Buying your own RV site. Should you? What’s involved?

what's up guys you know after coming uh here to rgv last winter we liked it so much that we came back here this year again and one of our objectives this year was to see what it would cost and is it feasible for us to own and buy our own site yeah details coming up on rv street [Music] okay let's get right to it if you remember last year we posted our what it takes to spend the winter down here in rgb but in that video if you remember we showed you the highway down in where we stayed at all the different encore parks there under our thousand trails membership we can use that membership for two weeks but then we have to leave that park to go to another park and pay that park that's right for one week yeah so we get two weeks free one week pay you do that for four months and we figured out oh and plus while we're doing that you have the laundry fees there and all that type of stuff so you had up all those costs of it was right about 1100 bucks to spend the winter down here in rgv so when we came down this time we had two objectives one like i said earlier in the opening we wanted to research and see if it was possible and could we afford and was it feasible yeah to buy and own our own site that way we wouldn't have to um move every week or two and we would have our own personal place of refuge in the future if we ever needed one the second objective was was to fix and paint my old craft graphics oh you did fabulous on those but yeah we got that accomplished and so we started off by going to the annual two-day event winter texan expo yeah while we were at that expo uh we stumbled across a uh insurance guy yeah yeah real exciting um but he explained to us depending on where you buy your lot your insurance could be three to four times higher if you buy it in say cameron county than if you buy it in hilda or star county and the reason being is because cameron county is like right on the water right over by um yeah so take a look at this map this will kind of help give you a feel for what we're talking about what you're looking at here is rgb and rgv has four counties you have willisi and cameron county which are right there next to the cor the coast port mansfield and south padre island and then you have hildago and star if you buy a park model an rv site any kind of a structure in willisy or cameron your prop your uh insurance rates are going to be three to four times what they would be in hildago county and besides that hildago county is where most of all the parks are anyway yes there are some in uh harlogin which you can see right there next to the word cameron there are some parks there in harlingen but most of them are in the southern part of hildago county about 10 miles north of the mexican border so we knew that we wanted to find an rv site in hildago county so the search began i kind of got online and started looking and the prices were all over the place i mean they would be four thousand dollars to forty four thousand dollars and i'm like wow uh hoa fees are all over the place we found this book it was called the park book and this book it shows all 300 plus parts that are in rio grande valley it lists whether they want to just rent the lot or if they sell the lot just pretty much anything you want to know about each park yeah that tells you the size how far away it is how many sites are there uh do they do they accommodate rvs some don't uh but out of those 300 parks down here in rgb there's only 17 of them that had that box checked off to the side saying yes we do sell rv sites most of the parks down here uh they will rent you a site yeah they rent them now you can buy a park a park model or you can put your motor home whatever you want to on that site but you have to pay the park rent every month and it could be three four five six hundred dollars a month every month of the year even though you're say you're from wisconsin or michigan or canada and you come down here for the winter and you've got yourself that this is your winter home it could be an rv it could be a park model mobile home whatever but you pay every month every month and you don't own it it's like owning an apartment we're not doing that we wanted to buy something where we own it and that's it now here's another thing about when you buy into a park and let me just make this clarification here so these parks down here are really not parks they're they're they're communities they're 55 plus retirement communities and they have mobile homes and rvs these okay there's a mixture of them and uh we ended up having a friend that we met that bought they just called us randomly they arrived down here around the end of december first of january they said hey guys we're here you won't believe what happened we bought our own rv site and we're like oh my god that's exactly what we want to do so we went over there yeah and we always kind of you know we had been saying we were going to start looking so we went over there and we looked at their their site and that really lit a fire under us to really start looking out of the 17 parks that would sell us a lot we only looked at 15 of them because two of them were like forty four thousand dollars and we're like for a piece of concrete we're not doing that yeah one as we began to go through this list we'd look at maybe three or four parks a day and we'd go in there and we we've quickly discovered you don't just buy the site you you are actually buying into the community so you have the price of the site you have hoa fees of course you're going to have your utilities water and electric you're going