If you love spending your holidays away from home but can not afford a holiday house, renting a long term holiday site can be the next best thing.
Depending on the site available in the park of your choice you could relocate your own caravan, or rent a site with an established cabin / caravan.
The annual fees range from $1,000 to about 4,000, depending on the location. These fees cover your stay and the maintenance of park facilities (showers, laundry room, kitchen, barbecues, game rooms and swimming pools where available). Some parks will let customers pay monthly or quarterly, not just annually.
Depending on the caravan park agreement, water and electricity may be included in the annual fee, or billed separately.
The people covered by the annual fee are normally the immediate family (parents and their children), and any guests that may want to visit are to be paid for separately. The fee guests have to pay is usually less than normal full caravan park nightly fee ($10 – $15 per person per night).
Another fine print paragraph you may want to check in your contract is the maximum stay permitted at any one time. There are caravan parks that limit your stay to, for example, 28 days per time. You can come back later and spend more time in the park but you will have to leave after the first maximum period of stay ends.
Yet one more thing to check is the total period of occupancy. The number of days you can stay in a caravan park per year may also be limited – even though you’re paying the annual fees. Some parks set it more generously at 180 days but in others it can be as little as 60 days per year.
The good things about annual sites in caravan parks are that you don’t pay council rates or land tax, and there are minimal maintenance costs. That and the low capital cost makes renting an annual site pretty attractive in terms of money.
