Articles

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

Like all forms of real estate, mobile home parks have had about a decade-long run of easy financing and low cap rates. However, those good old days are over. And the result can be some of the best yielding mobile home park deals since the first trailer rattled down the interstate.

There are few things more attractive about the mobile home park business than seller financing. Non-recourse seller financing allows the buyer to escape the hassle and scrutiny of bank lending, while at the same time offering some degree of insurance against fraud

When I first got into the manufactured home community business, everyone was obsessed by the concept of a "star" system 1 for poor, 2 for mediocre, 3 for average to good, 4 for better and 5 for best. Owners would love to outdo each other by boasting "my property is a four-star, how many is yours?"

Some people invest in Google. Some buy shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Other invest in Apple. But sheer investment geniuses invest in bushes. And trees. Because if you own a manufactured home community, these are, dollar for dollar, the best investments you will ever make. How good are the returns?

Mobile home park tenants use, on average, about $30 per month of water & sewer. In some parks, however, that amount can run around $100 per occupied lot. Whenever you become suspicious that your water is running too high, here are the steps to find out where the water is going and proactively solve the problem.

Of all the barometers of park performance, from a profit and loss statement to the annual license renewal, one of the crudest and simplest is the fine art of analyzing grass. Because you can tell a lot about a mobile home park just from looking at the grass.