Is Thousand Trails Membership as Healthy as ELS’s Member Count Suggests?

Equity LifeStyle Properties (NYSE: ELS) owns Thousand Trails, a membership camping program. The premise is simple: pay one fee and camp as many nights as the terms of the membership contract allow. ELS reports about 108,000 Thousand Trails members. That number has barely moved in eighteen years, and that is about the most flattering thing you can say about it.

ELS reports about 108,000 Thousand Trails members. The number that matters — who pays, for what, and what ELS stopped telling you about them — tells a different story.

A Brief Overview of Thousand Trails

The mechanics matter, so a paragraph on them. A member pays a set fee and then camps as many nights as the rules of the product they bought allow. An extra night costs the member nothing and earns ELS nothing; the fee is the revenue, however much or little the member camps. For decades the products were annual camping passes and “lifetime” memberships bought with a large upfront payment; since the first quarter of 2025 ELS sells the pass and a two- to four-year term product instead. Either way the premise is the same: pay the fee, follow the rules, camp.

That premise is why the member count is the wrong place to stop. ELS acquired Thousand Trails in August 2008 with approximately 120,000 members. Strip the free trials out of today’s figure — ELS discloses them in the same sentence — and the paying base is at most 88,000. Most of those hold the cheapest product ELS sells, and that product sells today for less than its published price in 2010. A fifth of the dues ELS collects are frozen under contracts it cannot reprice, held by the members least likely to leave. The one membership revenue line that is growing carries a new product ELS does not separate out. And the disclosures you would need to check any of this were in the 10-K once, and are not now.

Thousand Trails is a small business inside a large one: 5.3% of ELS’s 2025 revenue. It is not a small piece of the real estate. The 82 membership campgrounds hold about 26,000 of ELS’s 173,400 sites — 15% — and they carry constraints the rest of the portfolio does not: legacy contracts that run for as long as the member chooses to stay, a fifth of all dues frozen by contract, and statutes in California, Oregon and Washington that govern closing a membership campground. Whether those constraints become liabilities is a question for Part III. The member count is where it starts.

None of that is an accusation. All of it is in the filings, and this piece is organized around them: Part I is what the filings tell you about the membership today; Part II is what ELS used to tell you and when it stopped; Part III is what nobody outside the company can know, who can, and the five questions I’d put to management. Where a figure rests on an assumption of mine rather than a number ELS printed, I say so.

The short version

ELS reports about 108,000 Thousand Trails members. It bought the business in 2008 with about 120,000.
Thousand Trails is 5.3% of ELS’s revenue but 15% of its sites. On ELS’s own figures the membership campgrounds earn well under the rest of the portfolio per site, and the filings articulate no clear, discernible plan to close the gap.
About a fifth of the reported count is free trials from RV dealers, and ELS says so. The paying base is at most 88,000 — below the 90,900 ELS reported for 2018.
Most paying members hold the camping pass, the cheapest product ELS sells. It was published at $499 in 2010. It sells today for $475.
A fifth of all dues are frozen by contract. The legacy holders behind them are the members least likely to leave.
Annual membership subscriptions grew 10.8% last quarter on a shrinking base. That line now also carries the two- to four-year upgrade products at $2,500–3,000 a head. ELS does not split it.
ELS once disclosed renewal rates, an attrition curve, upgrade counts and prices, and the paying remainder. The FY2025 10-K discloses none of them.
Five questions I would put to Management are in Part III.

Part I — The Membership as It Is

1. The Count ELS Reports, and the Count That Pays

Start here because this is the number everyone quotes, and the point of this section is that it is two numbers wearing one coat.

ELS had owned the Thousand Trails campgrounds since 2004 and leased them to the operator. On August 14, 2008 it bought the operator too, acquiring substantially all of the assets and certain liabilities of Privileged Access, LP for an unsecured note of $2.0 million. The FY2008 10-K called it a business Thousand Trails “has been engaged in for almost 40 years” and reported “approximately 120,000 customers who own right-to-use contracts.” Then it shrank: 97,000 by the end of 2012. It recovered to 102,400 by 2015, climbed every year to a peak of 128,439 at the end of 2022, and has fallen every period since — 108,731 at the end of 2025, 107,857 at June 30, 2026. I covered the four-year decline in the frozen-dues piece and won’t rehash it. The point of the longer view is simpler: on ELS’s own numbers, the membership base is smaller today than the one it bought.

