Sky Park RV Ranch

This park does not have a nightly or weekend rate because they cater to the full time RV traveler with weekly or monthly stays as their intention. This is a wonderful place to live except during the summer heat. Newsflash, my RV has wheels and it can move to cooler climates. Pluses you are not piled in on top of each other, FREE fiber park internet, FREE laundry, quite country setting, gated community, onsite managers that are available and attentive to your needs, good water, good cell coverage, non-smoking park, this is a big plus for me but others see as a minus, go somewhere else. Negatives for some - 6 miles to town where there is a family owned grocery, pubs, and restaurants. It's another 4-5 miles from there to HEB and Walmart. Make your list and go once a week if you must shop at the big markets. I have enjoyed the peace and quite here more than I imagined possible. I'm actually staying 5 weeks at the $500 plus electric rate pro rated for the 5th week. that was not easily explained in the days stayed and rate entries section

Everything was okay until approximately May 2020. No charcoal cooking fires. They sent an email that said and I quote, “ as long as you understand we have No Insurance coverage for any Damages to you, Your Neighbors Or XS12RVRanch Property in the event of a Fire”

No unregistered visitors in park preserve the beautiful part of the park. The front of the park is undeveloped and not even mowed. We were told none of the amenities could be used by unregistered guests. The tennis/basketball ball area is an amenity. So that leaves where the campers are and a small picnic you can’t grill in and fire pit we are also not allowed to use.Neighbors started talking and complaining. I had been there almost a year and have talked to these people, some daily. So, of course they came to me with questions. There was a Private Facebook Group not affiliated with the park or Management.  But, the owners wife asked the original group manager to let this new woman into our group. By the end of that day the group was gone and everyone forcefully removed from the group. I opened a Private Facebook page for neighbors virtual and actual. People started leaving the park and my Facebook group was blamed. One of my so called friendly neighbors joined the page and took screenshots to send to management. On July 6th, I got a cease and desist letter from Managements lawyers. On July 6th I asked said law firm for clarification on what posts needed removed. Silence. I again requested clarification from the lawyer on June 7th. Silence.  But, July 7th a 3-day Eviction notice was emailed to me. The owner of the park called my husband. He told my husband if I shut down my page we could stay forever. Because we were perfect tenants. Later that same day I noticed the sprayer in the dog park was leaking badly. My husband texted the owner to report this. The owner had the nerve to call and ask my husband to go switch the water off for him. He evicts us but still asks us to do him a favor. SMH

So During the highest spike in  Texas Covid-19 pandemic. My 60 yr old husband with multiple medical problems and I with multiple medical problems have to move. On top of that we have no truck to move the RV. We rented a truck before but not during a pandemic. Our trailer had no plates or inspection because Covid has everything shut down. So how can we hire a driver who will want proof of inspection and valid plates? We can’t stay there because even if I shut the group down we would have no way to prove it was gone. And can we trust this owner? Will he just keep making up imaginary problems and blaming us? Will he become more violent and threatening to me or my husband? A kind local Rv park owner any a few of our RV friends made it possible for us to leave. Thank God. We were told we would get our deposit and pro rated rent back. But so far no money or response from the owner. The owner just called and told my husband, We won’t get our deposit back unless I give a favorable review. We shall see.

As per other reviews comments. For Kit G. The whole year I lived there we were never even close to full, so them holding your site was not an issue. As for the free meals they provided. They were not good. We threw out the chicken, pizza and tacos they served us. We thanked him for them because that’s what civil people do, even if you don’t like the food. We declined the free meals after that.

Lastly the fire at the ranch in July 2019 was in the preserve and caused by a lightning strike. I had just moved in and was there for it. It happened over night. No one was even in the preserve, and no grills are located near that area. There are no trees or grass on the parking pads and if the owner mowed the tall weeds behind the RVs there would be no flammable material near a campers grills.
As of 6-28-20 covered grills are now allowed.

Our experiences at XS12 RV Ranch located in Liberty Hill, TX have spurred a sudden need to review the places we stay. This includes the good, the bad, the ugly and in a few cases things that are absolutely baffling.



And the per night stay is based on our contracted rate of 560 a month plus power for the duration of our stay.

TLDR: “It does not matter how beautiful and how well maintained a park is if the owners do not treat their staff and residents with dignity and respect. If this was just a matter of how wonderful the facility is on it’s own, this review would contained 5 Stars and end here. Unfortunately this glowing review ends with plot twists that we did not see coming.”

