How to Find Developable Land for MHP, RV, and Storage Projects

Why Site Selection Is the Hardest Part of the Deal

Most land developers think the hard part is grading, entitlement, or construction. It is not. The hardest part is finding dirt that checks enough boxes to justify a pro forma and still pencil at the desired equity multiple. That is especially true for manufactured home park (MHP) development, RV park development, and boat/RV/self-storage facilities. These asset classes live and die by access, utility availability, and jurisdictional goodwill.

Developers who treat site selection as a passive byproduct of MLS browsing routinely miss opportunities that are sitting in plain sight. In our experience, buildable land for these product types shows up in three main buckets: off-market county records, underutilized corridors within expanding metro footprints, and legacy rural parcels with suppressed per-site basis. Each bucket requires a different sourcing muscle, a different timeline, and a different set of due-diligence tasks before you ever write a LOI.

Bucket 1: Off-Market County Records and Absentee Owner Lists

The simplest source of deal flow in Texas and Louisiana is also the most underused: raw county appraisal district data. Tax rolls give you owner names, mailing addresses, parcel size, zoning, acreage, assessed value, and sometimes prior sale history. For manufactured home parks and RV parks, you want parcels that are already commercial or agriculturally zoned, typically five to fifty acres, with frontage on a state highway or numbered county road.

What to Filter For

Parcel size greater than five acres for MHP/RV parks; two to ten acres for boat/RV or semi-truck storage.
Access that does not require a recorded easement if possible.
Utility adjacency: power within a quarter mile, water within an eighth mile, sewer if available.
Owner-occupied residential parcels are harder to convert; look for LLC-owned, trust-owned, or out-of-state absentee parcels.

How to Use the List

Pull ownership data quarterly, clean the list for invalid addresses, and send a structured mail piece to the top 200 absentees. The goal is not to sell them on your plan; it is to create a category label so when they are ready, you are already in the funnel. Most land is not sold because it is bad; it is sold because no one has been talking to the owner for three to five years.

Bucket 2: Expanding Metro Corridors and Growth Wedges

Manufactured home parks, RV parks, and storage facilities run on proximity to workforce housing and freight corridors. The best land finds are usually not in the shiny suburban office parks but along the edges of metro areas where zoning is still flexible and competition is lower. Look for corridors where:

A major employer has announced a new plant, distribution center, or data center.
TxDOT or the state DOT has a funded widening project within five years.
State-funded water or wastewater expansions have reached the county line.
An area has shifted from rural to suburban land use in two successive comprehensive plan updates.

Case Example

In the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, the US 67 and I-20 corridors absorbed thousands of manufactured home lots in the last five years because raw land sellers assumed the next buyer would build single-family homes. Industrial and workforce housing buyers moved in first. That corridor is still yielding land if you are willing to look at parcels between ten and thirty acres with highway visibility but no current commercial demand.

Bucket 3: Legacy Rural Parcels and Suppressed Basis Opportunities

Family-owned ranches, old homesteads, and recreational parcels sometimes carry per-acre prices that do not reflect development value. These are the easiest to acquire but the hardest to entitle. The advantage is basis: if you can pick up twenty acres at three thousand dollars per acre in a jurisdiction that has already adopted an updated comprehensive plan, your pro forma stands a much better chance of surviving a lender underwrite.

The 72-Hour Rule for Calling Absentee Owners

When you identify a good absentee parcel, move fast. Investors who take more than seventy-two hours to initiate outreach lose more deals than from any other single mistake. By the time you have a website, a letterhead, and a campaign, another operator has already set a meeting. Phone and personalized email beat fancy packages every time for the first touch.

Physical Filters That Cannot Be Skipped

Price and ownership are only half the battle. Physical constraints kill more land deals than bad numbers. Before you send a LOI, confirm:

Soil percolation rates for MHPs and RV parks where septic is required.
FEMA flood zone status for storage and RV sites.
Access width: MHPs need at least twenty-four-foot paved drive aisle; storage needs at least thirty feet for semi-truck and trailer circulation.
Setbacks from wetlands, jurisdictional streams, and high-voltage easements.
Utility capacity data from the local utility provider.

What a Site Visit Actually Tells You

Maps lie. Aerial photography lies. A site visit during or after rain tells you whether the land moves water or holds it. If the lowest portion of the parcel is soft, spongy, or visibly pooling, you have a drainage problem that will require either fill, a stormwater pond, or a downslope pipe easement. Those are not always reconcilable on a five-acre parcel.

Storage developers should also run a truck circulation test on paper before buying dirt. Draw ingress and egress paths from the public road onto the site. If you cannot clear a forty-foot semi from the right-of-way onto the property without crossing a centerline, you do not have a storage site. You have a tax bill.

