In bringing old mobile home parks back to life, a common challenge is how to use the existing pieces to create reasonable aesthetics. But some parks don’t even have any pieces to work with. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to explore available methods to make even the ugliest of properties attractive again.
Episode 426: How To Beautify Even The Ugliest Properties Transcript
Let's be honest, mobile home parks have never really been aesthetic achievements. You will never see a mobile home park on the cover of Town and Country magazine, nor will you ever see it on the cover or even in the inside of a book on American architecture. However, there are some parks out there that are particularly bad. These are mobile home parks that have nothing to work with. Many properties you can make look better by enhancing landscaping or trees or topography or maybe a babbling stream. But then others are simply a flat piece of land, devoid of any trees or any landscaping or anything nice looking at all. And even then, the homes may just be little square, rusting shoeboxes. How do you beautify a property like that? Well, this is Frank Rolfe with the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. We have turned many ugly properties like that back around and there are some basic steps, there's some science that's been created to make even the least attractive mobile home park a nice place to live, a property that you can be proud of. Now, let's first all admit that ugly mobile home parks exist in virtually all states.
Colorado, which people always think about the beautiful mountains and terrain and the pines. It's got some other areas in the state that look a whole lot more like Oklahoma. So don't be listening to this and saying, they're only talking about certain states that I don't invest in. That's not true. I have seen ugly parks virtually everywhere from coast to coast. They exist in California, they exist in Florida. So this is something that's a universal language that we all need to be aware of, and that is that many mobile home parks really need a lot of help. So how do you turn an ugly park, a hideous park, into something more attractive? Well, the first thing you have to know is you're going to have to use man-made beauty because clearly, the reason there are no big trees there or bushes or flowers normally is, the area is very difficult for things to grow in. Not enough precipitation, improper soil. So I'm not even going to attempt when I have a property that's just horrible looking to try and replicate that which God has created through nature. Because in this case, that's not my friend, that's not my ally.
I have to use things that are immediate, products that don't need watering, things that I can pack a real punch. So the first thing on man-made beauty is the concept of repetitive features. Now what's a repetitive feature? It's something that distracts the viewer from what they normally would see and gives the property extra class and extra style, because someone driving through, they see the same thing on every lot and therefore that thing becomes like the missing trees or the missing bushes. Some repetitive features that are very good to bring back a sense of aesthetics in a mobile home park, one of them are coach lights. In fact, coach lights historically were the first repetitive feature that anyone ever attempted to use to make a mobile home park attractive. These are the lights out in the yards of every mobile home, typically maybe 5-10 feet back from the street. It's a black pole with a coach light on the top. And the first thing you'll find on parks that have existing coach lights is they're not helping, they're hurting because those coach lights are typically bent or broken off or rusting. So if you're going to add in new coach lights, if you're going to even fix the old coach lights, you've got to go solar.
Solar is the only way to go because the cost to run wiring or gas to those coach lights will cost many times more than the coach lights themselves. And then they'll be subject to constant repair and maintenance issues. Whereas a solar coach light, you install it, it turns on immediately, it runs just fine, you don't have to worry about it anymore. It also has no additional utility bills. Another repetitive feature we like in the same family are solar streetlights. Why? Because they're attractive both in the day and the night, like the coach lights. And because they're solar, I don't have to worry about trying to get power to them, which can be hugely expensive, if it's even possible. Now another thing that's a repetitive feature looks great in every mobile home park are new street signs.
Signs telling you what street you're on. Because in most mobile home parks, and particularly the ugliest variety, those things are bent, rusted, missing. They do more of a disservice than they do a benefit. And you can buy street signs very inexpensively. You can get them through purchasing platform, for example. And when you take that street sign and you put that on a 4x4 post sleeved in white PVC with a white PVC cap. Now you're talking. Now we're getting that little bit of that country club flavor out there. And once you've got that going, let's put every sign in the property on that white PVC with white PVC cap. Now everything ties together, distracting the viewer from the ugly reality of the park itself and instead focusing on new things, new man-made things that we've put in, which make it look that much better.
And of course, you don't even need to stop there when it comes to white PVC, because you can run three-rail white PVC fencing right down your frontage, which gives your park a fancy subdivision look. And you can then run it on up into the park. If you've got little islands or landings where the road kind of V's around them, you can put white vinyl all the way around those islands. If you have a dead-end street, you can put a section of white vinyl to show drivers that that street dead ends, but without the ugly thing that many park owners do of just a post with some reflectors on it. Also, feel free to use white vinyl even as your repetitive feature. You'll see that in parks sometimes. What they'll do is they'll take eight-foot sections of three-rail white PVC fencing and they'll run them parallel to the street in front of every home.
And even though it sounds a little hokey, it actually works out fairly well aesthetically. Also, you can use sections of white vinyl, even the full solid white vinyl fence sections, to block off some of your most hideous views if you have those. And let's not forget about dumpster enclosures. If you're on a dumpster, again, white vinyl makes for excellent dumpster enclosures. And by using exclusively white vinyl throughout your park, you not only give it that my old Kentucky home feel, but everything ties together and is fully consistent, yet needs no painting and effectively self-cleans every time that it rains.
Also, don't forget the use of feather flags. Feather flags are another repetitive feature that goes down the frontage of most properties. But you can utilize those even up in the properties. We'll use feather flags to denote where the office is. We'll even use it sometimes on homes that are for sale. Feather flags don't require any wind. They already stand out, look great from the street, in the complete absence of wind. And as far as the color, I don't think you can really go wrong with feather flags. And we've used every color over the years. We've used white, we've used green, we've used orange, we've used blue, we've used purple. It all looks good.
Now, let's go to the one final item that really gives an aura to a park, a sense of class, and that is your entry sign itself. I have never seen an attractive property that did not have a good entry sign. But I have seen properties that were let down and lost a lot of their sex appeal because they were missing it. All you need to have to have a really great-looking entry sign in a park today: two 4x4 posts sleeved in white PVC with white PVC caps, and then stretched between them, a piece of aluminum from something like Fast Signs, although you can also buy them from purchasing platform, typically forest green with white vinyl lettering on it or maybe blue with white vinyl lettering on it. It's a very, very inexpensive sign, but it definitely is going to make you feel as you enter that property, oh, this is something that's superior. This is nice. And so much of life is based on first impression. When you've got a positive first impression on things, you tend to cut it a little bit more slack.
And you want the viewer that goes in the property that was aesthetically challenged to initially think to themselves, oh what a nice property. Because even then, if the property is lacking in some of the fundamentals they would like to see, big trees or topography or even newer homes. Nevertheless, they will cut you a lot of slack because their first feeling was very positive. The bottom line is you can take any mobile home park in America and make it nice. It isn't just based on the natural elements of the property. It's not just all about the age of the homes. No, I'm firmly convinced after 30 years of doing turnarounds that you can truly make any property attractive, institutional quality, and something that the tenants can be proud of. This is Frank Rolfe, with the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.