How I Made A Million Dollars With A Mobile Home Park --And How You Can Too, Even In This Recession

By Frank Rolfe, MobileHomeParkStore.com

The mobile home park industry is terribly misunderstood. There is massive opportunity, but everybody is looking in all the wrong places. Why? Because mobile home park investing, properly done, requires trusting in the opposite of what your initial instincts are. That's because it is an unusual investment real estate niche that does not work like apartments, single-family homes, duplexes, or any other form of housing you have ever seen before. And its advantages make those other forms of investment appear pale by comparison.

In most forms of real estate, the more upscale the property, whether it's a Class A skyscraper, or prime retail anchored by Chanel and Polo, the more valuable it is. And in most real estate niches, you have to take a lot of risk and leverage to play the game. Well, forget all that with mobile home parks. It's all about the downscale part of the market, and seller carry if you want to make a million dollars. Here's one example.

I bought my first park for $400,000 with $10,000 down and the seller carrying a $390,000 mortgage with no personal recourse. The location was near downtown Dallas, and the neighborhood was horrible. But the park served a clear purpose it was affordable detached housing for people with low incomes. The reason I could buy it so cheap and with so little down was that it showed terribly  no sane person would buy a dump like that with so much deferred maintenance.

Of course, the deferred maintenance was mostly cosmetic. It was nothing that paint, an edger, a mower, some tree trimming, some trash collection and some pothole repair could not resolve. But even then, there were the collections problems, lack of management and a virtual culture of non-payment and no respect for park rules. All of that had to be corrected through evictions and non-renewal of leases. Sure, it was unpleasant. But it was necessary.

Once I had cleared out the bad element, I had to focus on attracting new customers, and to bringing in mobile homes to occupy vacant lots. And I had to suffer through the loss of my natural gas system and problems with my master-metered electrical system. I had to put another $100,000 in capital into the park during this time, which brought my total down payment to the standard 20%.

And after surviving such tough times and harrowing moments, I was rewarded with a $1,525,000 sale to another investor group, which netted us about $1,000,000 after paying off the seller note and recapturing our down payment.

What made this story possible? While I was working on the problems, the basic business was taking care of itself. Why? Because there is always a demand for affordable housing and it costs about $3,000 to move a trailer, so you don't have to worry about customers moving out on you. In addition, I was not responsible for anything but the dirt. I did not have to run around doing repairs on homes. And the entire time this was going on, I did not have the pressure of a full recourse loan  my worst case scenario was just giving the property back.

Can you do the same thing I did? Yes, if you can find a great deal and know what to do with it. I was very lucky on my deal, because I didn't know what I was doing, and I made some guesses which turned out to be pretty good. But I also made some huge, costly mistakes. But you don't have to. With our Mobile Home Park Investing Home-Study Course, we will show you exactly what the correct steps are in buying a mobile home park, and how to manage it into a profitable investment.

Will you make a million on every park you buy? Absolutely not. But we can definitely put the odds in your favor, whatever your goals are.

Go to www.mobilehomeparkstore.com or call (800) 950-1364 and learn all about mobile home park investing, and our specialty products for investors.

And one more thought. The time to find good deals is when things are bad. This is the worst recession since the Great Depression. Harness that negativity into the buying opportunity of a lifetime. You can skirt the financing void with seller carry notes. And the focus on affordable housing means that the worse things get, the more customers there are. There are about 1,250 mobile home parks available right now on our website. And there are still thousands out there that might be for sale that are not on the site yet. You should be calling on these deals and using them to achieve your dreams.