Alternative real estate asset classes differ from apartments in structure, not only in return. Four things separate them: what the investor actually owns, the depreciation life of what was bought, what limits competing supply, and the remedy when someone stops paying. Self-storage is nonresidential property let month to month, where a statutory lien lets an operator sell the goods instead of running an eviction. Manufactured housing communities rent land to residents who own their homes. Marinas often depend on a state lease of submerged land the operator does not own. Grey Oaks sponsors multifamily only.

Asset classes

Alternative real estate asset classesWhat actually differs, class by class.

Accredited investors are shown storage, parks, marinas and a dozen other classes alongside apartments, usually with the differences described as flavor. They are not flavor. They are different legal structures, different tax lives, different remedies against non-payment and different ways of going wrong.

Published September 3, 2026 · Last reviewed September 3, 2026

The six classes covered here

Each page runs to roughly 2,500 words and is built on primary sources: the statute, the agency rule or the federal data series, linked in the text rather than summarized from a broker's market report.

The four questions that separate one class from another

Ask a sponsor why their class is attractive and you will usually get a demand story: people are downsizing, boat ownership is up, freight needs somewhere to park. Demand stories are the easiest part of any deck to write and the least useful part to compare, because every class has one. Four structural questions do more work, and the answers are checkable.

What does the money actually buy? Land, a building, an entitlement, or a lease of something the seller does not own.
Over what life does it depreciate? Land is never depreciable. Improvements to land run 15 years. Nonresidential buildings run 39.1
What stops a competitor building next door? Zoning, a federal permit, a utility interconnection queue, or nothing at all.
What happens when someone stops paying? An eviction, a lien sale, a repossession, or a credit loss against a single large counterparty.

The table below answers all four for every class on this page. It is the comparison the individual pages expand on, and it is the reason those pages are separate rather than one list: the answers are not close to each other.

Structural comparison of the six classes covered on this hub. Grey Oaks sponsors none of them.
Class	What you own	Depreciation life	What limits new supply	The structural distinctive
Self-storage	Buildings and the land under them	39 years, nonresidential	Little. Cheap and quick to build where zoning allows	A statutory lien lets an operator sell the goods instead of evicting
Mobile home parks	Land, roads and utilities. Residents own the homes	15 years, mostly land improvements	Zoning, and communities are rarely newly entitled	Federal tenant site lease protections where agency financed
RV parks and campgrounds	Land, pads and hookups. Guests bring the vehicle	15 years, mostly land improvements	Local zoning and land cost only	A guest becomes a tenant at a threshold that changes at every state line
Marinas	Upland, and docks often sitting on leased state water	Mixed. Docks and site work are shorter lived	Federal permits under the Rivers and Harbors Act and the Clean Water Act	You may not own the submerged land your revenue depends on
Industrial outdoor storage	Land and a zoning entitlement. The building is incidental	Weak. Land is never depreciable	Municipalities have largely stopped permitting outdoor storage	A legal nonconforming use can be extinguished by a fire
Data centers	A shell whose value is power, cooling and connectivity	Short lived plant inside a long lived shell	Utility capacity and interconnection queues measured in years	Income is a credit position on very few counterparties

What you own is often not the building

In an apartment deal the answer is simple: the partnership owns land and a building, and the building is most of the value. Move one class sideways and that stops being true in ways that change the risk without changing the pitch.

A manufactured housing community owns the land, the roads and the utility infrastructure. The residents own their homes. That single fact reorders everything downstream, because a resident who owns a structure that costs several thousand dollars to move is a very different counterparty from one who owns a lease. Where the community is financed through Fannie Mae, the loan carries required tenant site lease protections, which include a one-year renewable lease term and thirty-day written notice of rent increases.3 Those protections are a condition of the debt, not a state landlord-tenant statute, so they travel with the financing rather than with the property.

A marina is stranger still. The upland may be owned outright while the docks sit over submerged land the state owns and leases, and any work in navigable water requires federal authorization under Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act.4 An investor can hold clean title to the parcel and still hold a revocable interest in the surface that generates the slip revenue. Industrial outdoor storage inverts the usual relationship a different way: the building is close to incidental and the value sits in a zoning entitlement that a municipality has often stopped issuing.

Depreciation life is the difference nobody leads with

Two properties producing identical cash flow can produce very different after-tax outcomes purely because of what the improvements are. The IRS schedule is not ambiguous about this. Residential rental property recovers over 27.5 years2 and nonresidential real property over 39.1 Fifteen-year property covers, in the IRS's own words, "certain improvements made directly to land or added to it (such as shrubbery, fences, roads, sidewalks, and bridges)".1

Read that against the classes on this page. A manufactured housing community and an RV park are mostly roads, pads, utility runs and fencing, which is to say mostly the 15-year category. A self-storage facility is mostly building, which is the 39-year category. The same publication lists "swimming pools, paved parking areas, wharves, docks, bridges, and fences" as land improvements while stating that land itself does not qualify.1 For a marina that is the whole argument in one sentence: the docks are depreciable, the water is not.