to have property taxes because it's like you're in the community you're in a like it's like it's like a house only exactly okay so we had to inquire at each part okay so what are the fees here okay we see what the we see what the site costs what are the fees here some fees were fifteen hundred dollars a year some were eight hundred dollars a year uh i mean it was all over the board so this park this was about the seventh or eighth part that we had looked at yeah and we did a drive around and we saw this site and we're like wow we like this one well well yeah actually what happened was we saw an ad for this site and we came here but then we noticed oh there's other places for sale in this park so we went to the activity center and there right there on the bulletin board was a sheet with all the places for sale so we ripped that off there took one of those sheets and started going and looking at each site well we quickly learned some of these sites are just 30 amp yeah some have a trashy old shed on it or an old park boat or they covered the driveway with astroturf and i mean this is like what are you thinking man so you had to get through the nose to get to the yeses and when we cut to this site it was definitely in the yes absolutely category absolutely and martin and i both agreed yeah this is a strong contender yeah but we do you know we're still going to go to these other parks and we're still going to look and we did and they all failed none of them matched up to this site so we came back here the neighbors kept seeing us coming back and coming back and so they started coming around going who are you what are you doing you're trying to are you going to rent and no we're saying no we're trying to buy this place oh you're not going to be able to buy this that is not going to happen you're not going to man there's been so many people trying to buy this place it doesn't have a clear title there this thing is all wrapped up in an llc trust and many people have tried to buy this many many many people have tried all have failed and i uh so we listened to all that not and we'd like you know what johnny we need to get to the bottom of this what's going on yeah what the hell is happening here so we got out our magnifying glass like a detective and we went on the hunt for the truth indeed so he went to the tax authority yeah we went to the uh the appraisal appraisal district we found out the owners names and their addresses and their phone numbers and man we got on the horn with them and we had many many conversations with them come to find out this cut to the chase it had a clear title and we made two or three emails back and forth to decide on the price and a couple of little conditions had it all done sent it off to sierra a sierra title it took 29 days to close but it was it was like a house i you know i thought maybe a week yeah you know we give you money you give us a title but no no no no not even close let's go back now on what we said in the beginning how our cost here was eleven hundred dollars to come to rgv every winter and do our own laundry and all that well now we've got a site with a shed and and it's a nice shed it's got its own washer it's got its dryer we've added a refrigerator it has a 12 foot uh workbench it's got 220 coming in there it's got electrical outlets on all three walls overhead lighting it's an 8 by twelve i could go on and on i feel like i got a garage now but what's funny is how quickly we can actually fill that shed up yeah well i and i told her you know how sassy she gets sometimes right i told her you keep this sassiness and he's going to say you're going out there no you're going out there but anyway getting back to the cost so we had the initial cost of the property 220 a year property taxes during the winter while we're here our utility our electric runs about 60 bucks a month so times four that's 240. our water 22 a month times four round it off to 90 bucks a hundred dollars for lawn care because we're not going to be here from may to november we have to pay somebody to mow the lawns and of course we had to find a guy to do the lawn cutting guess what his name is jose he'll mow the lawn twice a month for 13 a month so we threw in 100 bucks a year for lawn care add all those fees up and it's 800 a year to own this property so we own it we don't have to move if we don't want to and we've cut out all of our camping fees we still have the ability to go to campgrounds if friends of ours come and they're going to a campground they're going to be there for a couple weeks we can just pack up and go to that campground charlie donna kent carroll eminem's okay if you guys come down here we can just pack up make a reservation and we could go over there for a couple of weeks and party up good so we closed on the property and now it's sarge but the place is a disaster it's been vacant for 10 years yeah so we spent the next four days three or four days we hired a power washing company to come out here and power wash this place man it was just filthy i had a i have a small power washer that i used for my uh when we washed the coach but that's nothing for this kind of a job i did use it to power wash the shed yeah we we used it we power washed the shed martin had some touch-up paint that he needed to do to the shed we cleaned it all out inside yeah um yeah uh there were some cracks in the concrete that we didn't realize how large they were until after it was uh power washed yeah so but i mean these cracks are very common this place was built in 1978 so cracks and foundations are very common but it's easily solved so i went and bought a