We all know that Zell’s REIT Equity Lifestyle is the largest mobile home park owner in the U.S. with over 160,000 lots. But now he appears to be investing in the macro industry itself. Sam Zell has announced that he is buying MHVillage (the largest website selling mobile homes) and Datacomp (who supplies mobile home park market data) https://therealdeal.com/texas/2022/01/26/sam-zells-equity-lifestyle-properties-invests-147m-in-manufactured-homes/. What does this mean for the mobile home park industry?

The #1 American fear is public speaking, followed by snakes.

A recent article in Realtor.com is forcing those who criticized mobile homes as investments for consumers to eat their words

There are only around 44,000 mobile home parks in the U.S. – and that number is set in stone with roughly ten times more torn down each year than built new. Of that number, around 4,000 are owned by professional investors, leaving about 40,000 up for grabs. What are you doing to buy your fair share of these properties – and why bother?

There are two simple facts in the American economy right now. They are somewhat tied together, but not entirely.

Mark Cuban recently bought a mobile home park and a strip club in a town called Mustang, Texas

In 2014 I helped a Bloomberg reporter write a story on the mobile home park industry by answering their questions.

About a decade ago I was at a mobile home park industry conference where a speaker gave a report on why single-family homes in the U.S. cannot be built at an affordable price. The reason was the high price of residential lots in most American cities, which average around $80,000 each. When you add the price of the home, the speaker remarked, there’s no way that even a small home could possibly go up for less than $150,000 or so. Recently a non-profit in Florida tried this unsuccessful strategy again and ended up with 900 square foot homes for over $200,000 https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/new-affordable-housing-ends-up-more-expensive-than-some-expected/ar-AAO2ryJ which they claim was partially caused by lumber price increases as a result of the pandemic. But it all simply points out that the mobile home park “moat” of affordable detached dwellings cannot be breached in a modern America.

One of the big attractions to owning mobile home parks is their very passive nature. You rent land and you collect rent. There’s no toilets to fix and no units to show. But even with a simple business model, complications grow as your holdings do, and many owners prefer to keep their involvement in day-to-day activities at a minimum. So how can you keep your mobile home park investing passive even as your holdings grow in size?

America is a rapidly changing market when it comes to housing. And it’s essential that you stay on the right side of the “megatrends” since these are what propel your investment forward. With the landmark events since March 2020 – and particularly the change in administration from Trump to Biden – some of the key drivers to success have materially changed and these should be noted and considered. And the net effect would appear to greatly favor investing in small town mobile home parks and avoiding opportunity zone options. Here’s four big reasons why.

He may be able to launch cargo into space and invent the electric car industry, but Elon Musk is not always thinking big – at least not when it comes to his housing. Musk, a billionaire, is currently living in a $49,500 “Casita” made by Boxabl, which is a 375 square foot tiny home. So how will tiny living by Musk translate into mobile home park industry success?

Long ago, a couple of young men from the Midwest dreamed of better ways of building homes. Growing up in the days of Levitton, Lustron, Aladdin and National Homes, they saw that existing housing methods were obsolete and the potential boundless. Each of obtained good educations; one in engineering and the other in design.

Mobile home parks have always been the “black sheep” of the real estate family. The stigma against mobile home park residents (commonly called “trailer trash”) and mobile home park owners (considered “evil” by the media) has long rendered the mobile home park industry off-limits to those who lack the bravery to overcome these stereotypes. But there are many positive factors to being the only sector of real estate that nobody seems to like or respect.

We recently saw this news story on the internet https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/561211-jordan-chariton-kentucky-trailer-park-residents-literally-living-in-terror-due . Perhaps the writer should talk to John Oliver, who criticizes mobile home park owners for raising rents. You see, you can’t have both low rents and parks not being re-developed into more profitable uses. And it’s about time that media outlets start telling the truth about the situation.