Up until the weeks leading to our recent departure, I genuinely loved the ranch. The residents, both short and long term, have fantastic. We were lucky enough to have a property manager who lived on site. The property is gorgeous once you get away from the runway. Unfortunately where our sites are, there is just no shade because you live on a runway, at an airport that was once a flight school. Despite the lack of shade, there is just something awesome about saying your driveway is a runway. Just something amazingly cool about being able to say that you live full time at an airport.

The Ranch Itself

The ranch itself has fifty two available RV sites that are well sized and even fit our 44 foot Grand Design 397TH. There is plenty of room in each site to put our ramp down to enjoy our patio and even park our motorcycle at the nose. With concrete slabs for your rig to sit on, there are no concerns about your rig being stable. The sites themselves are crushed stone with full hookups and very few concerns about water availability. While we were there we only experienced a handful of power blips caused by storms.

Since our arrival in February there have been a number of changes made to the park. From the addition of a small fenced in dog park with a watering station for your furbaby to a major upgrade in the quality of internet provided to residents.
The internet was initially spotty despite the presence of site to site towers on the property. Due to the number of residents growing, the onsite service was wasn’t able to keep up, though there aren’t many parks that can. As my husband is a full time coder, poor internet was not an option for us, we opted to maintain our three mobile wireless providers in addition to the parks wifi. He has us set up in such a way that our router will switch over to the strongest internet signal available. I do not believe that during our residence that the parks wifi was ever our default connection.

We left the park just as they were finalizing the installation of new internet and access points. This internet update was definitely needed and will hopefully be well received once the kinks are worked out as a large portion of residents are currently working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

While the Heli Hangar was closed due to the AC being down, we were told that it would be reopening later this summer for gatherings and events, like Sunday Brunch, once a new unit is installed.

Owner Responsiveness

That said, the ranch is a great spot for you and your kiddos to enjoy a gated community without the worry for through traffic. There were previous incidents with deliver drivers, the majority being Amazon Prime, who did not obey posted speed limits. One of these incidents I experienced myself when a driver sped through the taxiway between RVS. I literally dove out of a delivery drivers way and hit the deck as they raced by. I freely admit it was not my best moment, that my pride may have been bruised and I followed him to the gate and gave him a piece of my mind which might have possibly included a bit of a Karen attitude. There are children at the ranch that are not as observant as I am. Luckily it was early enough in the day that they weren’t out.

This situation resulted in a change in delivery policies. Instead of packages being taken directly to residents, they are being left at the arrivals building. This showed and proved to residents that owners were quick to respond to resident concerns. The owner spoke with me regarding plans to add speed bumps to the residential portion of the ranch but he did elude to the fact you could not put them on the runway. He told me during that conversation he would explain that later. Luckily he did not. This situation proved to me that the owners were involved in the ranch even though they were not often onsite.

Great Resident Community

Residents also had a community FaceBook group that they ran that wasn’t affiliated with the ranch where residents were able to get to know each other, offer each other support, check in when things weren’t going as expected, or just for quick notifications. For example, on days we had water issues, I’d reached out to the owner after checking in with neighbors and then posted to the group letting them know that it was being looked into. It was also great to have a spot to check in if something was wrong because the majority of the issues that happen aren’t going to be specific to the park and an issue with a residents rig or equipment. We used this to help troubleshoot each other’s problem and life was pretty ideal. (More about this later).

The Property

The property is well planned out and easily navigated. There are plans in the works to add an additional fifty RV sites to Phase I, and another section further down the runway has been roughly planned for Phase II.

Keep in mind that this little map does not include the 250 acres that include a mile and a half of trails. It is also missing a swimming hole, dock, kayaks, paddle boat, great picnic areas, and wonderful places for our four legged friends to swim.

The one thing about the ranch that was tough is how hot it gets out there on the taxiway. This is because of the concrete and a lack of trees, which you can’t really have at an airport. This made it a bit harder to enjoy the ranch as a whole as you couldn’t deploy awnings to help get the sun off your rig due to the wind. In our case, our rig has full body paint with the majority of the shell being painted black.
That means we get toasty pretty quick. Our three AC units kept up with the heat, but added to our expenses, and we had only had three days hit triple digits. With the Texas summer coming we knew we needed to make plans to travel and make our way north before our power bill at the ranch crept over $180. OUCH!

Handling Rent

My husband did not like the fact that we were sending credit card information through unsecured email. We updated our payment method and our contract was emailed back to us with the old number covered by a post it note and the new number written on it. You could see still see the old number in the scan. While we did
not experience any security issues with our account, I do encourage anyone out there to use a privacy card to pay for their RV adventures. You can set up a credit card for individual recurring payments at Privacy.Com at no cost. This way if something happens, you can just cancel the card number without worrying about the number being used again without permission.

