Most Americans are only familiar with owning property with a single-family home on it. But mobile home parks are much larger and complex. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to explore the unique nature of mobile home parks to bend the rigid rules of traditional private property law.
Episode 401: Private Property Considerations Transcript
I think we all know what private property is. It might be a car, it might be a watch, but in the world of real estate most people think of private property in regards to their personal residence, their home, their yard, those property lines. But in mobile home parks, the concept of private property extends much farther. This is Frank Rolfe for the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. We're gonna talk about private property, some of the things you may not realize about private property, subtle nuances, things like that. So let me first start off with a story which really to me exemplified how unusual private property is. Years ago, my daughter, when she was in high school, was driving through a development outside of our small town in St. Genevieve, Missouri, and she was hit by a drunk driver. She was on a regular old road in the residential subdivision, and the person driving the other car was highly inebriated and hit her car, and their car and hitting her car became inoperable. So they were stuck there at the scene. And so my daughter called the police, and she also called me, and I was only probably 10 minutes from there. So I drove out.
When I got there, the police were already there. The police said, well, yes, your daughter was hit by a drunk driver. And I said, okay, so are you going to arrest the drunk driver? And they said, no, we can't arrest the drunk driver because, you see, we're on private property. We're in this large lakeside subdivision, and we're not in the city here. We're just on private property. I can't arrest this person unless they drive outside of the entrance to the subdivision. But as long as you're within this private property, there's no laws about being drunk and driving inside of private property. In fact, if you really think about that, even in your single-family home, you could take your car as someone who is underage, no driver's license, and you could literally drive it from your garage to the end of your driveway and back, and you probably technically would not be breaking the law because most laws only apply when you leave private property. Now, how does private property become different than what we're accustomed to in the case of a mobile home park? And the first key item, of course, is the fact that in a mobile home park, unlike in a subdivision or somewhere in a city, within city limits, you don't have the ability for people to go door to door. You have what's called trespassing. And no one is supposed to trespass on private property. You can control that. You can call the police and say, this person cannot be on my property.
With mobile home parks, we attempt to typically be very user-friendly and very reasonable. But if you had someone who was bothering the residents, going door to door, trying to sell this or that, you could definitely have them banished from doing so. So allowing people on your private property in the form of the mobile home park is not a given. It's not a right. No one has a right to do that. And you could have your manager call and block people from going in your property. It doesn't have to be just a vendor going door to door. It could obviously be a street person or it could even be a tenant that you've evicted. In most states, when you evict a tenant, they're no longer allowed to be back in the property. In fact, if you talk to an attorney, you'll find out you could even banish the city inspector from coming into your property and looking around. But that's probably a very bad idea to do so because if you did that, they would then probably go down to a magistrate and get some kind of a warrant or something allowing them to go on site. So I wouldn't recommend you ever go to that extent.
But at the same time, if you had a group like MH Action or some other group that wants to cause trouble within your community, then once again you might exert your private property rights that you do not allow people, strangers, non-residents, to come in the property and particularly go door to door and harass people. Now, another key thing you'll find in private property and mobile home parks are things related to how homes are oriented on private property. Normally, when you look at the ordinance for most single-family homes, you'll see there's a building setback. So you look at your lot lines, and then you have to build your structure so many feet from those lot lines. But a mobile home park is defined as two or more mobile homes on one platted piece of property. So consequently, a lot of those laws on setbacks do not apply when it comes to being inside the boundary of your own land. In many cities, the setback requirement from the street, and I'm talking the streets that you own inside your private property, there's no setbacks at all.
Even though the city might have a setback of 50 feet from the edge of the curb, in the mobile home park, it's very possible the setback can be nothing or a foot or three feet or five feet, something significantly less than what you would face if you were not inside the confines of private property. Also, things such as site visibility triangles, which typically gives you a certain setback from corners for better visibility, those may not also always apply within private property based on the state that you're in. So where homes are oriented on lots typically is not of much concern to most cities. In fact, most of the time they will allow you to move and reconform the property to meet the current requirements of larger homes. So setbacks are one key item within the boundaries of your private property that are different than what you may be accustomed to. Another big one are utilities.
Now, in a typical mobile home park, you have water and you have sewer and you have electricity and you may even have natural gas. But the easements that you see for these utilities are there for your own use. So it is possible, since you are the property owner and you are the one who's responsible for delivering the utilities, you may have the capability of actually having those easements moved. Now, if you've got a lot or a series of lots that you want to make those lots larger but you can't because of the current positioning of the utility line, it is possible. You'd have to make sure that it's economically viable, but it's possible to perhaps move those lines around to accommodate those larger homes, something you could never do with your traditional single-family home where you'd be at the mercy of all of your neighbors who are not on your private property who say, wait a minute, I don't want to move that water line or that sewer line. Also, this gives you the capability, in some cases, to additionally add utilities into your private property, which as long as you have a connections point at the front of your property, you would not need any easements for because you basically control everything.
So there's no permission needed from anyone regarding what you're going to do. Now, private property on Mobile Home Park also has some unusual situations as far as inspections go. We talked about the fact that on private property you sometimes could say, no, I won't allow the inspector in, although we don't think that's a very smart idea. But I know some lawyers have suggested that to park owners in the past, although probably not a good policy. But a lot of cities don't feel the need on private property to even go in and look at what's going on behind those bushes or that fence because to them it doesn't matter, it's just private property. We've even had cities where we've been able to bring in mobile homes historically, but they don't require inspections from the city because the city feels it's private property and therefore they're not concerned about it. All they're concerned about is that we meet the certificate of occupancy as far as total number of homes within our boundaries. But their positioning they don't much care about. And as far as the homes, as long as they have a HUD seal on them, they're satisfied. In the same vein, many of them don't even go in the property on a regular basis to see what's going on because again, as far as they're concerned, it's private property.
And when bringing in homes, as long as you can get the sign-off from the water and sewer provider and the electricity provider and or the gas provider that everything is fine, then they again don't feel the need to be issuing any specialized permits. The bottom line to it is that private property is a very strong thing for many park owners. It gives you many advantages that you don't normally think about because none of us really have our brains wrapped around the whole idea of private property. Now one problem you have to be aware of with private property, however, is if you do not state your rules and regulations in your park, you default back to the greater city or town or county's rules. And that can get you in a lot of trouble. Typically in most mobile home parks, we're not allowed to have dangerous breeds of dogs or large dogs or trampolines or swimming pools. That's not always the case with every insurance carrier, but that's pretty typical.
And the only way you're going to have that level of control is by having rules in your mobile home park typically signed by the resident, duly adopted with the correct amount of time frame before they become effective. And then and only then can you enact these additional rules inside your private property. That also encompasses things like the speed limit, which just outside the boundaries of your mobile home park might be 35 or 40 miles an hour, but within the confines of your property might be 10 or 15 miles an hour. So make sure you don't go under the assumption that what's outside the property is good for what's inside of your property. Many times rules and policies are required to make your property run better for the better of everyone in the community. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.