If you’ve got a low downside and a big upside, you go do it. If you’ve got a big downside and a small upside, you run away. The only time you have any work to do is when you have a big downside and a big upside.

If you believe the U.S. economy is in great shape then you must not be in your 60’s. That’s because you’d have to be in your 60’s to have been an adult during the era of Jimmy Carter and “stagflation”.How did that era work out? Well, here’s a preview: inflation goes up, the stock market crashes, bonds plunge, and single-family home values plummet. Those who lived in the era of Carter are permanently scarred by what they saw and are better investors because of it. I am one of those people. And that is why I’m 100% bullish on the mobile home park industry at this moment in American history.

If you study the data on www.Bestplaces.net, you will see one unusual anomaly that has a direct bearing on understanding the attractiveness of a market for mobile home park ownership: the astounding difference in single-family home and apartment pricing. Perhaps the best example of this is to be found on the stats for Cairo, Illinois. This city of around 2,100 inhabitants has a median home price of $31,500 yet a three-bedroom apartment rent average of $1,000 per month. How is that even possible? Here are some thoughts:

I get a lot of calls from various mobile home park owners that find my name and phone number on the internet. These are people that I have never met and have never read a single book or article I have written. Instead, they are going through the internet desperately looking for help to save their property from failing, and when you Google “mobile home park” I come right to the top. One call I remember vividly was from a new park owner named Rosie. Here’s her story.

One of the big news stories in the U.S. – which gets little coverage in mainstream media outlets since most of them are based in New York City – is the simple fact that people are leaving American cities in a big way to gain a higher quality of life in suburbs and exurbs. Titled “The Great Migration” by some groups,it’s a reversal of the period in U.S. history, starting in the 1920s, when Americans flocked to move to the “big city” from smaller towns across the country, followed by recent trends of both young and old to abandon the safety of outlying areas and move into the city center to be near the “action”. And the net effect of this new exodus megatrend is very favorable for mobile home park owners for a number of reasons.

Despite every bad faith attempt by the Biden administration to accept the Federal Court’s decision that it’s unconstitutional, the national “masks off” policy will probably finally force a day of reckoning on June 30th – the official expiration date of the current CDC evictions order. Here is our opinion of what happens next when the eviction floodgates are opened, and how to best mitigate these factors.

Many deals – despite you doing everything correctly to the best of your ability – reach a moment where an extension is necessary from the seller. It typically is the result of the bank’s attorney not getting the loan documents together as promised or a missing or deficient third-party report such as the survey. But regardless, your deal hangs in the balance if the seller should deny your need for more time. So here are the secrets to successfully getting an extension from your seller.

When I got into the mobile home park business with my first property “Glenhaven”, one of the chief attractions was the financing. The deal was $400,000 with $10,000 down and the seller financed the remaining $390,000 with non-recourse debt. This was insanely compelling to me as it meant that – no matter what happened – I was only out $10,000 if I walked away from the deal at any moment. Sadly, the Governor of West Virginia did not follow this same conservative posture when he borrowed $700 million with full recourse. So what is recourse vs. non-recourse debt, and why do mobile home parks have so many non-recourse options?

Mobile home parks have outperformed virtually all other sectors of real estate in recent years. But that’s only about to accelerate. The net effect of the new America – created by the impact from the pandemic, urban unrest, and the Biden administration – is about to create an environment in which all other sectors of American real estate take a beating and mobile home park revenues and values soar.

No mobile home park can be successful without a competent manager. A manager serves as your eyes and ears in the field, as well as your problem-solver, ambassador and mayor all rolled into one. Since the manager is such an essential role, every community owner should focus on what can go wrong and how to mitigate that risk.

There’s a unique strategy that has been used to construct clever mobile home park deals over the decades, but it rarely gets much notoriety. The name of this strategy is a “master lease with option” and it can be a win/win for many situations – as well as the worst idea ever in other circumstances. So what is a “master lease with option”, how does it work, and when is it a good or bad idea?