HOW TO COMPENSATE A MANAGER FOR MAXIMUM OUTPUT
by Corey Donaldson 

It is critical to compensate managers of your mobile home park - both financially and non-financially. To get and keep good management, it is vital that you (as the owner) work with your managers by setting (and helping them to achieve) business and personal goals. It is good to offer incentives for hard work, surprises for a job well done, and finally entrusting them with some of the decision making.

A manager needs a good base salary, but I feel it is very important to set goals that are tied to bonuses so that the manager will want to work harder in order to achieve additional income - aligning their financial goals with yours. You need a combination of financial and non-financial compensation. Non-financial compensation would be really understanding what their goals are (both personal and business), and helping them achieve not only their business goals, but also their personal goals. For example, at one of my mobile home parks in Texas the manager really wants to learn the business of mobile home parks so that in the future she can own a smaller mobile home park of 15 to 25 mobile homes. This will provide her a residual income every month from her own mobile home park so that she does not have to work as hard, and also will have a sound retirement plan. I am coaching her so she can understand both the management and the business side of a mobile home park in order to help her achieve her long-term goals.

Another manager in Texas likes the management of a mobile home park, but would really like to relocate from the small town she currently lives in, to a bigger town. Her long-term goal is to stay with our company, but to be moved to a bigger property where she can raise her family in a better environment. And so we are helping her to understand that if she does a good job for us in her current position, then we will go ahead and promote her to another property that will better suit her needs. She, too, then achieves her goals - and so do we.

Providing managers a base salary that is solid and competitive in the marketplace allows them to live easily from day to day so they do not have to live from paycheck to paycheck. It is also good to have in place an incentive plan that really rewards results. For example, with rent collections: if our managers collect 95% of the rents by the tenth of the month, we give them a bonus from $100 to $150, depending upon size of the property. When we are bringing new homes in, we really want them to sell homes. So, we will give them a $300 bonus for every home that they sell, or if they rent a lot, we will give them $100 for every lot that they have rented. That gives them incentive to help us fill up the park thus meeting all of our goals.

Onsite managers are absolutely critical. Your mobile home park ownership will be a very enjoyable experience if you have a strong manager who is diligent and really cares about your property and doing a great job!