Anyone who owns a static caravan...

[Bearsinmotion]

Please tell me why I shouldn’t buy one?

We live close to a national park in a beautiful part of the country. However for various reasons it isn’t practical to have visitors, certainly not to stay.

10 minutes drive away is a static caravan park, where we stayed while work was done at our house. We all loved it there, it has lakes with Watersports and is very quiet and peaceful.

The time we spent there (In autumn so low season) the kids loved it. Wide open spaces to play in, easy for friends to come over for the afternoon, good amenities.

Extended family live some distance away so it would be a way for them to visit when they wanted.

We could get a loan to cover the cost of buying relatively comfortably. Just struggling to estimate other costs - electricity, site fees, insurance etc.

So, talk me out of it! What am I missing?! Other than the obvious, not staying During pandemics!

I don’t own one but can tell you why we didn’t buy one when looking closely at them

1. Site Fees - equivalent to 10 good weekend breaks a year

1. Deprecation - like a stone or a car, the site we looked at required you to change them every ten years.

You could look at renting out to cover recover those costs but we felt it just wasn’t for us as wouldn’t be able to go enough to justify it. Also like visiting new places.

The site we looked at fees where £4K a year. Lovely site not a lot of facilities.

Get a quote from the site about site fees, electricity, water, insurance and any club fees necessary. Are gas bottles easily available if needed?

Check with them how old caravans are allowed to be before they have to be moved on, some are 10 years, others 15, which means your caravan is basically worthless after that time.

Then check how long the site is open for, some are 9-10 months of the year, others only close for 4 weeks, and check when their closed season is. Not much point in buying one for visitors if they can't come over Xmas for instance.

Also are dogs/cats allowed on the site and does this impact on which pitch you can have, will that be an issue to you/any of your intended guests

We had one growing up and I have v fond memories of it, but I'm not sure if have one now. The fees have gone up a lot and so have the price of the caravans. Work out how much it will cost you over 10 years, whether you'll want holidays elsewhere in that time, and the cost of putting relatives in a hotel as a comparison

That’s helpful, thank you. Looking at the park we like, the upfront costs quoted include site fees and electricity for the year, which is nice but means it’s harder to work out what those costs are!

We had one for over ten years on a Parkdean site. We were on a really good plot but the problem was that they then wanted to move us from that plot unless we bought a new caravan. Site fees were £6000 a year and they again put pressure on for them to manage the renting out of our caravan to cover the site fees. We never did that because we wanted to use within our family and friends group but the costs were always a worry. You have to balance out the good holidays with the costs. Also it really does depend on your neighbours. If you get a bad set the holiday can be badly affected.

Yes, looks like site fees are the killer financially.

Check what the deal is if you want to sell. My mum bought one, seemed like a good deal to her, low site fees, etc, but she wanted to sell after a couple of years and there was a clause in the contract that she could only sell it back to the site owners and AT THEIR VALUATION - which meant that she got £1,500 for something she had paid £20k for two years before.

How long would you want to keep it for?

I’d been thinking about one last year as we go to the forest of dean several times a year, when I looked at buying a new static, site fees etc it was averaging £600 a month, thats essentially a mortgage, but in ten years time I would have a static worth essentially nothing.

I’m in the process of buying a tiny cottage, after my deposit the mortgage is around the same amount as site fees, but if I still have it in ten years it will have value if I decide to sell it. It does depend where you are obviously, but luckily for me the area is very cheap.

Very good point re mortgage.