It’s that time of year when mobile home park owner attention turns to property condition, which always includes thoughts on the roads. Paving companies are more than happy to suggest hugely expensive road upgrades. But how can you improve your roads with as little capital as possible? In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to explore various options to get better roads at a low cost.
Episode 390: Road Tricks Transcript
Every park owner would love to have beautiful jet-black roads paved, or they'd love to have beautiful dark gray concrete streets. But unfortunately, that's just not economically feasible. And at this time of year, when we all start thinking about park improvements as the weather gets warmer, roads are always on the list. But what are some ways you can build and fix roads more inexpensively? This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. We're going to go over some ideas for building roads on the cheap. How to get the job done, how to make your roads look good, how to keep the customer satisfied, but at the same time, preserve your capital. So the first thing you need to know about roads is a lot of it is just based on appearance. A lot of park roads out there really don't have any fundamental flaws. There's no big potholes, but they are aesthetically very unpleasing, cobbled together from a series of different colors of gray and black. Because you have a paved road with many, many different patches on it, lots of weathering. And in those cases, often you can solve your road problem by simply spraying those roads with emulsion with tar basically and staining them jet black.
And that process is called sealcoating. And then, to add to it, you can put in brand new striping, either yellow or white striping, and the roads look just about as good as new. Because a lot of times with roads, as long as you produce that nice jet-black asphalt look with striping, that's 90% of the game, is just the mental visuals of a nicely done paved street. But let's say also you've got some potholes in your street, but they're not very large. What can we do with those kinds of potholes? Well, traditionally, potholes are fixed by improving the road base underneath the asphalt and then filling, cutting out, and filling those areas up to grade with asphalt. But there's an alternative out there that's a lot less expensive, and that's air drying asphalt, commonly known as cold patch. Now, the way cold patch works is it's kind of like that clay that you can build little pots with your kids with, where it air dries to hard, and it's never as strong or as long-lasting as something that's been heated up in a furnace to a thousand or two thousand degrees.
But it looks about the same. And with cold patch, you can go down to purchasing Platform or Home Depot or Lowe's, or even Walmart; you can buy some bags of this stuff. I've done it many times myself; all you do is cut open the bag, pour it into the hole up to above grade, and then get a 4x4 wooden post and pick it up and drop it on it over and over again and just tamp that air-drying asphalt down to pretty much the height of the road and just let Mother Nature do the rest. Between the oxygen in the air, the heat of the sun, it will pretty much get solid and hard. And while it's not nearly going to last for that long a period of time, because it's air-drying asphalt, as opposed to asphalt that's been mixed with tar at super high temperature, it still will fill in those holes. And I've done cold patch before on holes, and I've had cases where it's lasted a period of years. A lot of head success or failure will fall based on how often the car tires hit it. So, potholes in the middle of the street will last longer than those that are right where the tires go.
But cold patch is a perfectly good alternative if you have small potholes. And it will save you a fortune. Another thing that comes up often in mobile home parks are the parking pads. Now, a standard parking pad in a mobile home park for two cars is a 20x20 square. And that allows you to park two cars side by side. But they can be very expensive to do them in asphalt can easily run anywhere, based on the market, from one to as much as $4,000 a pad. And to do them in concrete is even more expensive. So here's an alternative you can do to build inexpensive yet good-looking parking pads. What you do is you get some steel landscaping edging, the kind that you do to delineate beds of flowers or ivy in your yard from the grass, and you make a beautiful square right where the parking pad should go. And then what you do is you get some crushed rock, preferably in a dark gray or even black color based on the market and the kind of rock you have in your quarries, and you pour that into that beautifully delineated 20 by 20 square, and it looks to the average person like a paved parking pad.
Remember that the cars are typically parked on the pad, so the customers or the appraiser or the bank is only gonna see a portion of that pad. But as you're going down the street, you don't really drive onto those pads, so it becomes more of a streetscaping issue. It's just about the visuals. And by building them in that manner, steel-framed, filled with crushed rock, you will save a fortune. If you have a lot of parking paths to put in. Another thing to consider is doing a skim coat of asphalt. This is something that most of the pavers will not throw out to you as an option. But if you have a road that's weathered and beat up pretty badly, rather than putting a full asphalt on the entire street system, you can put it what are called skim codes on top. It's almost like a veneer of asphalt. And if you're gonna be selling that park soon, where you're trying to slide through on another refinance, it's a pretty good method because they do last for a fairly long period of time, and they definitely give you the look of an all new asphalt street at a fraction of the price.
Because again, it's more like a veneer. It's more just kind of a covering on top of what you currently have. But it often will get the job done. Another option you have in the world of asphalt is what's called chip and seal. Now, chip and seal is an inexpensive alternative to asphalt because it's kind of like asphalt laid backwards. And you see this on a lot of county roads. It's very hardy and very long-lasting. The way it works is you lay down a very thick bed of tar, and then you put your aggregate rock on top of the tar. The best of these are then rolled with some kind of heavy weight to start the process. And then when cars drive down that street, every time a car drives down, it pushes the rock deeper into the tar. So, rather than roads getting weaker over time, like a traditional asphalt paved street, these roads become stronger over time. And that's why they're very frequently used on county roads, which are anticipated to last long periods of time. Now the biggest problem you're going to have with chip and seal is it's very messy, and you'll get lots of complaints when you use chip and seal because people will track tar into their mobile homes, they will track tar into their cars, or get in their shoes.
So that's a problem with it is it's typically not a crowd-pleaser with the installation. But if you have a steamroller come out and roll on it a lot with... Put a lot of weight on it and really get the rock well stuck into the tar, that will at least mitigate that problem to a certain degree. Another problem you have with chip and seal is the ending coloration, because we all know in traditional asphalt it's jet black. But chip and seal becomes the color of the stone on top. Have you ever driven down a county road and seen, sometimes, a road that appears pink? That's because they're using a pinkish aggregate on that top level of rock. And to some lenders, that's concerning because they're used to only seeing jet-black asphalt. And an even a brand-new chip and seal road may have a different color. We've seen them in brown, we've seen them in very light gray, and we've seen them in pink. Now, a final tip as far as roads and keeping customers happy and trying to stay on a budget. If you have a park that has extremely distressed asphalt to the point that it actually just looks like rock, you can't even see that was ever stuck together with tar.
In those cases, you may be better off just going back to road base, particularly if you have seller financing. Banks typically like to have a nice paved surface, and they would not like it if you don't have that. And they certainly may not consider road base or caliche, which is just crushed limestone, as a satisfactory look for the property. But in some cases, you need to look beyond that and look at what works for your pocketbook. And to the customers, they don't mind a road-based surface. In fact, it keeps the traffic going slow without the road bumps. It's easy to fix. It kind of fits in with a good old Kentucky home feel of most mobile home parks is more of a rural feel and a seller note, you don't have to worry about pleasing the lender. So oftentimes if you go in and just take the road than try and pave it, take it back to a road-based format again, it will save you a lot of money. The bottom line is if you go out to any old paving company and tell them, I want to make my roads look great, they're more than happy to do that. They'll rip all the roads out, put in all new road base, all new, very thick, expensive paving, and the problem is you will blow, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars unnecessarily. But when we just sit back for a moment and reflect on what the goal is, if the goal is to make the residents happy and the bank satisfied, there's often lower-cost alternatives that can save you a lot of money. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.