Every park owner wants their residents to feel secure. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to explore options to enhance your park’s safety as well as concepts that have proven to be more of a disadvantage than a benefit.
Episode 430: Security Tips Transcript
All mobile home park owners want their residents to feel secure. We want them to feel good about where they live. We want them to feel safe. But there are some methods we've learned over the decades on how best to provide that secured environment, as well as some things to avoid. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're going to talk about some security tips for park owners, some basic things you should know that we've learned that may help you provide a safer environment for your residents. So the first thing we've learned over the years is a big part of feeling safe and secure at your home is having enough ambient light. There's nothing scarier in life, whether it's old folk tales from the past or in horror movies, than pitch darkness. You don't know what's in it, and therefore it makes you feel very uncomfortable. But how do you elevate ambient light in a mobile home park? How do we make it so that every part of that park has at least enough light to kind of see what's going on? And one of the best things we found to achieve ambient light is by using solar street lights and coach lights.
Now you might say, why solar? Why not just regular powered ones? Well, the problem is, if you have to use regular power, you're never going to do the project. Because most of the parts of your mobile home park that need ambient light are not anywhere near a power source. If you go out to any mobile home park in America at night, preferably at a night where there's not even any moon, and you say, okay, what part of this park is not getting any light from any source? It's going to be in the far corners of the park. It's going to be maybe up by your mailboxes. These are areas where people don't live. And as a result, there's no light emanating from windows or from other light sources. And as well as not being on the road, most of your traditional wired lights are attached to street poles that are there on the frontage of the streets. When you use solar lights, you can actually pick and choose where you need the light, and you don't have to worry about the electrical power to get to them. So it's a very simple process. You go out to the park, find the dark areas, put a stake in the ground where those dark areas are.
That's where you put in the solar lights. And because they're solar, you don't have to worry about the thousands and thousands of dollars of cost to get power to them, nor do you have to worry about the ongoing power bill and maintenance of those lights. So bringing ambient light to any park is an absolutely top of the list priority, and solar is a great way to get that done. Another one is to use cameras, but use them intelligently. You can put a camera on your office, you can put a camera on your pool, you can put a camera on your dumpster, but you're not going to be able to use cameras as a method to monitor the entire property. It's just going to be impossible. Most mobile home parks are fortunate enough to have a lot of trees, and when you combine trees with cameras, that's never a good combination. People have tried to put cameras throughout their parks, and typically what they end up with is the ability to only see slight glimpses between the trees most of the time. But if you want to put a camera on an office to make sure that it's secured and so that the manager feels more secure, that works.
Want to put a camera on a pool, then that's great. Make sure people are not abusing the pool when the pool is closed. You want to put a camera on your dumpster to catch illegal dumpers. Those are fine. But if you're going to use a camera, it has to have some kind of purpose to it. Also, you need to have zero tolerance on crime, and that includes on your own tenants. Make sure you have a very, very good, but completely in line with all fair housing law screening method to make sure that residents do not have a criminal past that can cause problems for your other residents. Such things as registered sex offenders should never be allowed. And additionally, you want to make sure that people who already live in the park aren't allowed to cause discomfort or a threatening nature to their neighbors. So if someone wants to blare loud music at night, it can't happen in your mobile home park. And you need to instruct your manager to feel free to call 911 and the residents to call 911 because the park's policy is no, we're not putting up with this.
A lot of parks that have security problems, and we've turned some around and even the residents themselves were the ones who were breaking and entering other people's units. You have to lay down the law that we are not going to put up with that. Too many moms and pops did not evict people for whatever reason. But you can no longer let that be your guide. So you have to have a zero tolerance on crime and be very vocal about that. Also, fences are a great way to denote ownership, to denote boundaries, but also to block people who are going into your property for no good. We've had properties that we've turned around where there was crime coming into the park from a neighboring property, maybe a downscale apartment complex. And you can see a well worn path or paths from that parking lot of that apartment complex right into the mobile home park. Don't allow that. You can build a metal security fence, one that no one can climb over, nor can they claw their way through. And those simple barriers do work. This whole narrative in America, do walls work? Yes, walls totally work.
