Most mobile home park office hours tend to be Monday through Friday from 9AM to 5 PM – which just happens to be about the worst schedule if you’re trying to sell homes. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review how your office days and hours need to reflect the job at hand.
Episode 399: The Power Of Weeknight And Weekend Office Hours Transcript
At most mobile home parks, not a lot of thought is given to office hours. But in successful mobile home parks today, particularly those who are trying to sell or rent homes, there has to be a great focus on the days and times in which your office is open. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're going to talk about office hours, days that you're open, and how that will lead you to either success or failure when it comes to getting homes out the door. Now, many mobile home park owners get a little lax over time. Many moms and pops, in fact, will not even have truly established office hours at their mobile home park because there's not much that goes on. I've walked in many a mobile home park office only to find the manager in there watching soap operas on TV. I've even walked in when they were asleep, literally asleep at their desk, because they know that between 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, very few people will walk in. And they love that arrangement. And the park owner typically is okay with that arrangement as well because there doesn't really need to be much action.
Remember that a mobile home park really doesn't have many moving pieces. People are renting their little spot of land from you like a parking lot, but you're not involved in their daily life. And normally you own none of the homes, so you're not even involved in what goes on in their home. So the only reason they would come to the office is to either pay rent or inquire about their rent or to report a problem with a neighbor, that type of thing. And that kind of business can be conducted traditionally 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. In fact, the very definition of office hours are the hours in which business is conducted. So if your business can be conducted Monday through Friday from 9 to 5, then why change office hours or office hour days? And the answer would be you wouldn't. You just leave it alone. If it's running fine, well then if it's not broken, don't fix it. But also in many mobile home parks, there's another element to the business. It's not just collecting rent. It's just not enforcing rules. But you have this other thing, and that is you're either bringing in homes to fill your vacant lots and then selling them or possibly renting them.
Or maybe you already have a home on an established lot, but the customer has now vanished, and you've taken the home back through abandonment, and you've got to get it sold. And if that's the kind of business you're going to conduct, then Monday through Friday 9 to 5 isn't going to work. Think of all the businesses out there that deal with consumers trying to sell them things. Car dealerships, Costco, Target, their hours are not 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. Yes, they are open during those hours, but they augment that with extensive late night hours and weekend hours because they know they have to be open when the customer needs to conduct business. And particularly in the housing industry, it's impossible to ask people to buy a mobile home who have not seen it. Or more importantly, their entire household has not seen it. And when you have Monday through Friday 9 to 5, then when can people tour the home? And the answer is only during their lunch hour. That's the only shot for 99.9% of American households. Now if someone said, okay, well I'll try and do it during my lunch hour, here are the complications.
Number one, travel time from their job to your mobile home park and back. Let's just say that's 15 minutes each way. Well, there's half an hour of the hour already blown. And then on top of that, when they get there, they're going to be in a horrible rush, worried about getting back to work, not going to have much time to talk to the manager. If the manager is busy, well, they may just walk out because they can't afford the time loss. So they'll be very rushed. It won't be a pleasurable experience for the buyer. But more importantly, how do you get the rest of the household there? What if the kids are in school? What if the spouse has a job with an entirely different time frame? Maybe an even different shift if they're in a manufacturing style of business. And how can they get all this coordinated and done during the lunch hour? And the obvious answer is they can't. It's never going to happen. So if you've got homes to sell or rent, 9 to 5 Monday through Friday is never going to work. No one would ever imagine that it would. If it could, then all these other retail businesses would also be sharing those office
Hours, but they're clearly not. So then what are the correct hours for a mobile home park that needs to get things sold? Well, clearly 5 o'clock isn't late enough, but maybe if you were to drop that down to 7 p.m., that might do a better job. But if I'm going to go to 7 p.m., I obviously have to open later in the day. So if I was at 9 o'clock before opening, now I would need to drop to 11 to 7. But I don't have to do that every day. I could tell customers, yes, we're open to show this home. We have many easy hours to accommodate you. But it might only be one day a week, or maybe two days a week that you're open a little later. You open the office a little later, and you close the office a little later. Let's say until about 7 o'clock at night. But then what about weekends? Weekends are extremely important when you're trying to sell mobile homes. So when it comes to weekends, you've got to be open Saturdays if you really want to get homes out the door. That's an ideal day for the entire household to come and walk and view the home.
But if I'm going to be open on Saturday, then something else has to give, right? So in that case, what you'd want to be is open on Saturday but closed on Monday. So now you've swapped your traditional Saturday-Sunday weekend with the manager for a Sunday-Monday weekend, theoretically. So now what we've done is, now we're open on Saturdays, and we're also open a little later, maybe one or two days a week. We've not added any hours to the manager's schedule. We've not added any additional days to the manager's schedule. But who hates this more than anyone in the world? It's going to be the manager. The manager doesn't like being open on weekends, and they don't like being open later than 5 o'clock. And why is that? Because the way they view the world, it's all about them. So they already have other plans. They wanted to go do this. They want to go do that. They don't like being open that. They want to stick with the status quo of 9 to 5 when it simply does not work. So now we're faced with a dilemma. Do we want to disappoint the manager and have the business fail? Or do we want to be strong and have a backbone and say, look, we've got to be open on Saturdays and we've got to be open late because we've got to get all these homes sold?
And now it's really going to fall down to what kind of manager you have. A good manager understands that for them to get paid, the business must succeed. And they are going to be willing to adapt. They'll say, I understand your position. Yes, I have no problem being here on Saturday. But the manager who cares nothing about the business, nothing about you, nothing about the nuts and bolts of profitability, they're going to hate the idea no matter what you say will ever mullify it. And that manager probably needs to go. There's different types of managers out there. There's the manager who can fly on autopilot to play in satisfactory, collect in the red if needed, rules violation notices, talk to tenants. That's a certain style of manager. And that can work in a park where you have no homes to sell or rent. But you need a whole different manager, a whole different mindset when you have homes to get out the door. And that manager will have to be a lot more committed to your business, a lot more willing to sacrifice their days and times to meet your needs. We've often said in our business it's easier to change people than to change people.
And what that means is that you don't really have the luxury in a mobile home park, which typically has only one employee, to retrain them or retrain the way they think of American capitalism. It's much easier just to find somebody else who already has those attributes and stick them into that role. But you can help forge their desire to have the weekend hours and those later weekday hours simply by constantly hammering on them, how are we doing on getting these homes sold? If you're all over the manager with a single focus, not talking about the weather, not talking about movies or making small talk, but how are we doing on getting these homes sold? How many showings have you had? What's going on with getting them sold? At some point, they will pick up on that. And they'll realize their life will never be simple unless they make the maneuvers to get these homes out the door. And remember, you can dangle the carrot that once they get all the homes sold, then you don't longer have to be open on weekends. Or open after hours. Because again, you're only making this change to get the homes sold.
And once all of them have been sold, that's then abated. Many mobile home parks, once they achieve 100% status, they don't need to be open on weekends. They don't need to be open later hours because there's no business to be conducted outside of that 9 to 5 window. If your park already is at that level, that's great. Then don't worry about it. But if you're trying to fill vacant lots with homes, and you're trying to get homes sold or rented, you really need to probably change those office hours. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.