This describes the general schedule, not any specific deal. Component lives are decided by a cost segregation study on the actual property and by facts a website cannot see. Nothing here is tax advice, and the depreciation treatment of a particular acquisition is a question for the CPA who signs the return. Our note on what a CPA asks for before a cost segregation study covers the practical version.

The remedy when a payment stops is not the same remedy

Underwriting treats delinquency as a percentage. The mechanics behind that percentage differ enough between classes to change how quickly a problem clears and what it costs.

Self-storage is the clearest example. Rather than evicting a tenant, an operator generally enforces a statutory lien against the stored goods. Virginia's Self-Service Storage Act sets out that structure in state code, and comparable lien acts exist elsewhere, including Iowa's Self-Service Storage Facility Lien Act.56 The unit is recovered in weeks rather than months, but the procedural requirements are strict and an operator who skips a notice step is exposed rather than protected. An apartment in the same situation runs an eviction through the courts on the court's timetable.

RV parks sit at the awkward end of this. Whether a long-staying guest is a transient occupant or a tenant with eviction rights is a threshold set at the state line, and it moves. North Carolina's statutory definition of transient occupancy is "limited to fewer than 90 consecutive days", which leaves the older common-law question of when a guest becomes a tenant live in every stay that falls outside it.7 A data center inverts the problem entirely: there is no eviction question, because the income is a credit position on a small number of large counterparties, and the risk is concentration rather than process.

Supply is the part the deck usually skips

A demand story tells you where rent could go. What limits supply tells you whether it stays there. This is the axis on which the six classes diverge most sharply, and it cuts against the classes that market themselves hardest.

Self-storage is comparatively cheap and fast to build where zoning allows it, which is why strong submarkets attract competition quickly. Manufactured housing communities are rarely newly entitled anywhere. Industrial outdoor storage is constrained because municipalities have largely stopped permitting the use, which is genuine scarcity and also the reason a legal nonconforming use can be extinguished by an event as ordinary as a fire. Data centers are limited by utility capacity and interconnection queues measured in years rather than months, which is a constraint you can read directly in federal generation and capacity data.8

None of that makes a constrained class a better investment. A constraint that protects the owner also caps the exit: the buyer pool for a marina with a state submerged land lease is smaller than the buyer pool for a suburban apartment building, and that shows up in price when it is time to sell rather than when it is time to buy.

How to use these pages

These are comparison pages, not recommendations, and they are most useful read against a specific offering already in front of you. Three suggestions.

Read the structural distinctive first. It is the column in the table above that most often explains a deal that behaved differently from its projection.
Take the questions to the sponsor of that class, not to us. Each page ends with a question set written to be asked of somebody who actually operates it. We cannot answer them for storage or marinas, and a sponsor who cannot answer them for their own class has told you something.
Separate the class from the operator. Most outcomes in private real estate turn on who is running the asset rather than which asset it is. That question is class-agnostic and it is covered in how to vet a sponsor.

For the structure and tax mechanics common to every private real estate deal regardless of class, the investor guides cover waterfalls, preferred return, K-1s and capital calls. For where we would and would not buy apartments specifically, the market guides state a position on 49 submarkets.

References

Internal Revenue Service. Publication 946, How To Depreciate Property. https://www.irs.gov/publications/p946
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 527, Residential Rental Property. https://www.irs.gov/publications/p527
Fannie Mae. Manufactured housing communities: tenant site lease protections. https://multifamily.fanniemae.com/financing-options/manufactured-housing-communities/tenant-site-lease-protections
US Environmental Protection Agency. Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899. https://www.epa.gov/cwa-404/section-10-rivers-and-harbors-appropriation-act-1899
Virginia General Assembly. Virginia Self-Service Storage Act, Title 55.1 Chapter 29. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacodefull/title55.1/chapter29/
Iowa Legislature. Iowa Code chapter 578A, Self-Service Storage Facility Lien Act. https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/code/578A.pdf
UNC School of Government. How does new legislation addressing transient occupancy impact the landlord-tenant analysis in summary ejectment?. https://civil.sog.unc.edu/how-does-new-legislation-addressing-transient-occupancy-impact-the-landlord-tenant-analysis-in-summary-ejectment/
US Energy Information Administration. Electricity data: generation, capacity, consumption and price. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/

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