That's why they've been a part of everything all the way back to medieval castles. And often, if you can break up this easy access people have through your property, sometimes as simple as just putting fences in to stop people from cutting the corner on their way over to the main thoroughfare. These things can do a lot to promote a safer feel in your property and to stop or change people's pathways, they have to maybe commit crime. Now, what are some of the bad things, some of the security things that don't work that some park owners try? What is a gated entrance? I know it sounds great and it looks nice and it's always impressive going into a single family subdivision that has a gated entry. But the problem with mobile home parks are it doesn't work very well. And it's not because the gates don't work. Yes, the gates do work. That's not what I'm saying. The problem isn't even that the gates occasionally break, which they can, but when a gate breaks on a gated community, there are mechanisms that allow you to still open the gate. The big problem on a gated community is what happens when people hit the gate with their car.
That is the big issue. Because in a mobile home park you often have a lot of people going in and out. Sometimes it might have been a little too liberal on the number of drinks they had at dinner or they just aren't paying attention. And when they hit that gate, what happens is you can't open it or close it. So everyone is basically, if they hit the gate as they are going into the property and it's still mostly closed, then everyone's trapped, they can't get out of the park. Or conversely, if it's just a portion of the way open and then they strike it, then no one again can get in and out and you can't ever close the gate again. So because of the fact that cars are cars and drivers are drivers and people in mobile home parks are sometimes a little less cautious in their driving, gates have proven to be, for the most part, a problem. Now, if you have a special mobile home park with a clientele that you believe can drive carefully, cautiously enough never to strike the gate, then you could give it a try. But it's a very, very expensive experiment.
Also, running cameras throughout the park, which we just went over, has one additional bad attribute. Because if you run all these cameras, who's going to actually watch those cameras and monitor those cameras? And if they're all over the park and everyone sees them, if there ever was a problem, someone might add you into the litigation claiming that you should have been monitoring those cameras. So talk to your insurance agent before you go out there and put a bunch of cameras up to make sure that won't cause you additional liability issues. Also, you would never want to get involved in some kind of park sponsored volunteer crime watch group. You probably remember the Trayvon Martin case down in Florida many, many years ago. I don't know if it was 10 or 15 years ago. What you had is you had a property which had a crime watch. And during the crime watch, one of the volunteer members killed somebody, which then sucked the property into all kinds of litigation. So if residents want to form their own crime watch in some manner, you have nothing to do with that. You're a mobile home park owner, you're renting the land out, but you can't have something that is actually a park sponsored affair.
You can't have something where your manager is involved in that. And then finally, and this one is shocking, and it was shocking to me when it happened, but one of the worst ideas in park security is often what you would think would be the best. And that is having not solar street lights, but those regular powered streetlights, installing a whole bunch of those. Let me tell you the story. What happened the first time I did that, it was on my first park, Glen Haven down in Dallas. And I was trying to elevate the ambient light. And I thought this would be a great idea. So I went to the power company, said, hey, can you turn on a bunch of street lights? Can you add some street lights to all these poles? And they said, sure, if you'll pay for it, we'll do that. I lit up Glen Haven like it was daylight 24 hours a day. I had the thing so bright it was crazy. And I liked it. Because when I drove through Glen Haven, hey, it made me feel good. But the problem was as soon as I got those lights on, not just one day later, I got a call that oh my gosh, I can't sleep at night.
There's light pouring through my windows. Turn that thing off. And those calls just kept pouring in. The problem is you can go overboard with ambient light. If you make things daylight 24 hours a day, that's very uncomfortable, that isn't conducive to people's sleep patterns, and just having a happy life. So be very, very cautious with those full powered streetlights. Now if you want to put them on the road at your entrance, I don't think people would have a problem with that. Most people don't live right at your entrance. But if the idea is to bring daytime to nighttime in your mobile home park, that is only going to cause you a lot of grief. And then the problem is you have to take everything down that you did. The bottom line is that all park owners should have a goal of making all residents feel happy and safe and secure at all times. Look at your property, particularly at night, see where your failings are, and then move forward to try and plug those holes. Because a happy resident, a safe resident, is a resident who's never going to want to ever leave. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.