Event Focuses on Prospering in Mobile Home Parks in a Recession

Mobilehomeparkstore.com, America's most popular website devoted to the mobile home park industry, is hosting a conference on February 20 - 22 in Anaheim, California entitled "Successful Mobile Home Park Strategies for the U.S. Recession". This three-day event also features one day devoted to self-storage investing, which has many of the same low management/high return features as mobile home park investing.

"We get 10,000 hits per day at the site, and one of the number one questions is what the current U.S. recession will do to the industry," says Dave Reynolds, owner of Mobilehomeparkstore.com. "So we decided to hold a special event to address this issue from all angles and all aspects of the mobile home park business". Speakers will range from park owners to mobile home manufacturers, asset protection experts, mobile home park brokers, mobile home park lenders, and many others 15 speakers in total.

What are some of the features of the mobile home park industry that make it attractive to investors during the recession at a time when most real estate investments are falling apart? The first, and most compelling, reason is the simple fact that it is based on "affordable" housing; essentially housing for people with lower incomes. This group, who frequently earn only minimum wage, are feeling little impact from the large-scale layoffs affecting most American workers. "While many well-paid workers ranging from assembly line workers to office managers are losing their jobs, the folks who work at fast-food restaurants and grocery stores and thousands of other low-paid occupations, are not seeing any cutbacks at all", said Reynolds. This is becoming the most dependable and employable of all wage levels. Indeed, even the government initiatives that are being discussed to jump-start the economy, such as re-building America's infrastructure, will be positive for this segment of the economy. Also, as workers lose their well-paying jobs and seek to downscale their housing also plays well into the mobile home park business. The timeliness of this type of investing has never been better  it is a counter-cyclical strategy.

Equally important are standard industry cap rates of 10% to 20%, and cash on cash returns of 20% to 50%. These high returns are fairly common in this unusual investment niche. In addition, many sellers are willing to self-finance the transaction, so you do not have to obtain a bank loan, and can often borrow with non-recourse. Mobile home park yields are probably the highest of any real estate investment class. And the recession is actually making these yields higher as desperate sellers reduce prices even further.

Another extremely attractive feature of mobile home park investing during the recession is the inability of the customer to leave one park for a better deal at another. "At a cost of around $3,000 to move, set and skirt a mobile home, there is no way a customer can afford to move their mobile home from one park to another", says Reynolds. "Studies have shown that 90% of mobile homes are never moved again once they are set up in the first mobile home park". As a result, your revenue as a park owner is very stable since customers may come but they never go. And no matter how bad the recession gets, that is unlikely to change.

Some of the most important features of the event will be the discussion and strategies park owners can use to fill lots. Manufacturers will be there to review their lowest cost products that can be purchased by park owners to bring in and sell themselves. There will also be speeches on how to retro-fit mobile homes to make them work more effectively as rental units, and over ten different, fresh strategies to fill lots without waiting for dealerships to call. Mobile home park lenders will discuss current trends in financing and strategies to get loans in a tough economy.

This event will only happen once, and will not be repeated. If you go to just one investment conference this year, this should be the one.

For more information on this event visit the Mobile Home Park Summit Page.