TempHomeFinder vs LongTerm RV vs Shelter On-Site (2026): Which Displacement Housing Service to Call First

The question that picks between these three is not “which is cheapest.” It is “can an occupied RV legally sit on my own lot, and for how many days?” Answer that at your county planning department before you call any of them, because it changes your monthly cost by up to $1,500 and it is the step that stops deliveries at the curb.

All three are part of the RV rental network we operate alongside BestRV. TempHome Finder and LongTerm RV are PopNet Media properties. Shelter On-Site’s own Organization schema gives its legal name as Fireside RV Rental, founded by Garr Russell, who also writes for BestRV. We are telling you that up front because the most useful fact on this page is about how they connect to each other, and you should be able to weigh it knowing who wrote it.

Everything below was measured or quoted from the live sites on September 13, 2026. The zoning counts were first taken on September 11 and re-counted two days later, because they moved.

Side-by-side

	TempHome Finder	LongTerm RV	Shelter On-Site
BestRV rating	4.5 / 5.0	4.0 / 5.0	4.2 / 5.0
What it actually is	Directory and education	Booking broker	Operator
Cost to you	Free	By quote, none published	$1,500–$3,000/month published
Does it own or place rigs?	No, it refers	Places via partners	Delivers and sets up
Bills your insurer directly?	No	Not stated	Yes, monthly, carrier invoiced
Asks lot vs park at intake?	No	Yes	No, assumes driveway
Raises the campsite pad?	No	Yes, arranges it (fees separate)	Not addressed
Speed commitment	None published	None published	48-hour average placement
Rig classes	n/a	Trailer, fifth wheel, Class C	Sized and assigned by them
Best single feature	Sourced ALE explainer	Pad-aware quoting	Direct carrier billing
Weakest point	Zoning data covers 3 states; 40 have none	No published rates	Savings claim overstates its own floor
Phone	(408) 404-5926	(408) 404-5926	(616) 813-0822

Two of these three share a back room

This is the thing worth knowing before you “get three quotes,” and it comes from the companies’ own published pages rather than from us.

LongTerm RV names Escape RMC and Fireside RV Rental as the partner operators it places bookings through. Shelter On-Site’s Organization schema gives its legal name as Fireside RV Rental.

So a LongTerm RV quote and a Shelter On-Site quote can be fulfilled by the same operating company. They are two front doors onto one fleet. That is not a scandal, it is how brokered fulfillment works, but it does mean that calling both and comparing the numbers is not market-testing a price.

What to do instead: treat those two as one quote. Bring a genuinely independent third to the table, usually a peer-to-peer marketplace listing priced by the month. Our Outdoorsy and RVshare reviews cover how the 28-night discounts work on both.

Cost of not knowing: you believe you have tested the market when you have asked the same fleet twice, and you negotiate against yourself.

The pad is the number nobody quotes you

Every RV-versus-hotel comparison in this category quietly assumes the rig sits on the insured’s own property, where the pad is free and the utilities are already there.

Shelter On-Site’s adjuster page describes placing the unit “in the driveway” with “owner on-site.” We read its adjuster and calculator pages on September 11 and again on September 13, 2026 and found no statement on who pays for a pad if the lot will not work. We are not going to invent one.

A private RV resort pad runs roughly $400 to $1,500 a month, per the rate research behind our long-term RV rental guide. Run that through Shelter On-Site’s own calculator default, which is $135 a night for 120 nights of hotel against $2,200 a month for four months of RV:

Scenario	RV total, 4 months	Hotel total	Saving
On your own lot (their default)	$8,800	$16,200	46%
Park pad at $400/month	$10,400	$16,200	36%
Park pad at $1,500/month	$14,800	$16,200	9%

The consequence: at the top of the pad range the RV has stopped being a cost-saving measure and has become a proximity-and-comfort decision. That may still be the right call when you want to stay on your street and watch the rebuild. Just make it knowingly.

LongTerm RV is the only one of the three that asks. Its quote form takes dates, ZIP, lot versus park, pets and ALE claim fields, and it runs a dedicated park pad plus RV page. It arranges the pad but does not absorb it: its pricing page states that “pad fees are separate when you need a site.” Being asked still beats being surprised. TempHomeFinder’s form takes name, email, phone, ZIP and situation category. Shelter On-Site’s assumes the driveway.

