Why do we rent out campers? Our story!
(From our book, Make Cash With Your Camper)
The reason people rent out their camper usually revolves around one word - money! That can mean paying off the loan on the camper, paying for trips with the camper, making upgrades to it, or even making extra income as a side hustle. Letting someone rent your camper involves work and risk, and the reason people are okay with those things is that they expect some sort of return.
I will add one more reason to rent out campers…
Our personal journey to renting out campers started in my childhood. We would spend our summers camping on the lake and riding on our boat. I have fond memories of waking up to the sound and smell of our green Coleman stove. My favorite was the smell of bacon and coffee - even though I wouldn’t become a coffee drinker for decades. I also remember the sound of crows waking me up at the Corps of Engineers property we frequented. It seems like most nights we were sleeping outside in our sleeping bags on folding plastic lounge chairs. After a lazy morning, we would hit the water for an exhausting day of swimming and skiing. The perfect end to such a day was enjoying grilled hamburgers and hanging out by the fire with the lantern humming away in the background. However, I don’t miss having to set up that heavy canvas tent and helping to pack up at the end of the week! I am very thankful for those times and can’t imagine a better way to spend a childhood summer.
The other reason to rent out your camper is
a desire to share such wonderful experiences with others.
Initially, it was my son who I introduced to camping. Our camping trips were one of our primary getaways. We spent many weeks camping at the same lake I grew up on, camping on the beach in Florida, and trying out new places in North Georgia. Our church would plan a couple of camping trips each year, and we always had a good time spending the weekend at state parks with so many close friends. To make it even more special, I would let my son skip school on Fridays so we could get to the campground on Thursday evenings and spend an extra night out. (Shhh, don’t tell!) My wife and I have introduced many of our friends to camping and we especially enjoy treating them to meals cooked over the fire, followed by cobbler from our Dutch oven served with homemade ice cream.
Our Camper Journey
We bought our first camper, a pop up, for a weeklong trip to the Gulf coast. We discovered that our cat had stowed away in the camper while we were packing when she came screeching out during set-up! Needless to say, that was her one-and-only camping trip with us. That camper served our family well for many trips! We had a very organized system of storage totes when we were tent campers, but we still couldn’t believe how nice it was to keep everything stored in the camper and ready to go whenever we camped.
The pop-up camper would be followed by a “hybrid” camper that had beds that folded down from both ends but had the hard sides of a regular camper. I had gotten used to having air conditioning in the pop up and my wife was “strongly requesting” a bathroom for our camping trips. I don’t miss folding up the canvas at the end of a trip - especially a rainy trip - on those two campers, but I do miss the feeling of sleeping outside that you get when there is only a screen between you and mother nature. We were officially spoiled with our creature comforts (and a little older), so we planned to upgrade.
However, we had one other thing we were working on: building a home on our recently purchased dream property.
Our love of nature and the outdoors led us to a little hill in the woods. You can see for miles in three directions! We decided our next big adventure would combine building our house with living in a camper... Hey, what could go wrong? So, our next camper would have to be big enough for my wife and me, our Dachshund Coco, and cat Gracie to live in. That was quite an experience, and it took me a while to get my wife to sleep in a camper again after having lived in one for almost a year.
After we finished building our house, we decided we didn’t need a large camper anymore because our sons had grown up and moved out and didn’t camp with us. I was going to trade in our camper for a smaller one, but I would have ended up paying the same amount of money for a smaller camper and that didn’t make sense to me! I saw a Facebook ad for RVshare about renting out your camper and, to my surprise, my wife was okay with the idea. (I think at the time she hoped it meant I would quit bugging her about camping with me;)
Maybe this is where our stories start to align. You own a camper and want to make some money with it, or you want to get your family into camping but are concerned about making such a large purchase. Campers sit 95% of the year, so renting seems like a great idea, but you don’t know what renting out a camper will entail or if it will be worth it.
I worked for months preparing, researching, and asking questions before renting out our camper, and it took me about a year before I had all my questions answered and really felt comfortable. The good news is, even though I really didn’t know what I was doing, we didn’t have many problems. The bad news is, just because we were able to avoid any major catastrophes doesn’t mean others have avoided them.
The purpose of this book is to help you learn everything we have learned over the years so that you won’t have to rely on luck, but instead will be well prepared and, maybe even more importantly, will be able to enjoy the process!
Smart people learn from their mistakes.
Really smart people learn from others’ mistakes.