Buying a used mobile home is supposed to be a positive step to fill a vacant lot. But sometimes it can rapidly spiral into a nightmare scenario. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review what can go wrong with a used home purchase as well as how to proactively guard against those issues.
Episode 431: Used Home Horror Stories And How To Avoid Them Transcript
Park buyers nationwide are buying more used homes now than ever before. They're doing that because used homes do not require the very costly and non-commonsensical foundation systems the new homes require. So you don't have to put in the concrete pad, piers, or runners in many states when you bring in a used home. And used homes are more within the price category of most of our shoppers. It fits within the budget of more mobile home park tenants than new homes do. But you can have problems with used homes. And we've bought well over a thousand used homes over the past 30 years. And yes, we've had our own share of horror stories. But I thought we would go over used homes, horror stories from used homes, and how to mitigate those problems. This is Frank Rolfe with the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. Let's jump right into horror stories about used homes and the lessons learned from those. Horror story number one: we bought a used mobile home, and that used mobile home was not within a mobile home park, it was out on some land. Because mobile homes don't always land into mobile home parks.
Sometimes the farmer buys one to buy a home for his daughter. Sometimes the gentleman squire weekend rancher buys a mobile home to put out on their property they bought. And then sometimes, yes, they do default, or maybe they want to sell it to build a stick-built home. So in this particular example, this is one that had defaulted. It had gone back to the bank and they were selling it, and you had to remove it. Now, we're used to removing mobile homes from mobile home parks. That we've had thousands of test cases with. But we're as big a neophyte as anybody on removing a mobile home from raw land. It didn't look that bad as far as what you could see on the aerial. Pretty straight shot down a dirt road. But here was the problem: it started raining and raining and raining, and it never stopped raining. And when that road and that property got turned into mush from that rain, we couldn't get the home out. It was impossible. We went down on several attempts to see if anyone could get in to do it, and it was impossible to get equipment in. All that would happen is the wheels of the home would just sink right into the mud.
In the end, we had to go ahead and abandon the adventure, sell the home off at loss to somebody else. What was the lesson learned? Sometimes access is as big an issue as the home itself. So if you're looking at buying a home on raw land, not in a mobile home park, never happened in a mobile home park before, but out on raw land, make sure that you can get in and that you can get that home out of there. Another horror story we had happened within a mobile home park. We bought a mobile home, again, one that had defaulted, repo list, bought the home to pull it out of the mobile home park. And when we went to get the home, the park owner protested and said, you can't remove that home. I won't let you remove that home. You owe back rent. You have to put in a bond, a deposit. He even went so far as to block us from having access to the home. He would deliberately park cars, even his own car, in front of the home. So we went to the guy and said, look, we're just a mobile home park owner just like you.
We bought this home in default. You could have bought it also in default. You didn't for whatever reason. And so we're trying to just bring it over to fill a vacant lot in our park. We're not trying to have a fight with you. So how do we come to a successful resolution of this ongoing dispute? And in the end, we ended up selling the guy the home back at the same amount we had in it so it would stay in his park. Now, he should have bought it. Sometimes park owners are stupid. They don't buy the homes that go up for sale or default of their park, and then often those get bought by home wholesalers or other people on repo lists and pulled out. But once again, we bought a home, we were denied the ability to move it into our park. Missed opportunity for us, at least on that one, no financial loss. Then we have a million horror stories of this: the mobile home that looks good on paper, but when it finally arrives at your park, it's a catastrophe. Now, these come in all shapes and sizes and years, although the older the home, the more likely the problem, although not always.
And we've had some true success stories buying homes sight unseen in a hurry. We once had a bank call up and say, I've got two homes and I want to get them out the door immediately, and all you gotta give me is X. And X was so cheap that if either of the two homes had to be demolished and only one could be saved and needed full renovation, it was still an attractive buy. And on that one, to our shocker, when the two homes arrived, one was better than we thought and the other one was immaculate. So buying things off the cuff can sometimes have good endings, but normally it does not. So what happens on this horror story, and it's pretty common, is the home arrives and then you find it's in much poorer condition than you thought, or it has some other problem that you couldn't see in a photograph, such as mold or electrical fire, things like that. Then of course you have the house that comes in and your park is all-electric, but the home has gas. So you would think that's impossible. How could you screw that up that bad?
Well, once again, relying on what people tell you. We were told the home was part gas, part electric, or the home was all-electric. And then it comes into the park and it's got the wrong utility system. And in this case, we had an all-electric park. We were told that the home was an all-electric home, and when it showed up, of course, it had a gas furnace and it had a gas range, and it was in no way an all-electric home. And then of course we have the house that came in and was sticking out in the street. This is not an uncommon problem in our industry because the titles are four feet different than the actual length. A home showing 80-foot length on the title is in fact only 76 feet long because the government allows you to tack on the end of the hitch as opposed from the back wall to the front wall. So we thought we had it clear with the seller. We thought we had everything just right. And lo and behold, the home arrived and we were not in conjunction on our thinking and the home was four feet longer than we had anticipated.
The good news was we had another lot that could accommodate it. So then we just simply had the guy when he arrived to put the home in that lot, and found it wouldn't fit, we put it in a different lot. Could have been a much worse story if in fact we had no longer lots that would take that additionally four-foot longer home. Now, what all of those stories have in common, you might say, what are the lessons learned from that? Well, obviously the home access. Always make sure on a home that you have the ability to get it out, particularly if it's on raw land.
And also make sure when you're talking to park owners when you're gonna pull the home out of a mobile home park that everything's good to go. They're not gonna fight you, or more likely the mover when they go there to get there. Make sure that everything is fine and that everybody is happy. But the final lesson learned is you've gotta look at these homes in person. You cannot just buy them based on a bunch of photographs or videos. It just doesn't work. But you might say, well, how do I see it in person? Because I might be hundreds or thousand miles away. Well, if you can't go look at it in person, have your manager go look at it. And if you say, my manager can't go look at it. My manager isn't mobile enough. They can't get over there to look at it. Okay, great. Well, then find somebody on Craigslist, call the local fire department, pay someone $50 to $100 to go out and visually look at that home. And better yet, when they get there, have them get to you on FaceTime so you can see it real life.
Have them poke around on the home with you watching the entire time. But you cannot buy these homes without further inspection. That's the issue. You would never buy a car, I imagine, unless you could test drive it. And I'm sure you would never buy a car unless you could physically touch it and see it and look at the condition of the interior and the exterior and all those things. You can cheat with photographs or videos, right? You can pan over those scratch and dings on the car, just the same as you can on the mobile home. But there is no substitute for the human eye when it comes to inspecting these homes. And almost all the horror stories you will hear in our industry of people who bought a used home and brought it in and it was a horrible mess and it cost them instead of $5,000 remodel, it cost them $15,000 remodel. If you then say, well, didn't you look at it? The answer always is, well, I looked at it in pictures, or, I looked at it in a video. And that's the problem. In the modern internet era, we've all gotten a little bit lazy.
We assume we can just do everything off of our computer. We don't feel the need anymore for that person-to-person contact, that eyeball contact of things out in the field. But sadly, when it comes to buying used mobile homes, that's an all-essential item. And I left off the list because I hope everyone already knows this: never buy a used home ever without a title. So that's one that I hope nobody would even think of doing, but you also can never do that. Most of the common sense we all learned in buying automobiles applies to mobile homes. They're very similar. They have similar titles. They're both chattel property. So when you're looking at buying used homes, just bring your car-buying common sense with you and that will save the day from having those kinds of horror stories. This is Frank Rolfe with the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.