Comparing MHP, RV Park, and Storage Site Requirements

Each product type has a slightly different site profile. Understanding the differences keeps you from underwriting a self-storage site with MHP utility requirements or an RV park without the right setback buffers.

Manufactured Home Parks

MHPs need flat to gently sloping land, sewer or acceptable septic, centralized water, and paved internal roadways. The ideal parcel is rectangular with minimal environmental constraints. Long counties in Texas, such as Bell, Coryell, and McLennan, frequently flag 1025 acre parcels that fit this profile if you know which zoning districts allow mobile home parks.

RV Parks

RV parks require bigger spaces, pull-through or back-in layouts, and often need to accommodate modern big-ticket rigs. Hookups per site cost more than MHP hookups. Sites need to be flat enough for rig leveling but large enough for snowbird season and wide-body Class A rigs. Lake proximity without flood plain exposure is a premium feature.

Boat/RV and Semi-Truck Storage

This is the simplest physical profile. You need pavement or compacted base, perimeter fencing, controlled access, and enough length for thirty to fifty-foot boats or fifty-three-foot trailers. The main constraints are local fencing ordinances, distance from residential windows, and whether the local fire code requires a looped drive or fire lane.

Relationships That Shorten the Search

Instead of chasing ListHub listings, build relationships with three categories of people who see land before it hits the market:

County planners and community development directors. They know which owners have called in asking whether their land can be rezoned.
Commercial real estate brokers who specialize in land and vacant industrial. Most brokers do not have the development expertise to turn dirt into a pro forma, which means they cannot effectively market the land. They need you as much as you need them.
Local civil engineers and surveyors. A good engineer will tell you if a site is feasible before you even look at it, because they have already walked it for someone else.

If you network weekly with one county planner, two land brokers, and one engineer, your deal flow will exceed most syndicators within ninety days.

Underwriting Filters That Separate the Real Deals from the Noise

Not every developable site should be a development. An operator-level filter keeps you from chasing land that will not work.

The 60 Percent Test for Raw Land

Before you buy land for development, confirm that the hard costs per unit are inside sixty percent of the projected stabilized value. If you cannot hit that threshold, the site is not development ready at current basis, regardless of how much you want it to be.

The Entitlement Confidence Test

Ask yourself whether the community already has a precedent for your product type. If the jurisdiction has never approved a boat/RV storage facility, does not allow manufactured homes in the zoning district, or has no history of variances for similar uses, your timeline just tripled and your cost just doubled. That is an information point, not a reason to walk, but you had better price the risk.

Using Technology to Accelerate Sourcing

Parcel Data Platforms

Modern parcel marketplaces let you filter by acreage, zoning, owner-occupied status, and flood zone in minutes rather than days. Pick one primary platform, learn its query syntax, and audit the output monthly for accuracy against the county source. Bad data costs deals.

GIS and Utility Overlays

Publicly available GIS layers show utility corridors, FEMA boundaries, soil classifications, and major capital infrastructure projects. Combine these with your parcel list, and you can schedule only the most qualified sites for physical review. This turns hundred-site campaigns into twenty-site campaigns and raises your close rate.

Broker Submittal vs. Direct Outreach

Broker submittal is easier but often slower, because brokers gate access to comps. Direct outreach is harder but faster if you have a clean data list and a competent dialer. The best approach is a mix: submit to brokers to get on their mind for future off-market lists, while simultaneously calling the absentee list you built yourself.

For MHPs and RV parks, direct outreach usually wins because most land brokers underestimate the residual value of these sites. They think mobile home parks are low-end assets rather than recession-resilient cash-flow plays. When you tell a broker you have a private equity group looking for 1050 acre sites with three-phase power, they will treat the inquiry seriously.

Working With Capital Partners While You Source

Developers with access to development capital have a sourcing advantage: they can close quickly, which makes land sellers more willing to accept reasonable terms. A partner who understands construction lending, entitlement risk, and value-add development timelines can help you underwrite land faster and cleaner than you could alone. Land Kings focuses on deal structures and capital access for land development projects and can introduce the right operators to the right capital.

Summary: The Operator Checklist for Finding Developable Land

Good land sourcing is a process, not an event. The best development operators live by this short checklist:

Pull county ownership data quarterly and maintain a live database of absentee owners.
Filter for parcel size, access, and utility adjacency before making calls.
Confirm FEMA, soil, and drainage conditions before sending LOI.
Match site characteristics to product type: flat and big for MHPs, hookup-ready for RV parks, paved and fenced for storage.
Target growth corridors with infrastructure investment and employment expansion.
Use a local planner, broker, and engineer as early-warning intelligence sources.

Land is not scarce. Buildable land that pencils at today's entry cost is scarce. The operators who consistently win are the ones who treat land sourcing like a pipeline with stages, filters, and metrics, rather than a search on Zillow every other weekend.