The Break Down – Loosing Resident Community

You could say that we had every intention to return to the ranch this fall. We made this decision ahead of planning our summer despite the long distance commute to my husband’s office once it reopens next spring. It was just after we let the owners know that we would be leaving for the summer that things took a surprising turn.

The Admin of the community FaceBook group left the property to travel for the summer and attempted to install other admins. I would have said yes when I was asked, but we had our travel plans on the calendar and were getting ready to bounce around State Parks and the Thousand Trails system. This was appealing because we wouldn’t have to pay a power bill and could set our AC to 70 all day, every day, and lower at night if we wanted. It meant cutting our monthly spending for our site rental and power by more than half.

While conversations regarding who the admins would be of our community group occurred, the owners requested to add one of their vendors as an additional admin. Less than 24 hours after adding their admin, all discussions regarding anything even questionably maintenance related or reflecting negatively on the property itself (things residents didn’t like) or the owners was quickly scrubbed from the group. The rules were updated to indicate we should not discuss maintenance related issues and that all posts about maintenance related issues would be deleted.

It took a bit, but after chatting with other residents, I explained to the vendor reasons we post on the group about issues before reaching out to the owner or property manager. In the long run, the majority of the issues residents encounter were specific to their rigs and not the property. I provided examples and explained that without communicating with each other, we can not verify if the issues were wide spread or just us without talking to each other.

The vendor blocked all of the residents on their personal account, removed us from group and then archived it. Several conversations with the owners later we were assured that the vendor didn’t delete the group and that if she had, we would be invited back to it by the end of the next day.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Drama like this tends to leave a sour taste in your mouth and conflicting stories from the owners over the situation made it worse.

Initial Rating And What Baffled Us

I had been working on a constructive review for FaceBook and Yelp. Initially I had planned for a solid 3 Stars despite the insanity.

And then this review popped up on FaceBook, posted directly to the ranches reviews. I am providing a screenshot after receiving permission from the reviewer.

I’m sure that there’s more to the story (the local police and sheriff blotters and Jay himself said there isn’t), but this was a bit of a kicker. I’m fairly certain that this review will be taken down by the admin in the future, but it’s been the talk of the new group that the residents are chatting in.

[UPDATE: The XS12 RV Park page on Face Book no longer has the ability to leave reviews. I’m not sure if this is to hide the bad review or to prevent the masses that have recently left the park from reviewing on a very public level. A link to Jay’s review regarding being trespassed from the property still exists with a direct link.]

Needless to say things are absolutely crazy out there at the ranch. Overall I give the park itself a solid 5 Stars. It’s pretty amazing for the short term and not during the super crazy Texas Summer. I even initially gave the management a solid 4 Stars because our on site manager was fantastic and the owners were quick to respond to resident concerns.

And then there was the moment you realize how crazy things were out there and how bad the still are.

Over All Review and Final Thoughts

Face it, after nearly five months out at the ranch, we made several long lasting friendships with some amazing people. A number of us chat and post back and forth to each other via social media and what I do know is that several have already left, some are scheduled to leave and others are making plans to leave.

When you consider how special a place like this can be because of it’s uniqueness, it’s heartbreaking to see it fall a part like this and I genuinely hope that things improve for current and future residents.

Recommendation: If you need a solid place to land short term, a week to a month or two, and you’re able to deal with an absurd amount of crazy and manipulation, then this place is for you as long as you are using a privacy card. They don’t follow proper security measures that are required federally for handling their residents sensitive information.

If being manipulated and pitted against each other, or being threatened by the owner after paying your deposit and attempting to move in on the day you’ve planned to move in on is not your thing, well, this place is definitely not for you. Since I have to leave a rating, I leave two stars for effort because it’s a beautiful, well maintained park. If the review itself was based on how we were treated as residents, and how other residents were treated, I’d leave none if possible.

I do not recommend this RV Park for long term, 3 month + stays. There are too many amazing places in this region to explore and experience without having to deal with the insanity currently happening.

[UPDATE: Following our initial review to Yelp and Google, we began to receive harassing, threatening and unprofessional contact from the park owner, including an article about anger management While the park itself is amazing, if you chose to park here, interact with the property management only and not the owners.

Please understand that we are not angry with the owners. This park is truly an amazing and unique place to live, however the way residents and employees have been treated is nothing short of horrific.Be wary.]