Most mobile home parks have a powerful marketing tool that is rarely used but highly effective – and nearly free of cost. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to explore how to use your road frontage as a successful marketing opportunity on a number of fronts.
Episode 428: Using Your Frontage As A Marketing Tool Transcript
Long before I ever got into the mobile home park business, I owned a billboard company down in Dallas, Texas, and I learned from that billboard company all about signage and visibility and the importance of traffic count. And many people do not realize, but even a good secondary street in America typically will have anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 viewers per day. Many park owners, however, not realizing this important contribution to their marketing, fail to properly utilize that one important asset that they own, which they overlook, which is simply their ability to put a sign on that frontage. This is Frank Rolfe with the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about how to maximize your marketing efficiency and all the many benefits you can have for your mobile home park from just simply hanging a banner or putting a sign right out there on the street. Now, let's first start off by investigating for a moment what kind of frontage most mobile home parks have. Because mobile home parks are all very old, they have not allowed new mobile home park construction since roughly the end of the 1970s. And in most cities and towns, that mobile home park, which at one day might have been on the fringe of civilization, today may be right in the heart of it.
We've many mobile home parks that even though they started out in life in almost a rural location, they later became right in the very center of the then prospering suburb. Surface streets next to highways are the most important arterial manner of reaching consumers. Your typical interstate highway in America has a traffic count of 50,000 all the way up to almost a half a million viewers per day. And on the non-highway roads, these primary, secondary thoroughfares, they are number two as far as traffic count, and they still reach thousands of people typically daily. So are you using that in your mobile home park? You've got this powerful weapon out there. Are you using it for good or are you ignoring it? Here are some of the things you can do with your frontage to really benefit your community. The first one is, if you have vacant lots, you can hang a banner out on your fence that simply says, "Move your home here for free." Just that. "Move your home here for free." What's the message? The message is if you don't like wherever your mobile home is currently situated, you can move it over to our mobile home park and we'll pay for the move.
And that, if properly accomplished, is what is called an organic move. We do hundreds of those per year. Many people in the industry do organic moves. They're great for the park owner because they allow you to fill a vacant lot without you having to get in the middle of the whole home cycle of buying the home and bringing it in and reselling it, but you can only really do this in a very passive manner. If you go to another mobile home park and actively seek their customers, if you send an email blast to them, for example, saying, hey, I want you to move over to this park, then what's gonna happen is, they're gonna have retribution. They're gonna come back on your mobile home park and do the same thing, and you'll probably get one of their customers and they'll get one of your customers, and you've accomplished literally nothing. But a better avenue, a different avenue is just to be very passive, just to say, hey, if you're unhappy and you want to move here, that would be great. But if you don't want to, I'm not gonna come out and actively pursue you.
So really, putting a banner out on your fence is pretty much the only thing you can really do to market for organic moves. They save you a fortune because you don't have to be in the home cycle. They fill a vacant lot, which every time you fill a vacant lot, the value goes from zero to whatever your occupied lots are worth. Maybe 50,000, might be over $100,000. So there's one thing you can do with your frontage, but here's another one. Let's assume you've got some homes for sale inside your mobile home park. Then just put a banner on your fence that says, "Homes for sale," and a phone number. Once again, people driving down the road see that, they think, gee, I wonder what those homes' price point is, because, can't afford to buy the stick-built subdivision homes they have across the street, and they'll call you and engage in a conversation of what do you have and what does it cost? And it's a great way to drive traffic to your park. Putting signs in windows and yards inside your mobile home park, it's always been a great idea, but the problem is you gotta get people off the road to get into your park to look for those homes for sale signs.
This is gonna reach the bigger audience, the people driving down the road in bulk, to get them into your mobile home park. Another thing you can put a banner on a fence for, is trying to find people to do home remodeling, because all park owners struggle. It's one of the weak spots of our industry, or finding contractors who can affordably fix and have the knowledge of how to fix mobile homes. If you ask any park owner, what's your toughest job out there? Invariably the answer is gonna be, well, getting those old mobile homes remodeled. And that's because mobile home remodeling has nothing to do with single-family stick-built remodeling. It's a whole different kind of contractor, but it's also a whole different kind of price point. As someone who's been doing traditional housing, they can't reorient their brain to the less expensive version of doing a mobile home. Then where do you find people? Well, you can call the other park owners. We all do that, say, hey, do you have anyone at your park working on the homes? But they'll probably say, no, I've been trying to find somebody, or I thought I did. I had the guy named Larry, but he ran off. So, another idea is just to put up a banner on your fence that says, skilled carpenters needed. We have found that is the correct term if you really want to attract that kind of a remodeling person, is a skilled carpenter.
And that's simply because you don't need someone who can paint. Anyone can paint, but skilled carpentry, and let's define that, someone who owns power tools, who knows how to measure and cut lumber to go in certain spots, to fix a cabinet, to fix a door. That's about 99% of your old mobile home remodeling, right? And we have found that if you put ads out there saying, skilled carpenters needed, what you're gonna get are two kinds of people. Number one, people who want basically a full-time gig to remodel a home, but it also taps into this entire concept of people who moonlight and try and make money on the side. You'll have people who come by the park who see the banner and say, I'm a skilled carpenter. What you got going on? And then they'll tell you, well, here's the deal. I have a regular day job building stick-built homes, but you know what? I could come by here at nights and on weekends and rehab your homes.
These homes are so simplistic, I can easily do this. And bingo, that's what you're looking for. So, sometimes you can use your frontage to advertise for those kinds of contractors. Another item you could do is you can put up a banner that just says, RVs welcome. Because if you have vacant lots and the city will allow you to put RVs on your vacant lots, what a great way to fill some vacant lots with almost zero out-of-pocket cost. RVers are always looking for spots to park their RVs, and some people prefer the kind of non-in-and-out, more content tenant base of a mobile home park with the consistency of that over a typical RV park where people are changing out every other day, but they don't know that you allow them there. If you put RVs welcome out on your frontage, you will have people come in and they'll say, hey, what's this RV thing? I've got an RV, I'm retiring, I'm thinking of putting the RV here in the community. So, what do you got available? So once again, a great way to bolster your occupancy simply with use of a banner.
And then finally, if you're trying to send a PR message to your existing residents, it doesn't hurt to put up a banner that just says something like, we heart our residents. Heart meaning love our residents, like the old I heart NY, which meant I love New York City, and so, it's a PR maneuver. It's not gonna really make you any money in the sense that people are not gonna come in and buy anything or do anything, but it does help impart the idea to those inside your mobile home park that the owners really do care. And it's obviously not bad PR for the overall community who says, "Oh gosh, I guess this park owner really is a nice and caring landlord." The bottom line is that your frontage is a very, very valuable asset. You can't monetize it. Under the Highway Beautification Act, you're not allowed to sell ad space on your fence, but you can monetize it in maybe a more meaningful way by simply putting ads and messages out there that will benefit your mobile home park. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.