It’s been a good summer for Australia’s $27 billion caravan industry recovering from a post COVID-19 slump.
Grant Wilckens remembers schlepping around Sydney trying to raise money for his little caravan park empire back in the early 2000s and it was so hard. No one was interested in the second-tier asset.
Now caravan park owners are beating off investors with a stick as Australia follows the lead of the US where enormous funds have leapt on board like kids unleashed on a jumping pillow. “They’re ginormous funds,” says Wilckens, founder and CEO of G’Day Group. “They’ve realised that Australia would follow suit and, lo and behold, here we are. It’s a very stable, steady income stream. We own land. We own property. It’s asset-backed.”
G’Day is now the largest owner of caravan parks in the country with 90 on its books thanks in no small part to Wilckens growing ability to raise that capital. But there are about 2,100 such parks around Australia so it is still a decentralised industry of small players.
One of the big players in the field, Big4, is a marketing group of 270 parks with disparate owners. G’Day Group also has a marketing group with 330 parks in its Discovery network, including the 90 it owns. After a GFC rescue by the Allegro funds in 2008, G’Day is now majority-owned by Australian Retirement Trust and has amassed more than $1 billion.
Tasman Holiday Parks has a portfolio of more than $500 million.
It’s a $27 billion industry that was already transforming before COVID-19 poured fuel on the fire, with international travel bans leading to unprecedented numbers of Australians hitting regional roads. Expenditure in caravan parks peaked in 2023 at close to $11 billion, and the 140-odd Australian manufacturers of vans and related accessories took in a cool $17 billion that year, bringing the number of registered caravans in Australia to 900,000, according to Luke Chippindale of the Australian Caravan Industry Association. 50,000 new vans and campervans are hitting the road every year, but statistics show people are using them less since COVID-19 restrictions lifted.
“What would the world’s best amenities block look like? We tore down all the old notions of what we used to do and how they used to be built.”
Nick Baker, Reflections CEO
“It started to turn last year when international travel started to come back in a big way,” Chippindale says. “Our key demographic has always been the 55-plus market. They shifted back towards international travel.”
But their place has been filled, almost, by digital nomads. [“Yes, they’re still out there,” he says.] And by families with kids, hit by cost-of-living pressures. And it looks like attendances are up 4% this summer, he says.
Meanwhile, a new threat to caravan parks’ market share has come in the form of apps such as US founded Hipcamp that allow campers access to private land, like an Airbnb for paddocks. Or the older Wikicamps which is a user-generated platform pointing nomads to camping sites of all types, from roadside truckstops to under-the-radar nooks by a riverbank.
But Wilckens doesn’t see these as a threat at all. Anything that puts more campers on the road is fine by him. In fact, he liked Wikicamps so much he bought it in September 2022. He denies however, that it is being used now to channel campers into paid sites, namely G’Day’s. “It’s wiki generated. It’s user generated content,” he says. “We do not influence what goes on there.”
Another app getting more people on the road is Camplify, an “Airbnb for campervans and caravans”, founded by Justin Hales in Newcastle, north of Sydney. He got the idea when trying to hire a van from the legacy market players like Britz, and finding they were heavily geared towards overseas tourists. And there were all these vans parked idly in his neighbourhood streets.
Launching in 2015, Camplify was hitting critical mass by the time COVID-19 struck. It did $7 million in revenue in 2021, the year it floated on the ASX. Camplify’s share price grew 300% within months, to $4.50. But it deflated with the COVID-19 bubble and is now around 80c, even as revenues rose to $47.7 million last financial year on the back of total bookings [ie, the money split between van owners and Camplify] of $165 million.
Hales is expecting revenue to grow 5% again this year.
Hales has spent time examining the industry numbers. “If you look back to 2014, the caravan industry was doing roughly 40 million trips a month. And now we’re up to 60 million, so there’s been a huge growth in the overall industry.”
Reflections on ablutions
A large driver of increased profitability has been replacing van sites with cabins which bring in greater revenue per square metre. But not everyone has gone that route.
And proving that it’s also not just about water slides and jumping pillows, Nick Baker, CEO of Reflections caravan parks says they’ve grown revenue 100% in three years by taking a back-to-nature approach.
Baker says Reflections – the largest manager of parks in NSW with 40 on its books – has learnt that it can’t compete with the big ritzy parks and is playing to its strengths. “I know it sounds simplistic, but we wanted it to be about nature because of this inherent belief that time spent outdoors is time well spent.”
But don’t forget the toilets.
“A massive change is you’re suddenly getting these people that are in their late 50s and 60s with a very different mindset to past generations. They’ll be travelling with e-bikes and stand-up paddle boards and kayaks and all manner of toys, wanting to go on walks and wanting to get engaged … rather than just get a deck chair out and have a brew. This is our most important sector.
“We did a massive survey with people like that. And the number one thing for them was the amenities block. So we made a call … What would the world’s best amenities block look like? We tore down all the old notions of what we used to do and how they used to be built.
“We’ve made a lot of multi-millionaires.”
G’Day Group’s Grant Wilckens
“And it’s going to open very shortly at Forster [NSW]. For the world’s best amenities block, we’re trying out everything we thought people would want. Whether it be a biophilic design, which is bringing nature into it, whether it’s storytelling, planning, use of light, art, smell.
“And the idea is all the learnings that we get off of that we’ll be putting out through our other parks. So you’re not just like in Bermagui looking at the headland, the ocean. It’s beautiful … Then you just go into a prefabricated building with cold showers and taps.
“We spent three months getting the right scent. We worked with a local candle maker to find what would be the Reflections scent. We went back and forth, back and forth. We must have had 30 to 40 different tries. But we eventually landed on our signature scent.”
Reflections is a state-owned company that manages 40 parks over 28,000 acres of land across New South Wales.
Many of them are inland, where visitation can plummet in winter, or if, say, the dam that it’s built on is empty because of drought, so they’ve had to come up with ideas to keep people coming.
“In Lake Glenbawn, we’re putting in a downhill mountain bike track. We’ve launched fishing competitions across a lot of our inland parks to bring events in. At Lake Keepit, we’re bringing in night-sky tourism, which is going to be big glamping tents and an indigenous star talk to be able to bring the night sky to life.”
Baker was recently inspired by a New Scientist article about the healing powers of nature. “We want to reach out and make this experience not just about ‘doesn’t it look good’, but there’s something in it. And again, that’s what camping does. It definitely makes you happier.”
In more material ways too. Wilckens’ G’Day group intends to keep rolling up properties blessed with locations a modern developer could only dream of, often jumped upon in the 1960s and 70s by the owners’ far-sighted parents. “We’ve made a lot of multi-millionaires,” he says. “These people have bought parks at great locations on beaches and on rivers, and they probably paid a lot for them in the 1970s and 1980s. Their kids have gone into the business and now they’re sitting on $20 million-$30 million worth of property.”
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