We all know that celebrities use plastic surgery to augment or alter their appearance. But how can a mobile home park share in this ability to improve the looks of the property using man-made products? In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review some of the methods that allow you to increase your community’s beauty quickly and at a relatively low cost.
Episode 392: Property Plastic Surgery Transcript
We all know what plastic surgery is. We've seen it in celebrities now for decades, whether it's Marlo Thomas or Pam Anderson. What you see is not what was there originally, but it's been enhanced artificially. This is Frank Rolfe for the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about bringing plastic surgery to mobile home parks or the different methods park owners can use to use manmade objects to create artificial beauty. Now, mobile home parks come in all different shapes and sizes and aesthetics. They're all different. One of the most predominant differences between mobile home parks and even state to state you see it on a macro level, is mother nature that which surrounds you. A lot of mobile home parks get most of their attractive elements from nature, such as big trees or shrubs or flowers, but others have no access to that because the soil won't grow big trees or flowers.
Some areas of America where there are mobile home parks, it doesn't really rain at all. And often you have to work as a park owner with what you're given. You don't really have a choice. So you have to take the cards that you are dealt and say to yourself, okay, given these cards, how can I make this the most attractive this mobile home park can be? So I wanna give you some different ideas of things that are out there. They're not really very expensive to really give mobile home parks that little additional pizazz that those celebrities use plastic surgery for on themselves. Well, the first one is if you have a muddy area of your park, an area where grass will not grow. And this is particularly true around an office. Let's say you go in the park to the office and it's a nice masonry building, but people never want to do the right angle turn of the sidewalk where it turns to go into the door of the office.
They always cut across the grass. And over time, let's assume all the grass is dead. And then it rained a lot. It just became a big muddy pit. What do I do with that? I could go and buy some sod, they'll just trample it again. It'll never hold. I could buy some grass seed. Same story, it's never gonna happen plus the measure will probably never water it. It won't ever sprout anyway. Here's what you do. Just get some master turf online or even green carpet from the local carpet store. Cut that in the size and shape you need. Get some very long nails, which you can buy at the hardware store. Get it in position, and drive those nails through it into the ground. They will typically hold it in position 'cause there's not a lot of force applied to that little bit of green carpet or AstroTurf and it changes everything.
Suddenly you have that beautiful right angle of green right into the pocket of that sidewalk and it never gets muddy and it never dies. And you don't have to water it. You may say, well, but I can spot that kind of thing from a mile away. No, you can't. Not when you're driving through the mobile home park, you can't. Yes, those few people who get out and walk up to the office may say, well, gee, wait a minute, is that grass or is that some artificial surface? But how many people do that in a typical day in the park? And the answer is virtually none. Most people pay their rent today off ACH. Most people have no problem with the mobile home park. All they know is as they drive in, everything looks beautiful. So if you've got little areas of grass that have died, you don't know how to fix it, don't keep trying grass, it won't work.
But instead just get some kind of artificial method to get the job done. And then of course, one of the greatest plastic surgeries ever invented for mobile home parks is the use of white vinyl. And I mean white vinyl, anything, any and everything in white vinyl looks fantastic. It doesn't need paint. It's one of the greatest products ever made for mobile home parks. And that's why you see so much of it sprouting up out there. We like to run three rail white vinyl fence down all of our frontages on the road. We use them on all of our fence posts, everything out of white vinyl. You don't need wood, you don't need metal in a mobile home park. You do those old rusted metal street signs. Get rid of all that stuff, convert over to white vinyl. And while you're at it on those street signs, let's buy new street signs.
You can buy them online. They're not expensive. When you take that old rusted metal mess, the mom and pop left you for street signs and you replace that with a beautiful white fence post with a beautiful white cap on it and a brand new sign. Oh my heavens, what a fantastic bit of plastic surgery that was? And don't forget about flags. I don't mean your traditional flag. Flags are great, but the feather flag, the flags that are totally furled, whether there's any wind or not, not super expensive. You take that beautiful three rail white vinyl fence, you run feather flags behind it, typically spaced every 50 feet. You can use those same feather flags around your office is, has an incredible impact. It suddenly will take your mobile home park from a trailer park to the finest subdivision because they use these same aesthetic tactics.
So feather flags, again, wonderful bit of plastic surgery. Then you have simply a paint color. Now we call this park service green, but if you look online just about the same green has one individualized name called Broadmoor Green, B-R-O-A-D-M-O-O-R Green. And this is from the Broadmoor Hotel out in Colorado. They patented the color, but it's very similar to the National Park Service's Green, but it's harder to find their green online. This is a green that is so beautiful that basically anything you paint with it looks expensive. You can take that green and you can put it on a post. It looks like a fancy post. You can put it on an old beat up shed made of particle board and falling apart. You paint it in Broadmoor Green, it looks fantastic. Broadmoor Green can typically solve almost everything in the mobile park. It will hide everything from view.
And if you should notice it, you'd think, wow, this is a classy mobile home park. Look at that Broadmoor green paint. So there you have a paint which acts as a form of plastic surgery. And speaking of paint, how about striping? A lot of mobile home parks and mobile home park owners forget the raw value of re-striping. You can buy a striping machine, which is really nothing more than a piece of aluminum with two wheels where you pull a trigger and it sprays spray paint out the end. And you can go in there and you yourself can stripe that park annually. It's incredibly inexpensive. You can either use white paint or yellow paint and it looks so good. It's crazy. And we all know this. We love it. On our own individual personal home residential streets when people re-stripe, it looks all fancy.
Mobile home park is no different. You can stripe your speed bumps, you can just stripe your handicap parking areas. You can stripe the stripes down the middle of your street if you have stripes down the middle of your street. And regardless of your road condition, it makes the park look so incredibly nice. And the great part once again is it's so incredibly cheap. Everyone should stripe all of their striping every year about this time of the year, if not a little earlier part of your general spring cleanup to the park you'll be really glad you did. And speaking of rose, just turn to the final bit of plastic surgery that park owners can use. And that's what's called seal coat or emulsion. This is basically a black tar kind of in the form of a paint almost that you can put on an asphalt road regardless of condition and make it look beautiful jet black.
And to the human eye when you see a beautiful jet black road, you automatically think this is a quality property. This one, the owner really cares about the roads, but it's really not that expensive. Now, it's not super cheap. So I would not recommend that everyone run out and seal coat the roads without giving a lot of due consideration. It might be something you just do right before your park comes up for refinance or sale. But nevertheless, as opposed to doing a full paving, which is horribly expensive. Paving a typical mobile home Park street system can easily cost you in the tens to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here's an option that you can do for a fraction of that price. And the net effect is pretty much the same if you go out there and patch your potholes so there's no big jarring bump, and then you seal coat those roads and you stripe them.
Well, it looks like a whole new road system. But you got away with murder 'cause you didn't have to put in all the money for those new roads. In fact, a lot of paving companies take advantage of novices. They don't know any better about how paving works. So they call the paving company and they say, look at my horrible looking roads. The paving company's sensing they're a rookie, says, ah, yes, well, we'll need to fully pave those or at least put an asphalt overlay on them. No, you don't. You can often make the road look so good without that asphalt overlay, which is called a skim coat of asphalt. You can accomplish the same thing using emulsion or seal coating those roads to get that desired jet black look. And again, when you have the contrast with the jet black road with the bright white or bright yellow striping, it looks absolutely country club deluxe, it looks incredibly, incredibly good. The bottom line is plastic surgery is not reserved just for celebrities. In every mobile home park you can take manmade products and you can create artificial beauty, which all your residents will definitely appreciate. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.