bunch of self-leveling polyurethane material filled them joni and i helped me we got a whole bunch of sand and filled in the cracks up to about that much and did the rest with the polyurethane material it looks fantastic all the cracks are filled and it looks great um over by the shed where that ugly lattice work is oh yeah when we come back next year we plan on putting in a new fence over where the lattice work is uh we are going to put in a spice garden you know a nice herb garden because i totally miss the herb garden that i used to have at the house god we had such an awesome spice garden but we're putting in another one right over there that's next winter those are next winter projects after it was all cleaned everything's ready to go we're it's time to move the coach here so we closed on monday cleaned came here on friday parked it two days later the coronavirus hit the nation and we're like whoa was this best was this timing or what i mean it was crazy we it wasn't even on the radar when we were looking for this spot two days later there's nothing in the stores everybody's locked down i mean it was nuts i want to say real quick we give god all the credit and the glory for us having this spot absolutely many many people tried to buy this site and for some reason no i'm saving this for martin and joni they're coming down in a few years and here we are and here we are by the grace of god all right so let's get into a few details of where we live here i know this is a little lengthy but you guys want details you keep telling us that get more details so one of the great things about the spot that we have and we didn't even initially realize it when we were looking at this spot is we are virtually across the street right there from everything there's shuffleboard across the street the pole the activity center the dumpsters the pool tables the laundromat the mailbox the library the library it's literally right across the street yeah and the one thing though that we were really focused on especially me was i wanted this coach a site that that pointed north okay i did not want to have a site facing south because you know how it is in the winter the sun as it rises in the east and goes to the west it's low and it's right there in the front of your windshield and just bakes that coach so i wanted to be facing north and so now when the sun comes up in the morning we're covered by our awning and then in the afternoon we're covered by our window awnings so the only area that's really exposed to sun is the back it is a it's a great great sight you know in closing here uh you know we have a lot of plans down the road next winter we're going to tidy this place up i mean we've got a lot done on here i mean compared to what it looked like when we were looking to buy it now it's just like night and day but uh we're going to do our little touches on it and it's going to be our little place to put her around in the winter the people here the people here are just fantastic yeah we've met some great people here already yeah we haven't hardly even touched on all of the people here yeah i mean since we've been on lockdown you know we've been doing the distancing and we haven't been going to the pool and all that kind of stuff but you know how people drive around in their golf carts and stuff and we've got to know our neighbors across the street yeah they're pretty awesome oh they're they're just fantastic they've been coming here for i think like 18 years or something like that they've got a beautiful piece of property and oh oh martin yeah here's something yeah there is a clothesline on the side of the motor home yeah yeah yeah that i initially thought oh yeah that really needs to come down but we have used that thing almost on a daily basis i swear it's great man you do the laundry and just go right around the corner and hang the clothes out there on the clothesline it reminds me when i was a little kid when my mom used to put them on a line and run them out you know but i know some people are like oh man that looks so tacky okay well it's behind the motorhome you can't really see it but i love sun starch crispy clothes don't you no i don't but i do but i love being able to hang his jeans and his crispy towel out there on the line for him there's nothing like putting on a fresh pair of crunchy underwear you know what i mean i mean come on it's getting back to the good old days well listen guys that pretty much uh covers this whole thing if you liked this video this one right here that we just did go down there and hit that like button and let us know that you liked it and if you haven't subscribed we'd like you to subscribe hit the button and ring the bell next door to it so you'll be notified the next time we upload our next great wonderful free video because subscribing is free can you believe that we don't charge for this oh we should i can't believe we do that all this entertainment it's free yeah and we pay for all the production we pay for i mean it's crazy anyway that's it guys this is rv street stick around [Music] you

Channel: RVstreet

Views: 94,440

Keywords: Buying your own RV site, full time RV living in the winter, owning your own RV lot, RV winter traveling, RV living in RGV, RV Security, RV winter texans, where to park your RV in the winter, safe place to park your RV, 55+ RV communities in RGV, 55+ RV Parks in RGV, RV RV site HOA fees, RV site property taxes, RV cost of utilities, rio grande valley a place for RVers, should I buy an RV lot, what does it cost to own your own RV site

Id: gL8Tc76FN6k

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020