Residential park home or holiday lodge? How to tell, and why it matters

What does "twelve-month park" actually mean?

That the park has planning consent to be open every day of the year, so it does not close for a winter period. That is all it means.

It does not mean you may live there. The usual planning condition on a holiday park requires occupiers to have a main residence elsewhere, and the park is required to keep a register showing it. Local authorities enforce it.

A seasonal park is a third thing: consent for part of the year only, typically March to October. The gates shut and the water is drained. If you are considering a holiday lodge, ask for the consent period in writing, because a closed park and a park with nothing available look identical from outside the gate.

What does the Mobile Homes Act give a residential owner?

The right to keep the home on the plot for as long as the park has consent, which in practice means indefinitely, and an agreement that cannot simply be ended at the park's convenience.

An annual pitch fee review with at least 28 days' notice on a prescribed form, and the right to refuse it and have the First-tier Tribunal decide.

The right to sell the home on the park, with the park's commission capped at ten per cent of the sale price. Since the Mobile Homes Act 2013 the park's approval of your buyer is no longer required for a residential sale in England, even if an older agreement or the site rules say it is.

And the written statement the Act requires, in your hands at least 28 days before you are asked to sign.

What does a holiday licence give you instead?

Use of the lodge whenever you like, in any month, subject to a maximum continuous stay the licence sets. A base that is yours, furnished as you want it, with nothing to reserve and nobody to ask.

What it does not give you is the statutory scaffolding above. The pitch fee review is whatever the licence says. The term is whatever the licence says, and you should ask what happens at the end of it. The commission on a resale is whatever the licence says, which here is 15% plus VAT.

None of that makes a holiday lodge a bad purchase. It makes it a holiday purchase. Price it as a depreciating asset you will enjoy, like a boat, rather than as property.

Which questions settle it?

Four, and they can be asked in one telephone call. Does the park hold residential or holiday consent, and for how many months? Is the agreement a Mobile Homes Act agreement or a holiday licence? What is the commission if I sell? Will you confirm all three in writing before I reserve?

A park that answers those in a sentence each is a park worth buying from. Vagueness on any of the four is the answer to the question you were actually asking.

A fifth, if you intend to let it: is subletting permitted, and through whom? In this portfolio it is offered at Marwell Court through Landal and nowhere else at present.

Does the building standard tell me anything?

It tells you whether the home is comfortable in February, not whether you may be in it. BS3632 is the residential building standard: full insulation, central heating sized for the volume, mains services, a structure certified for year-round occupation. BS EN 1647 is the holiday caravan standard, which assumes seasonal use.

Every home for sale in this portfolio is built to BS3632 with a ten-year structural warranty, including the ones sold as holiday lodges. A lodge built to the residential standard is still a holiday lodge if it stands on a holiday park.

That is the trap worth naming: a very good building on the wrong consent. The specification is reassuring and entirely beside the point.

Where are the residential homes in this portfolio?

Hound Hill in Hampshire and Tarvin Sands in Cheshire, with six homes between them at present. Beechwood Park in Derbyshire holds residential and holiday consent for 180 plots and has nothing released for sale yet.

Everything else currently for sale across the nine parks is a holiday lodge on twelve-month consent.