And the two ends of that chart are not measured the same way. Since the FY2018 10-K, ELS has reported the count with a component “including X RV dealer free trial memberships.” The trials date to 2012, when ELS began giving RV dealers a one-year membership to hand a customer with a new RV — “a customer acquisition tool,” in the FY2017 10-K’s words, on which “no cash is received from the member during the first year.” From 2012 to 2018 the trials sat inside the reported count without being separated from it. From 2018 on they are disclosed, and they have been between 16.5% and 20.2% of the count every year since — 19.0% at the end of 2025. They are also more than half of the new memberships ELS books each year: in 2025 ELS “sold 17,150 TTC memberships and activated 23,002 TTC memberships through our RV dealer program,” and dealer activations have exceeded paid sales every year since 2015. (A “TTC membership” is a Thousand Trails Camping membership, the annual camping pass; the filing defines it as “an annual subscription providing the member access to our Properties in one to five geographic regions.”)

So the number that matters is the reported count less the trials, and ELS has given you that number, or a ceiling on it, every year since 2018:

Year-end	Reported members	Free trials	The paying remainder, in ELS's words
2018	111,100	20,200	“The remaining 90,900”
2019	115,700	19,100	“The remaining 96,600”
2020	116,200	19,400	“The remaining 96,800”
2021	125,100	23,600	“The remaining 101,500”
2022	128,400	26,000	“The remaining 102,400”
2023	121,000	23,600	“The remaining 97,400”
2024	113,600	21,500	“The majority of the remaining 92,100”
2025	108,700	20,700	“The majority of the remaining 88,000”

Source: Item 2 / MD&A Overview of each Form 10-K, FY2018 through FY2025, rounded as ELS rounds them.

Read the last column. The paying base peaked at 102,400 at the end of 2022 and was at most 88,000 three years later — down at least 14% — and it is below the 90,900 ELS reported for 2018. Whatever the 120,000 of 2008 included, it did not include dealer trials, because the program did not exist.

That is the whole of the first number. The count is flat because a fifth of it hasn’t paid. The count that has paid is lower than it was eight years ago. And the next question — what those 88,000 actually bought — matters more than either, because a paying member is not a paying member.

2. What the Paying Members Hold

The 88,000 hold three different products. The filings tell you which one most of them hold, and it is the one that produces the least; they tell you a fifth of the dues come from contracts that can’t be repriced; and they don’t tell you the rest. This section is the “which ones.”

ELS says “the majority” of the 88,000 hold the camping pass, priced in 2025 at “an annual payment of $755” for a single region. The filings do not say what the minority holds. The two products the filings describe are the legacy upgrades sold with a non-refundable upfront payment, which entitle members in good standing to enhanced benefits “for as long as they choose to remain in the program,” and the two- to four-year term products introduced in 2025.

The camping pass. ELS introduced it in the spring of 2010 as the Zone Park Pass, and said why: “The ZPP’s sales are contributing to a reduction in the net attrition of the customers who have right-to-use Agreements,” alongside “the phase-out of memberships with higher initial upfront payments.” The FY2013 10-K added that it “replaces high cost products that were typically entered into at Properties after tours and lengthy sales presentations.” It became the Thousand Trails Camping Pass in 2014.

Read that 2010 sentence carefully, because it describes what the pass does and what it doesn’t. Nothing about a cheap one-region pass keeps a lifetime member from leaving; a member who paid thousands up front for nationwide access and longer stays is not going to give that up for a product with one region and fewer privileges. The pass doesn’t reduce attrition. It reduces net attrition — ELS’s own word — by adding cheap members at the bottom faster than members leave, without an upfront sale, without a long commitment, and without a sales presentation. It is a product built for people who will not camp much; a week or two in a Thousand Trails park and the pass has paid for itself. Since 2010, that is the member the base has been rebuilt with.

The price. The 10-K discloses the published price of a single-region pass each year: $499 in 2010, $755 in 2025, a 51% increase. The Thousand Trails website now lists $775. The published price is not what the pass sells for, and if you have shopped for one you already know that. On September 21, 2026 the same page offered “Fall Flash Sale! $300 OFF … Now Only $475/year.” Archived copies of ELS’s own camping-pass page show a discount displayed in every capture from March 2016 through 2026, and where the page prints the resulting price — every capture since 2023 — it has been between $470 and $566. The archived pages also show discounts in 2014 and 2015, so the $499 of 2010 very likely sold below list too; the filings don’t say, and no 10-K has ever disclosed a promotional or average realized price.

