Articles

The 2008 Olympics in Beijing offers an important lesson to the manufactured housing industry. Here you have an event where athletes have taken a certain specialty, a certain strength, and turned it into an extremely advanced skill.

You only need one mobile home park. That's all you need to create a sizable asset and a consistent source of income. That's assuming you buy it and operate it correctly.

Nobody can own a mobile home park without having at least one run-in with the city inspector. They normally come out of nowhere, and often when you think you are doing a great job with your park. There is no reason for embarrassment everyone has been there.

If your definition of a good buy is to buy low, and buy when "there is blood in the streets", then this is the time to buy mobile home parks. Prices have never been lower, and sellers more desperate, since the mid-1990s. And there does not appear to be any improvement on the horizon.

It is impossible to be a landlord and not receive frequent requests to "help" your tenants. These requests normally revolve around payment of the rent either to pay late or to pay a reduced amount. And the way you handle these requests has a huge impact on your business, and the life of your tenant.

Although it has taken us literally thousands of pages to describe how to do due diligence and operate mobile home parks effectively, the general theory on how to make money with mobile home park investments could fit on the back of an envelope.

When you buy a mobile home park, and if you currently own a mobile home park, it's a pretty safe bet that you need to change the name. Because most mobile home parks have terrible names that, sadly, could be used as a marketing tool if only they were different.

Mobile home park tenants are not rich. Most of them live from paycheck to paycheck. As a result, they frequently don't pay their bills on time sometimes at all. To motivate these tenants to pay their lot rent on time, you must enact a late fee for rent that is not received by the due date.

Many park owners feel that it is their duty as the owner to rule with an iron hand. They think that they can cure all of the park's ills with rule after rule. At many parks, the rules section is longer than the lease itself.

Nothing is more disconcerting than approaching a nice manufactured home community and seeing that the name on the sign is "Roll-a-coach" or "Mobile Heaven". If it is not bad enough that the industry is constantly battling the stigma of being lesser quality housing