An Australian caravan park is typically worth between 4x and 10x its annual EBITDA, depending on whether you own the land. Freehold going concerns — parks where you own both the business and the underlying land — attract the strongest multiples and the widest buyer pool. Leasehold operations, where you run the park on land you don’t own, sell for considerably less and are harder for buyers to finance. The difference between those two scenarios is enormous, and it’s the first thing any serious buyer will establish.
If you’re thinking about selling, here’s how the numbers actually work.
Freehold Going Concern vs Leasehold — the Most Important Decision You Didn’t Know You’d Made
When you bought your caravan park, or built it, or inherited it, you made one decision that now determines most of your sale price: do you own the land?
Freehold going concern means the business and land are sold together as one asset. Buyers love this. They’re acquiring a property asset and an operating business simultaneously. Banks will fund it. Institutional buyers can put it on a balance sheet. The pool of willing buyers is large, and competition between them pushes prices up.
Leasehold means you’re selling the business only — the right to operate the park on someone else’s land, under a lease with a fixed term and conditions set by a landlord you didn’t choose. Buyers face genuine risk: the landlord could refuse to extend, renegotiate rent at renewal, or introduce conditions that erode the operation’s economics. Banks are more cautious. The buyer pool is smaller — often limited to individual operators rather than institutional capital.
I spoke to a broker in Perth last year about a transaction he’d been through with a client who owned a well-run park in the southwest. The vendor had built the business over 14 years and expected a sale around $3.2M based on comparable freehold parks nearby. When the broker pulled up the lease documents, the park had 11 years remaining with no option to renew. The deal eventually completed at $950,000 — a valuation based almost entirely on the business goodwill and remaining lease term, not on any property value. The vendor wasn’t bitter, exactly, but he wasn’t delighted either. (He had never once looked at the lease since the day he signed it, which is more common than you’d think.)
Check your lease before you start any other planning for a sale.
What Caravan Parks Actually Sell For
Working multiples for the Australian market in 2025–26:
Leasehold caravan parks:
- Small park, weak location, aging infrastructure: 1.5x–2x EBITDA
- Mid-sized, reasonable occupancy, some tenure remaining: 2x–3.5x EBITDA
- Well-run, strong occupancy, long lease term: 3x–4x EBITDA
Freehold going concern:
- Regional inland park, lower tourism draw: 4x–6x EBITDA
- Coastal or highway park with solid occupancy: 6x–8x EBITDA
- Premium coastal park in a high-demand location: 8x–10x EBITDA, sometimes higher
One rule of thumb worth remembering: a well-run freehold caravan park should produce EBITDA of roughly 30–45% of revenue. A park generating $1.2M revenue with a 35% EBITDA margin produces $420,000 in EBITDA. At 7x, that’s a $2.94M business — before the land value is factored in separately.
Parks can also be valued by capitalisation rate (typical range 7–10% for freehold, treating the park as a commercial property) or by site rate — a per-powered-site benchmark that ranges from $25,000 in regional inland locations to over $100,000 for premium coastal sites in WA. Site rate is often used as a cross-check when EBITDA has been temporarily depressed by a bad season or a one-off cost.
What Drives Your Multiple Within That Range
Not all 7x EBITDA parks are equal. Here’s what moves you toward the top or bottom of your band:
Occupancy and Seasonality
Parks running above 80% annual occupancy attract premium multiples. Highly seasonal parks — say, a Pilbara park that’s full from April to September and nearly empty in summer — require buyers to underwrite the year as a whole, not just the peak. Buyers discount seasonality by adjusting the EBITDA figure down to reflect a normalised year, or by applying a lower multiple to the reported EBITDA. Either way, it costs you.
Tourist vs Permanent Resident Mix
This one surprises most owners. Parks with a high proportion of permanent residents look stable — and they are — but buyers don’t pay full multiples for permanent resident income. Permanent residents pay lower nightly equivalent rates, and they introduce complexity under residential tenancy legislation that some buyers simply don’t want to manage.
Tourist-heavy parks, particularly those in strong grey nomad corridors or family holiday destinations, attract higher multiples because the yield per site is better and the regulatory profile is simpler. A tourist-heavy park and a permanent-resident-heavy park can produce identical EBITDA; the tourist park will typically sell for 20–30% more.
Location
Coastal WA commands the top of the national range. Parks in Busselton, Exmouth, Margaret River, Esperance, and the Gascoyne regularly attract interstate and institutional buyers willing to pay for scarcity. Highway parks in regional areas are mid-range. Remote inland parks, even genuinely profitable ones, attract narrower buyer pools and more conservative multiples — not because they’re bad businesses, but because the universe of buyers willing to operate in a remote location is smaller.
Infrastructure Age and Condition
A park with 20-year-old amenities blocks, deteriorating camp kitchens, and ageing electrical infrastructure will face buyer discounting. Buyers estimate the capital expenditure required in the first two to three years of ownership and deduct it from what they’re willing to pay. A well-maintained facility with recently upgraded ablutions, reliable power infrastructure, and modern camp kitchen facilities is a genuine selling point — and it shows up in the final price.
How Buyers Are Looking at the Market Right Now
Caravan parks have attracted serious institutional capital over the past five years, and the buyer pool has changed as a result. G’day Group, Big4 Holiday Parks, and a range of private equity-backed operators have been actively consolidating. Listed real estate investment trusts and family offices have entered a market they previously ignored.
For sellers, this is mostly good news. Competition between well-capitalised buyers pushes prices up — particularly for coastal freehold parks above $3M in value where institutional appetite is strongest. The grey nomad and family caravan travel market remains structurally strong: there are now more than 850,000 registered caravans in Australia, up roughly 40% over a decade, and the owners of those caravans need somewhere to park them.
Below the $3M threshold, the buyer pool is predominantly individual operators, hospitality families, and semi-retirees looking for a lifestyle business. Pricing in that segment is more variable, more negotiated, and more subject to the individual buyer’s own financial capacity and risk appetite.
If your park falls in the middle — say, $1.5M to $3M — you need to think carefully about how you present it. Institutional buyers may find it too small to be worth the transaction cost. Individual buyers may find it too expensive to finance without significant equity. Running a well-structured sale process that reaches both segments is important in that range.
Before You Go to Market
Get your financials in order — three years of clean accounts, a normalised EBITDA schedule that accounts for add-backs like your own salary and any personal expenses run through the business, and a clear breakdown of your site mix, occupancy by month, and lease position.
If your park has deferred maintenance, either complete it or factor the cost into your price expectations. Buyers will find it in due diligence regardless. You’re better off being upfront about it.
The timing question matters more in caravan parks than in most other businesses. A park that sells after two strong tourist seasons looks very different from one that sells after a drought year or a regional downturn. Your three-year average smooths this somewhat, but trajectory matters — buyers will ask why EBITDA dropped in year three, and “it was a bad season” is a harder answer than “we just upgraded the amenities and the season ahead looks strong.”
The structure of how you sell — asset sale or share sale, and what tax concessions apply to you — is worth sorting out early. The preparation phase, ideally 12 months before you go to market, is also covered in more detail here.
If you want a realistic number for your specific park before committing to any process, the best starting point is a conversation — not a listing. Contact us or use our valuation calculator as a first-pass estimate.