So the comparison is not clean, and I won’t pretend it is. But the point survives the caveat. Apply nothing fancier than the Consumer Price Index to the 2010 price and a camping pass should sell for about $767 today. ELS’s published price, $775, is almost exactly that — on paper, the pass has kept pace with inflation for sixteen years. At the register it sells for $475, which is less than it was published at in 2010 and 38% below what inflation alone would put it at. ELS raised the price of the thing it could raise: the Trails Collection add-on went from $199 a year in 2017 to $475 in 2026 on the same archived pages. The product most paying members hold has not had a price increase in fifteen years. It has had a price increase on paper but not where it matters – when the product is being pushed out the door.

The legacy lifetimes. The minority of the 88,000 who hold a legacy lifetime membership — bought with a large upfront payment, good “for as long as they choose to remain in the program” — are the subject of the frozen-dues piece, so one paragraph here. Their dues carry two caps. Every legacy lifetime contract I have read limits the annual dues increase to the change in the Consumer Price Index; that is the first cap, and it applies to all of them. A subset carries a second: once the original member reaches 62 on most forms, 65 on some, dues are frozen outright or the increase is cut in half. ELS discloses only the second, in the Inflation section of every 10-K: “dues may be frozen under the terms of certain contracts if the customer is over 61 years old. Currently, approximately 21.0% of our dues are frozen.” That share was 23.1% in FY2020 and has sat at 20% to 21% since — steady while the paying base fell around it. ELS has never said how many contracts carry either cap or how many lifetime holders remain. The dues are capped, and a fifth of them are frozen; the cost of running the campground is neither. Which means a good many of these customers aren’t making the company money — they are costing it money, and they have no reason to leave, because the contract gets better for them every year it runs. So when you ask whether the paying base is healthy, “how many” is half the question. “Which ones” is the other half, and a fifth of the dues answer it. (For the contracts themselves, and what ELS could do about them, see the frozen-dues piece.)

Put the two together and the paying base looks like this: a majority on the cheapest product, sold below its 2010 price, and a minority on contracts that lose money as they age. That is who is left. It is not where the growth is coming from — and the growth is real, which is the next section.

3. The Bright Spot

There is one, and it deserves its own section, because an article that only counted what shrank would be missing the part of this business that is working. The one membership revenue line an analyst can watch is growing double digits. The filings just don’t let you see why.

Annual membership subscriptions revenue was $69.3 million in 2025, up 5.1%, and $18.8 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 11.3% on the same quarter a year earlier (ELS reports Core growth of 10.8%). Double-digit growth on a member count that fell 4.2% in 2025 and another 0.8% in the first half of 2026. Something is doing the work, and it isn’t headcount.

You already know most of the answer from Part I. Base dues on the camping pass moved with the published price, 4.1%, on a count that fell 4.2%; the legacy contracts, as I laid out in the frozen-dues piece, cap dues increases at CPI, and a fifth of all dues do not move at all. There is no version of that arithmetic in which base dues grew double digits. The growth is the new product. In the first quarter of 2025 ELS stopped selling upgrades for an upfront payment and introduced “subscription-based upgrade products with two- to four-year terms and higher annual dues,” and the FY2025 10-K tells you where that revenue lands: the term products “are recognized in Annual membership subscriptions,” priced at $4,000 to $8,000 for two years and roughly $7,000 to $14,000 for four, “which results in approximately $2,500 to $3,000 of earned revenue on an annual basis.” The supplemental package says the same in a footnote.

So one line now carries two products: base dues on 88,000-or-fewer paying members, and term products earning $2,500 to $3,000 a year each. ELS does not split them. The only volume figure for the new product is in the supplemental package, not the 10-K — “Membership Upgrade Volume” of 5,945 in 2025 and 2,587 in the first half of 2026 — while the old upgrade line, which carries the amortization of the legacy upfront payments, fell 24.5% and new upfront deferrals fell from $27.5 million to $6.7 million. The two upgrade series now measure different products, and the one that is growing is booked where you can’t see it.

So the bright spot is real, and it is new: a product with a term, a renewal, and a price that steps up. It is also the first thing on the list in Part III of what you’d want to see and can’t — because the line it lives in doesn’t say how much of it is there, or what the old base did underneath it.

Where Part I leaves you. The reported count is flat. The paying count is down. Most of what’s left is the cheapest product, sold below its 2010 price; a fifth of the dues are frozen; and the growth is a new product you can’t see. Every one of those sentences is a filing fact. What would let you go further — how many members renew, how many trials convert, how many of each product there are, what a pass actually sells for — is not in the filings. It used to be. That’s Part II.

