"Amenities" are defined as a "desirable or useful feature of a building or place". In the never ending desire of mobile home park owners to provide the highest quality of life for residents, new concepts are constantly being introduced – and many of them are terrible. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to explore the world of bad amenities: features that do not provide a desirable impact on the community.
Episode 420: Bad Amenities Transcript
Webster's Dictionary defines amenity as a desirable or useful feature or facility of a building or place. And we in the mobile home park industry know that an amenity is a very important aspect of making our residents feel good about where they live, to help entertain them, to give them pride of ownership, a sense of community. And most mobile home park owners in America are striving to provide the highest quality of amenities that they can afford for their residents. As many mobile home park rents rise and we get a higher caliber of customer and we feel we must give back more to them to create a good sense of value for them. But unfortunately, in the industry there are many so called experts and people who write articles, who will often be very verbose on amenities which are not based on actual practical use, not things they've ever done. Many of these people don't even own a mobile home park and never even managed one. Some of these, in fact, I think are written by AI. But I wanted to clear the air on some of the recent articles I've read in industry publications that offer what are considered interesting new amenities, which are in fact a very, very bad idea.
This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're going to just explore bad amenities. These are amenities that I'm pretty sure you probably don't want to do, yet some in the industry are throwing these out as great ideas. Let's start off with the first one. There was an article that said, hey, we need to have in your park neighborhood flea markets and garage sales. This is pretty much a terrible idea on so many different levels. If you, as the mobile home park want to encourage garage sales and flea markets, here's what's going to happen. Number one, garage sales and flea markets are governed by city ordinance, and only allowed to be held at a certain frequency. And you are going to irritate the city and the neighbors and the inspector enormously if people start holding them every week, because that's what they will do, if you now tell residents, hey, let's go ahead and fire up all the flea markets and garage sales you want to do. If you have a 50-space mobile home park and each person decides to have a different garage sale every week, you're going to have a garage sale in there every week of the year.
That will surely get you in trouble. And on top of that, you're inviting people off site into your property. Not a good idea. You're bringing in a lot of cars into mobile home parks which don't have enough cars to even park the residents, much less people from the outside world. So, that's a terrible idea. You're going to increase by 1000% your slip and fall claims. That's a bad idea. So in general, that's just a really terrible amenity. Bad idea. Another one you see people talk about are dog parks. Now, a dog park is by definition a massive liability. In fact, if you look at some of these large scale dog parks, for example, some not far from where I am in St. Louis, they're all shutting down. And they're shutting down because I believe the insurance premiums are approaching probably their gross revenue. When you deliberately try and introduce humans and dogs running free, you are prone to all kinds of dog bite issues, as some of the largest lawsuits in industry history originated from dog bites. So, the whole idea of the dog park is a little strange.
Now, if you think for your residents this is a really big deal, that this could be the makings of a huge advantage for you over the competitors, well, I guess you could check it out, but you better start with your insurance agent because I'm pretty sure they're going to have a very negative opinion of this idea. Another one are victory communal gardens. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen a communal garden. They have them in my small town in Missouri. But a communal garden, although it just sounds great on paper, it's a horrific eyesore. Imagine a mobile home park lot that no one ever mows and it just grows. It's just wild and unkempt-looking. It just kind of ruins it for everyone surrounding. That's what communal gardens look like in reality. Because a lot of these things that people want to grow, tomato plants, et cetera, well, you don't mow them. They have to kind of grow in the wild and then people never tend them. So there's weeds everywhere. So, the bottom line is that communal garden will be anything less than a victory and will certainly not be a victory for aesthetics, that's for sure. One of the worst amenities I saw people publicly talking about this year in the industry were things like crafts for kids.
Crafts for kids is probably the worst idea of 2025. If you talk to your insurance agent about what's going on right now on any activity that involves children in a mobile home park, the liability insurance cost on those kinds of items is skyrocketing. I got told recently by an insurance agent that does a lot of mobile home parks, said that one owner who was trying to do a weekly program for children, the insurance premium shot up for that activity to $40,000 a year, because those kinds of things are ripe for issues of child predators and that type of thing. Even though I know you're trying to do it out of the goodness of your own heart. And that isn't what the intention was at all on the onset. That's the reality of the America we live in. All it would take is one kid at one of these programs to claim rightfully or wrongfully, that they were inappropriately touched. And next thing you know, your mobile home park would be sucked into a litigious nightmare. And to what end? I don't think that is an amenity. It's something that really is going to bolster a lot of the feeling of value of your mobile home park.
And in fact, there are community issues for people who have insurance and are willing to take the risk in controlled environments. Not in your mobile home park. They're already out there that adults can really go to if they want. And it's not that much of an additional drive. Another one are basketball courts. Now, in one of my early mobile home parks, I got a call one day from the police, from the manager, because the police were there. And what was going on is there was a giant brawl going on on the basketball court. And when the police grabbed everybody and identified who they were, not a single person in the entire brawl lived in the mobile home park. Basketball courts have proven time and time again to be what we call an attractive nuisance, something that draws people from the outside into your mobile home park. That is of no benefit to you as the park owner, that only works against you. The whole concept of the amenity is to entertain and provide for your residents, not for people outside of the property.
And then you have the world's worst amenity, and one that most mobile home park owners are already stuck with, but should certainly not build any more of, and that is the good old American swimming pool. Now, the problem with the swimming pool is multi-faceted. Let's first talk about just the sure cost of a pool. You may have a pool in your yard, and that pool in your yard may be somewhat affordable to maintain, but in a commercial pool, you have to check the water quality, often several times a day during the swimming season. And then you're going to have huge amounts of chemical costs, huge amounts of just the general labor and repair and maintenance on the pool, on the pool, surfacing, everything else known to man. So, pools are very, very expensive to operate, but the problem is they appeal to a very, very small fraction of the park's population. It's thought through studies that the typical mobile home park swimming pool has only ever had roughly 10% of the entire park ever actually in the pool. And I'm talking historically, I don't mean on a regular use basis. As far as regular heavy users of that pool, it drops to just a single digit. And the problem is you cannot apply that much cost to try and entertain just a single digit of your population.
And then you have the liability aspect. How many cases have there been an industry history of people, people who have fallen in the pool and drowned? I don't know, but you hear quite a bit about it, so I know it does happen. There was one case just recently, I believe, where a 5-year-old kid who was being unsupervised by the resident crawled under the fence, I think, and drowned. So, pools not only have this huge cost issue, low use issue, but also a huge liability problem. Now, the good solution for pools today, if you were to build them new, is in fact the splash pad, which has none of those attributes. That's why most people are building splash pads and not pools. But if you already have a pool in your mobile home park, you might consider getting rid of it. I'm not saying that because unlike what most people try and claim, that mobile home park owners are evil and they don't care. No, the problem is the pool is just not a very good idea. It's a lot of liability for very, very little benefit. Often if you just take where the pool is, shut it down, demolish it, make it into a green space, let's say with a pavilion and picnic tables and charcoal grills, you'll have massively more use and a lot more happy people.
The bottom line is you need to think through each and every amenity that you would ever add to the mobile home park. Vet it with your state mobile home association for legality, vet it with your insurance agent to make sure that you fully understand the risk and the additional premiums responsible. It's a noble cause to try and offer your residents the best forms of amenity, but try not to do any of the bad ones. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.