Frank Rolfe
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Why You Should Never Build A Mobile Home Park
People ask us all the time why, since we’re the 18th largest mobile home park owners in the U.S. and are extremely bullish on the industry, we don’t build new ones. They’ll call us with raw land that they want to sell us to build a new park on. The truth is that we would never build a new park from scratch. We don’t recommend that anyone does. But now let us explain why that is not hypocritical.You can’t build in decent locations todayVirtually every city in the U.S. no longer allows new mobile home park construction. As a result,…
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The Case Against Land-Lease Community Terminology
The mobile home park industry has attempted to re-invent itself many times in the past. Unfortunately, it always seems to revolve around just changing its name, and nothing else. And the name change does little to actually accomplish anything of value, but only serves to confuse people on a product that is already chock full of misconceptions. So here’s an analysis of why the “land-lease” name is not the greatest idea.Nobody understands what Land-Lease Community meansThe original name of “mobile home” at least conveyed the selling point that the home could be moved from one place to another. Of course,…
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Mobile Home Parks Have Advantage In Commercial Real Estate
America takes pride in the concept of freedom of competition. That’s the reason that the Federal Government blocks potential mergers through anti-trust complaints. And the reason that we have laws against unfair competition. We’re the country that puts people in jail for price fixing, and even elects our President through freedom of choice. So how in the world did mobile home park owners get such an unfair advantage – the ability to completely avoid free competition and operate in an environment free of competitive forces?Unfair Advantage #1: Cities won’t allow new parks to be builtIf you own a self-storage facility…
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Make $100,000 A Year Cash Flow With One Mobile Home Park Investment
With the national economy in free fall, and millions of jobs being cut across all industry segments, many people are trying to formulate a plan to replace their income if they get laid off. And to many people, that income can approach $100,000 or more. So how do you replace $100,000 of income. For many people, the answer may be in a good old fashioned trailer park.The Type of Park You’ll NeedTo make an immediate $100,000 in cash flow with a mobile home park, you’ll need to find a park that has around 80 lots. A park with 80 lots…
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How To Get Zero Down Financing On A Mobile Home Park
With single-family homes, a legitimate zero down deal is about as likely as sleet in San Diego. However, with mobile home parks, they are as common as rain. of the 25 mobile home parks I’ve bought, about five of them or 20% — were zero down.So how do you get a zero down mobile home park deal?Just Watch the ListingsMany mobile home parks are listed for sale with seller carry at low amounts down. A 5% or 10% down payment can easily be converted to 0% with a little negotiating. You’ll find many such listings on the large internet park…
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Why The Retail Home Sales Debacle Has Been Great For Community Owners
At the end of the 1990’s, with new manufactured home sales roaring past 400,000 units per year, community owners felt like part of a giant machine, in which their role was to provide continually available lots to retail dealers. I remember a time in which I had a community that received, like clockwork, seven homes per month from a single Palm Harbor dealer. Little did we community owners realize that we were really an accessory in a giant game of loan fraud, in which homes were being sold to customers who could never afford them — and which came crashing…
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How Much Money Can You Make With A Manufactured Home Community?
An article I wrote recently, telling the story of my first manufactured home community that I purchased for $400,000 and sold around ten years later for $1,525,000, raised the ire of a self-styled industry “guru” who contended that such amounts cannot be made with a manufactured home community. Of course, a community we closed on a few weeks ago in Kentucky showed an appraised value of over $1,000,000 more than we paid so it doesn’t seem that unique to us. But it does raise the question of how much money you can realistically expect to make with a manufactured home…
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Why Invest In A Mobile Home Park?
When you write about mobile home park returns you always run the risk of being branded a liar, as nobody believes that you can make 20% plus returns on anything anymore. With a stock market that makes 2% a year, and CDs that make 1%, and single family homes that lose money, investors are just conditioned to expect a low single-digit return – and if you suggest more, they just discard that thinking as a bunch of hype that they’ve heard before in the days of the dot com and housing bubbles.But the truth is that you can make high…
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How Mobile Home Parks Make More Money Than Single-Family Home Investing
Just about anybody who watches late night TV, or receives email, or reads, knows that there are hundreds of people promoting concepts to make money in single family homes. “Buy foreclosures”, “profit from short sales”, “wholesale houses” there are at least 1,000 different concepts. Unfortunately, the only people who actually make money in many of these ideas are the promoters. There are so many people chasing after single-family homes to invest in that the market is beyond saturated, and any profitability has been extinguished.How about looking at something that few people are involved in and that actually generates money for…
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How To Find Seller Financing for Mobile Home Parks
One of the biggest advantages of mobile home parks over other real estate investments is that there is so much seller financing available. Whereas it is the rare exception in apartments, retail, office and industrial, it is very common in mobile home parks. And its availability – at a time when obtaining a bank loan can be nearly impossible – is allowing investors to continue to by when other asset classes are at a near stand-still.Why it is plentifulThere are around 50,000 mobile home parks in the U.S., and about 30,000 of those are still owned by the original “moms…
