was completely unopposed by anyone, and free of any legal issues, or neighbors who didn't want to cooperate. It took THREE years of getting fucked around by the township and the state, and nearly thirty thousand in various costs before he was done. The finished product is a handful of stakes in the ground, and four new deeds filed in the courthouse. Can you imagine trying to turn that same farm into a campground, instead of a few lots? You would be lucky to spend less than five years, and 100K on lawyers and other bullshit, before you even got your first permit.
