The New Zealand Motor Caravan Association is a member-owned incorporated society for people who own motorhomes and caravans, run from its own office in Takanini, south Auckland, with 63 members-only parks around both islands at its last balance date. It is worth a profile because it is the domestic visitor economy’s biggest club, it buys or leases its own land without borrowing, and its audited accounts show a model most tourism businesses never get to try: an audience that pays a subscription before it spends anything else.
A lobby group that bought land
By its own account the association was founded in 1956 by a small group of enthusiasts lobbying for fairer treatment of motor caravan owners. The Societies Register has it incorporated on 6 May 1969. Area representatives arrived in the early 1970s and area committees in 1978; the national office moved into association-owned premises in Takanini in 1995; the board created a chief executive role in 2016, filled since then by Bruce Lochore. It re-registered under the Incorporated Societies Act 2022 on 3 July 2024.
The founding purpose has never gone away. Advocacy on freedom camping rules, council bylaws and vehicle standards is still the first item in its statement of service performance. What changed is that the club started owning places to stay. Its “Places to Stay” strategy, adopted by the board in December 2022, sets a goal of 100 parks by 2032. The accounts record 63 parks at 30 September 2025 and 2,357 places for members to stay; the association’s own site said 66 parks on 27 October 2026.
How it is built now
At 30 September 2025 the association had 123,407 individual members in 67,552 memberships, up 2.4 and 2.5 percent on the year. Its consolidated accounts, which take in 39 area committees and special interest groups, were audited by Blackmore Virtue & Owens, who signed a clean opinion on 30 January 2026. Income was $14.7 million, up 5.3 percent:
| Income, years to 30 September | 2025 | 2024 | Share of 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscriptions and joining fees | $6,483,792 | $5,978,416 | 44.1% |
| Commissions from partner businesses | $2,773,428 | $2,773,206 | 18.9% |
| Park fees (members-only and public parks) | $2,730,093 | $2,509,740 | 18.6% |
| Advertising and trading sales | $1,152,810 | $1,156,728 | 7.8% |
| Area and special interest group income | $731,984 | $711,351 | 5.0% |
| Investment income | $645,325 | $626,464 | 4.4% |
| National rally, donations and other | $195,305 | $213,913 | 1.3% |
| Total income | $14,712,736 | $13,969,817 |
Line items grouped by us from the audited statement of financial performance; they sum to $1 more than the stated total in each year, a rounding difference in the accounts.
Spending was $10.6 million, leaving a surplus of $4.07 million before tax and $3.10 million after it, against $2.83 million the year before. The association pays income tax because most of its surplus comes from dealing with non-members: the tax note treats $3.47 million as non-member income and charges $971,966 at 28 percent.
The work is split between a paid national office and a volunteer structure that does a great deal of the ground work. Six full-time-equivalent senior managers were paid $1,130,397 between them. Its listed volunteers include park custodians, self-containment officers, area committees, technical advisers and disciplinary committee members, and the association names its volunteer culture as one of six things it exists to deliver.
What is worth copying: sell the audience, not just the product
The striking line in the accounts is not subscriptions. It is the $2.77 million of commission paid by eight partner businesses, led by its insurance partner at $2.03 million, which offer members discounted products and pay the association a cut. That is almost a fifth of income, earned without the association providing the service itself. A membership card with 123,000 names behind it is a distribution channel, and the association has priced it like one.
Commission from partner businesses
$2.77m
Earned by the association in the year to 30 September 2025 from eight commission partners, 18.9 percent of its income, and within $222 of the year before. (NZMCA audited consolidated financial statements, 2025)
The second thing worth copying is the order in which money arrives. Members pay ahead, so the balance sheet carries $3.53 million of income in advance, 69 percent of everything it owes in the short term. Cash and investments came to $11.8 million at balance date, and there is no borrowing anywhere in the statement of financial position. Net assets stood at $31.8 million, of which $22.4 million is park property.
The third is that the land is bought from earnings rather than debt. Over the two years the association spent $4.57 million on property, plant and equipment, against $7.90 million of cash generated by operations. The parks also pay their own way: members-only park income of $2.46 million against park spending of $1.70 million left $764,338 in 2025, up from $295,417 in 2024. And because it inspects and certifies vehicles under the government’s self-containment rules, with volunteer self-containment officers in its ranks, the club turned a compliance burden for its members into a service only it could offer at scale. A board report says its inspectors certified 35,193 vehicles between 1 October 2024 and 20 March 2026.
Where the model runs out of road
The audience has a ceiling. Membership is restricted to New Zealand permanent residents, plus overseas residents who have belonged to a recognised partner club for at least twelve months. The association’s own outlook in the accounts expects “minimal growth in 2026”. Joining fees fell 9.8 percent to $979,008 while it waived them for direct family members to keep numbers rising. Subscription income grew 12.5 percent on 2.5 percent more memberships, so much of the growth came from what each membership pays, which works until it does not.
Commission has stopped growing. It was flat to within $222 across the two years while membership grew, and about 73 percent of it comes from a single insurance partner. That is concentration risk in the line that makes the model look clever.
Opening up costs money. The parks the association runs for the public lost $155,076 in 2025 and $177,539 in 2024. The strategy talks about operating public campgrounds in desirable areas; on this evidence the members-only network is the profitable part and public camping is a cost of being a good citizen.
Overheads are climbing faster than income. The national office and compliance cost centre rose 10.8 percent to $3.72 million. Publications cost $1.83 million against advertising sales of $1.11 million, so the magazine and directories are a member benefit rather than a business.
It lives at the mercy of councils. Every new park needs consents and every freedom camping bylaw changes what membership is worth. In April 2026 the board approved a complaint to the Ombudsman over a West Coast mayor’s public claims that self-containment warrant cards were being duplicated, after an official information request found no records supporting them, according to the association’s board report. Its April report also showed about 18,000 vehicles on active memberships still uncertified with a 7 June 2026 deadline approaching. A club whose core product is permission to park has to keep winning arguments it did not start.
The most recent numbers are management figures, not audited ones: the April board report put the surplus for the five months to 28 February 2026 at $1,349,651, $505,728 ahead of budget, and individual membership at 124,992.
What to take away
If you run a business with loyal repeat customers, the association’s lesson is that the relationship can be worth more than the product. It collects subscriptions in advance, earns $2.77 million a year letting partners sell to its members, pays for its parks from cash, and carries no debt. Most operators sell one thing once. This one sells access to an audience, every year, and gets paid before the season starts.
What a reader should be wary of is the edge of the audience. A closed market of New Zealand owners grows only as fast as people buy motorhomes, the partner income has stalled, and the parks that make money are the ones the public cannot use. The association has built a very good club. Whether 100 parks by 2032 is affordable on a membership growing at 2.5 percent a year is the question its next two sets of accounts will answer.
Written from public sources: the New Zealand Motor Caravan Association’s audited consolidated financial statements for the year ended 30 September 2025, with 2024 comparatives, filed on the Incorporated Societies Register on 27 March 2026; the society’s register entry; the association’s published “Who we are”, membership, governance and Places to Stay strategy pages; and its published board report of April 2026. All arithmetic is ours and reconciles to the audited statements within the $1 rounding noted. Written without the operator’s involvement. The Shoulder Season has no commercial relationship with any business it covers, takes no payment for coverage, and gives no subject approval over what is published.
Operator profiles run every week or two, a different business each time. Written from public sources, with no involvement from the operator and no commercial relationship of any kind.