Part II — What ELS Used to Tell You, and When It Stopped

This part matters because the health of the base can’t be assessed from outside without the measures below, and the reason it can’t is that ELS withdrew them. I’m not going to argue motive. I’m going to lay the disclosures next to the count and let you read the dates.

What ELS disclosed	Years it appeared	Last value disclosed	Gone from	Reported count that year
An attrition curve: the share of new contracts expected to terminate after five years	FY2009–FY2016	6.7% (FY2016); 7.9% in FY2009	FY2017 10-K	106,500, rising
The direction of the member count, in a sentence	FY2012–FY2015	“a decrease in member count” (FY2015)	FY2016 10-K	104,700, rising
A renewal rate on the camping pass	FY2015–FY2016	~43.1% (2015); ~31.2% (2016)	FY2017 10-K	106,500, rising
The share of dealer free trials that bought a membership	FY2014–FY2016	~18% (2014); ~18.3% (2015); ~15.9% (2016)	FY2017 10-K	106,500, rising
Upgrade contracts sold, with average price	FY2014–FY2017 (count only FY2019–FY2021)	2,514 at $5,621 (2017); ~4,900 (2021)	FY2022 10-K	128,400, the peak
The paying remainder as a number	FY2018–FY2023	“The remaining 97,400” (2023)	FY2024 10-K (“the majority of”)	113,600, falling
A limit of ten memberships per site, partly from “provisions in certain of the … agreements”	FY2008–FY2017	—	FY2018 10-K	111,100
The words “Thousand Trails,” “free trial” and “RV dealer” in the supplemental package	through Q4 2025	—	2026 packages (“Membership Campgrounds”; “Promotional Membership Origination”)	107,857, falling
An explanation when the estimated member life changed	FY2016 (31 → 40 years; effect stated)	—	FY2024 10-K (20 → 24 years; no effect stated)	113,600, falling

Sources: the Form 10-K for each year cited, on EDGAR. “Reported count that year” is the Item 2 figure in the 10-K from which the disclosure is gone.

Two things stand out when you read the table against the count. The first is that ELS did tell you these things, in plain words, for years. The FY2013 10-K said “our member count increased by 1,590 members”; the FY2014 10-K said “our member count decreased by 2,147 members.” For three years it told you what share of free-trial recipients bought a membership when the free year ended: in 2014 and 2015 roughly one in five did, in 2016 roughly one in six, and the rest did not. For two years it told you a renewal rate on the pass — approximately 43.1% for 2015 and 31.2% for 2016 — without defining the measure, so I won’t draw a trend from two undefined numbers; but ELS thought the figure worth publishing, and then didn’t. No 10-K since FY2015 has said in a sentence whether the count rose or fell; you compute it yourself, by subtracting one year’s Item 2 figure from the next.

The second is the timing. The disclosures went in two waves. The first, in the FY2017 10-K, removed the attrition curve, both renewal rates and the trial conversion rate — the year before ELS first split the trials out of the count, and while the count was being rebuilt with them. The second came after the peak: the upgrade count went in FY2022, the paying remainder became “the majority of” in FY2024, and the brand name itself left the supplemental package in 2026. Over the same stretch the 10-K’s adjective for the business moved from “strong performance in our membership base” (FY2019 through FY2023, including a year in which paid sales, dealer activations and the count all fell) to “a stable membership base” (FY2024, count down 6.2%) to “stable revenue from our Thousand Trails membership base” (FY2025, count down 4.2%). The adjective has held up better than the base.

One row in the table is about money rather than members, and it belongs here because it is the same pattern. The estimate that governs how the $211.2 million of deferred revenue from upfront payments on membership upgrade sales is recognized is an estimate of how long members stay. ELS has stated it as “from one to 31 years” (FY2009–FY2015), 40 years (FY2016), “up to 40 years” (FY2017), 20 years on adoption of the new revenue standard in 2018, and 24 years since the FY2024 10-K. When it moved from 31 to 40 in FY2016, the note named both figures and said the change “did not have a material impact on revenue recognized.” When it moved from 20 to 24 in FY2024, one number changed in one sentence, with no effect stated and no reason given. The accounting is its own piece, and I’ll leave it there. What bears on this one is narrower: a company whose estimate of member longevity has ranged from 20 to 40 years is a company that holds the cohort data, disclosed a point on that curve in 2009, and does not now.