We checked Shelter On-Site’s savings claim against its own numbers

Shelter On-Site markets a “50–70% Reduction in ALE Spend” to adjusters. The same page publishes the rates that claim is built from, so it is checkable.

Scenario, 6 months on their published figures	Hotel	RV	Actual saving
Cheapest RV vs priciest hotel	$54,000	$9,000	83%
Their own calculator’s default (4 months)	$16,200	$8,800	46%
Priciest RV vs cheapest hotel	$27,000	$18,000	33%

Their adjuster page puts hotels at $4,500–$9,000 a month and their RV at $1,500–$3,000 a month. The real band across their own numbers is 33% to 83%, not 50% to 70%, and their own calculator returns 46% on its default scenario, which sits below the advertised floor.

The consequence: ask for a quote in dollars per month for your ZIP and household size, then compare it against one real extended-stay quote in your own market. Do not plan against the national range.

Cost of taking the headline at face value: on a six-month claim, the gap between the advertised 50% and the actual 33% is roughly $4,500 of ALE budget you thought you had.

The zoning database went from one state to three in 48 hours

TempHomeFinder’s county RV zoning tracker is the only public attempt we have found at indexing whether you can legally live in an RV on your own land, county by county. We counted it on September 11, 2026, when California was the only state with rows. We re-counted on September 13. Three states now carry real data, roughly 110 researched counties between them:

State	Counties researched	Detail pages	Allowed / Conditional / Prohibited	Phone-verified
Florida	55 of 67	49	3 / 28 / 18	0
Louisiana	48 of 64 parishes	—	4 / 9 / 5	2
California	7 of 58	6	0 / 6 / 0	1

Texas, Colorado, Oregon and Washington all showed zero researched counties when we spot-checked them on September 13. The nationwide header still reads “3 verified · 197 in research,” so the state pages are running ahead of the summary.

If you are in Florida, this is now a usable lookup rather than a framework. Everywhere else it is still a question list. Credit where it is due: the site labels desk-researched rows as researched and unknown rows as unknown, rather than filling gaps with plausible guesses.

”Prohibited” does not mean prohibited after a disaster

This is the correction the Florida data makes possible, and it is the most valuable thing in the dataset.

Eighteen of Florida’s researched counties are marked prohibited. Open the detail pages and several of them carry an explicit post-disaster exception anyway:

• Collier County prohibits RV living as a baseline, then allows an RV as temporary housing when the county has confirmed major damage to your principal residence, capped at 180 days.
• Orange County is marked prohibited, and its record says an RV may be occupied as temporary shelter where a single-family residence is uninhabitable due to natural disaster.
• Louisiana separately documents 4 parishes with post-disaster exceptions.

The assumption this corrects: a displaced homeowner sees “prohibited” next to their county, concludes the RV is off the table, and books a hotel. In at least two of Florida’s prohibited counties, the disaster is precisely the thing that unlocks the permit. The baseline rule and the disaster rule are different rules.

Ask it in these words: “Does the county have a temporary housing or post-disaster exception for an RV on a lot with a damaged principal residence?” Not “can I park an RV here.” The first question gets a yes in places where the second gets a no.

Cost of the wrong question: an extended-stay hotel at $4,500–$9,000 a month against an RV at $1,500–$3,000, on a claim where you could have stayed on your own street.

The day limit runs from 60 days to five years

Now that three states have durations on record, they can be lined up. Nobody else has compiled this.

County	Permit	Day limit	Renewals for a 24-month rebuild
Marion County, FL	Temporary Use Permit (TUP)	60 days	About 12
Butte County, CA	Administrative Permit, camping with hookups	180 days	About 4
Collier County, FL	Post-disaster temporary housing	180 days	About 4
Calhoun County, FL	Annual RV Permit ($100) or Temporary ($50/180d)	365 days	1
Lake, Napa & Sonoma Counties, CA	Temporary dwelling / trailer / occupancy permits	365 days	1
Ventura County, CA	Zoning clearance, County Planning Director	Up to 5 years post-disaster	None

The consequence: in Marion County a 24-month rebuild means roughly twelve trips back to Growth Services, each one a chance to be denied. In Ventura County the five-year post-disaster clearance outlasts your insurance by two years, so the county is not your constraint at all. Same rebuild, same policy, opposite planning problem.

So ask the renewal question, not the approval question. “How many times does this renew, and what triggers a denial?” Approval on day one tells you almost nothing.