None of this is required. Membership subscriptions and upgrade revenue together were 5.3% of ELS’s total revenues in 2025, and the business has never been a reportable segment. ELS is entitled to say less about 5% of its revenue. You are equally entitled to notice that what was withdrawn — renewal, attrition, conversion, upgrade count and price, the paying remainder — is precisely the set of measures that would let an outsider test whether the base is healthy, and that the second wave of withdrawals coincided with the base turning down.

None of these measures is exotic. ELS published them, for years, and then didn’t. What you would know if it still did, what you’d need beyond that, and who has all of it — that’s Part III.

Part III — What We Don't Know, and Who Does

This part matters because it is where the piece stops describing and starts asking. Everything in Parts I and II is a filing fact. This is the list of what the filings won’t give you, and the five questions that would fill it in.

If the 2016 disclosures had simply continued, you would know today the renewal rate on the camping pass, the share of free trials that convert, the shape of the attrition curve, how many upgrade contracts were sold and at what price, and the paying remainder as a number rather than a ceiling. With those five figures an analyst could say whether the 88,000 is stable or churning, whether the 23,000 trials a year are a funnel or a headcount, and whether the count is holding because members stay or because cheap ones arrive.

Even then you would need more, because the business changed in 2025 and the disclosures did not change with it. You would need the 88,000 split by product — pass, legacy upgrade, term product — because the three earn very different amounts and leave at very different rates. You would need the average price actually received on a pass against the $755 published, because the page has shown a discount in every archived capture for a decade. You would need the term product’s share of Annual membership subscriptions, because it is the growth and it is not separated. And you would need a definition the supplemental doesn’t give: whether a new customer who buys the enhanced product outright is counted in “Paid Membership Origination,” in “Membership Upgrade Volume,” or both.

We don’t know what we don’t know. That’s the honest summary of Parts I and II, and it is not a complaint about the difficulty of the subject. Every figure on that list exists. ELS knows how many members hold each product, what each of them paid, how many renewed, and how many left, because it bills them. The party that holds every one of these numbers is the party that reports to shareholders, and it published most of them until it stopped. So the questions below aren’t a research agenda. They’re a request.

Five Questions a Prudent Analyst Might Put to Management

ELS holds its third-quarter call in late October. These are the questions I’d want answered, in this order.

Of the approximately 88,000 non-trial members at year-end 2025, how many hold a Thousand Trails Camping Pass only, how many hold a legacy upfront-payment upgrade, and how many hold a two- to four-year term product?
What is the one-year renewal rate on paid camping passes and on RV dealer free trials today, on whatever definition ELS used when it last disclosed those rates for 2016?
Of the growth in Annual membership subscriptions revenue in 2025 and the first half of 2026, how much is dues-rate growth on the base product and how much is revenue from the term products now recognized in that line?
What was the average annual payment actually received on a single-region camping pass sold in 2025, against the $755 published price, and what has the promotional discount averaged over the past five years?
Why did the estimated membership upgrade contract term move from 20 years to 24 in the FY2024 10-K, what was the effect on revenue recognized in 2024 and 2025, and why was the change not described the way the FY2016 change from 31 to 40 years was?

Why a 5%-of-Revenue Business Is Worth the Afternoon

If you cover ELS, here is the reason to spend the time. Five percent is the wrong denominator. Thousand Trails is 5.3% of ELS’s revenue and 26,000 of its 173,400 sites — 15% of the real estate — and the 82 membership campgrounds produced about 9% of property operating revenue on that 15%, roughly $5,200 a site against about $8,300 company-wide (and that is generous to ELS, because the membership-park figure includes the non-member RV rent those parks collect). The member base is why that land earns under its share, and the member base is also what keeps ELS from doing with it what it does everywhere else: convert sites to annual rent, which is where ELS’s RV growth comes from. State closure statutes in California, Oregon and Washington, the ten-per-site limit ELS disclosed for ten years, and legacy contracts that run “for as long as they choose to remain in the program” all stand between ELS and 26,000 sites. So the health of the paying base isn’t a 5% question. It’s the question of whether, and when, that land gets put to its best use.

And the smallest slice of it is the one to watch. The legacy lifetimes’ own line on the income statement — Membership upgrade revenue, $12.4 million in 2025 — is 0.8% of ELS’s revenue. Under one percent. The constraint does not scale with the revenue. Whether ELS can close a campground outright, sell it, or move a park from membership use to annual rent turns on the contracts attached to it and the statutes that govern them, not on how much those contracts earn — which is how a line that is 0.8% of revenue can weigh on the strategic use of 15% of the sites. Those are the contracts that may restrict what ELS can do with a campground — sell it, close it, convert it to annual sites — and that may lock the company into a customer base that, on frozen dues against rising costs, mostly costs it money, until ELS pays to retire them or waits them out. A business that is 0.8% of revenue and may cost millions to unwind, or may hold real estate hostage for a generation, is worth an analyst’s afternoon. I made that argument in full in the frozen-dues piece, along with what ELS could do about it, and in the lifetime-memberships piece; I won’t rehash it here, but it is why the rest of this piece matters.

ELS's Best Case

Every point above has a good answer, and you should hear it. The free trials are disclosed every year in the same sentence as the count; nobody is hiding them, and a free trial that converts at one in five or one in six is a cheap acquisition channel into the more than 8 million households ELS says own an RV. The camping pass is an entry product, and first-year promotions on entry products are ordinary; the discount is recovered at renewal at the published price, and the pass exists to feed the upgrade sale, which is where the revenue is. Subscriptions revenue per paying member is well above the promotional price, because the term products carry $2,500 to $3,000 a year each. Recognizing a term product over its term is what the revenue standard requires, and ELS disclosed the change, the line it lands in, and the price ranges in the year it made it. The 2025 product change was deliberate and disclosed: the company stopped selling a financed upfront product carrying paper at 11.9% and the credit losses that came with it, and membership sales and marketing expense fell 27% as a result. The withdrawn disclosures, ELS would say, described products and measures that no longer fit the business; and a 5%-of-revenue business that is not a reportable segment does not owe investors a renewal rate. All of that is a reasonable position. It is also one that can only be tested with figures ELS holds, which is where this piece started.

If the answers to the five questions are good, the count is healthier than it looks, and I’ll say so. If they aren’t offered, that tells you something too.

Disclosure and about the author. I am a lawyer and former CEO. I use the Thousand Trails system extensively and write about it at LiveFreeRV.com. I operate The Thousand Trails Exchange, a marketplace for resold Thousand Trails memberships, and I review these contracts for a fee. I am a current Thousand Trails member, on a two-year Adventure term rather than a lifetime contract. I refer prospective buyers to Thousand Trails’ sales staff and am eligible for the company’s standard referral fee. To my knowledge I hold no position in ELS; any indirect exposure through mutual funds would be negligible. That is a direct commercial interest in this asset class, and it cuts against me: a shrinking and less valuable membership base is bad for the resale market I operate in. Figures are from ELS’s Forms 10-K for FY2008 through FY2025, the Q1 and Q2 2026 supplemental packages, and ELS’s own Thousand Trails website as archived by the Internet Archive; calculations on disclosed figures are labeled as mine. Where the filings do not disclose a figure, I say so.

Ty's TakeAways.

The reported count is the wrong number. A fifth of it has not paid, and the count that has is below where ELS reported it in 2018.

The base was rebuilt with the cheapest product ELS sells, at a register price that has not moved in fifteen years.

The members ELS cannot lose are the ones it cannot reprice: a fifth of all dues, frozen, on contracts that improve for the holder every year they run.

The one growing line carries a product ELS does not separate out. The growth is real, and it is unmeasured.

Every measure that would let an outsider test the base was in the 10-K once. They left in two waves, the second after the count peaked.

ELS holds every number that would settle this. The five questions in Part III would too.

Sources: Equity LifeStyle Properties, Inc., Forms 10-K for fiscal years 2008 through 2025 and the earnings releases and supplemental financial information for the first and second quarters of 2026, all filed with the SEC and available on EDGAR (CIK 0000895417); thousandtrails.com/membership-info and campingpass.thousandtrails.com as archived by the Internet Archive, 2014–2026, and the live page as of September 21, 2026; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U all items (series CUUR0000SA0). Quotations are verbatim from the filing cited. Where a figure is a calculation on disclosed numbers, the inputs are named in the text.

Republication: the analysis and figures in this article may be quoted or republished with attribution to Ty Chapman and Live Free RV and a link to this page.

Chasing great mountain biking, camping smart, and living full-time in an RV. Hard-won wisdom. Zero fluff. Live Free. Adventure Often

Quick Links.

State by State Info
MTB Info
RV Life
Thousand Trails

Things to Do in Sonoma (If You Don't Drink Wine)

Live Free RV 1.5K

Live Free RV × The TT Exchange

Want to Buy or Sell a Used Membership?

The Thousand Trails Exchange is where vetted used memberships change hands — see what they're really worth right now, whether you're buying or listing your own.

Visit the TT Exchange →

Vetted listings. Real prices. 🚐✨