The cap that ends your coverage is time, not money

The Washington Office of the Insurance Commissioner puts typical ALE limits at 20–30% of dwelling coverage and 12–24 months. Three states set statutory floors after a declared disaster: California Insurance Code §2060, Colorado HB22-1111 and Oregon HB 3272 each require 24 months, extendable to 36.

Run an $80,000 cap (a $400,000 dwelling limit at the 20% low end) against our own monthly medians, from the July 2026 pull of 3,398 live listings behind the long-term RV rental guide:

Rig class	Monthly rate	Months $80,000 funds	Which cap bites first
Travel trailer	$1,900–$2,600	31–42	Time. You hit the statutory ceiling with money left
Class C motorhome	$3,400–$4,800	17–24	Money. You run dry at or before the statutory floor
Class A motorhome	$4,500–$6,300	13–18	Money, with about a year unfunded

The consequence: rig class, not claim size, decides whether you run out of money or run out of time. On the same cap, a travel trailer funds roughly 14 more months than a Class C. LongTerm RV carries trailers, fifth wheels and Class Cs, so ask for the trailer quote alongside the motorhome quote in the same call.

Why two years is the realistic planning number: three years after the Marshall Fire, about two-thirds of the 1,105 destroyed Boulder County homes had been rebuilt, which Boulder Reporting Lab notes is far above the national average of 25% rebuilt within five years of a wildfire. Plan against the national number.

What most people assume, and get wrong

The assumption: that these three are competitors you should price against each other.

The reality: they are three stages of one process, and the right answer is often to use more than one. TempHomeFinder tells you what your policy owes. LongTerm RV prices the rig and the pad together when you do not have a lot. Shelter On-Site puts a unit on the driveway and bills the carrier. TempHomeFinder routes monthly RV requests to LongTerm RV, and LongTerm RV places through Fireside, which is Shelter On-Site. It is a chain, not a bake-off.

The second assumption: that the monthly rate is the number to negotiate. It is not. The pad, the permit renewal, and the ALE time limit each move more money than a few hundred dollars off a rig.

Which one to call

1. Call county planning first. Not any of these three. Ask what permit an occupied RV on your own lot needs, what the day limit is, and how many times it renews. This answer determines everything downstream.
2. Read your declarations page for two numbers: the ALE dollar cap and the ALE time limit. The time limit is usually the one that ends the coverage.
3. If you are still working out what you are owed, start at TempHomeFinder. It is free, the ALE guidance cites primary statutes, and it costs you nothing to orient.
4. If the county said no to your lot, call LongTerm RV. It is the only one whose quote accounts for a park pad, and that is worth up to $1,500 a month.
5. If the county said yes and you have an open claim, call Shelter On-Site. It publishes a rate and invoices your carrier directly, which solves the cash-flow problem that hurts most displaced families.
6. Get one genuinely independent monthly quote from a marketplace listing before you sign, because a LongTerm RV quote and a Shelter On-Site quote may come from the same fleet.
7. Ask for the travel trailer quote alongside whatever they recommend. On a long claim it is worth about 14 extra months of covered housing.

Sources

• Washington Office of the Insurance Commissioner, Additional living expenses coverage — ALE typically 20–30% of dwelling coverage, 12–24 months.
• California Insurance Code §2060 — no less than 24 months after a state of emergency, extendable to 36.
• Colorado HB22-1111 (enrolled) — at least 24 months, with two six-month extensions offered.
• Oregon HB 3272 (2021, enrolled) — 24 months for wildfire losses, two six-month extensions.
• Boulder Reporting Lab, Marshall Fire recovery three years on — two-thirds rebuilt at 36 months; national average 25% within five years.
• temphomefinder.com/rv-zoning, plus /rv-zoning/fl, /rv-zoning/la and /rv-zoning/ca — county counts, permit names and day limits measured September 11 and re-measured September 13, 2026.
• shelteronsite.com/adjusters and /calculator — savings claim, published rates, 48-hour placement, direct billing. Checked September 13, 2026.
• shelteronsite.com/about — Organization schema giving legal name Fireside RV Rental.
• longtermrv.rentals and /pricing — intake fields, park pad page, “pad fees are separate” statement, partner operators. Checked September 13, 2026.
• BestRV listing data — July 2026 pull of 3,398 live listings across 71 US cities. Methodology in the long-term RV rental guide.