Bill Gates once said “your most unhappy customers are your greatest sense of learning”. It’s an unusual adage from someone who held a virtual monopoly over the personal computer for decades, but this mantra is true for all industries. So what can you learn from unhappy customers, and how can you make them happy again?

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.

Much of the Southeastern U.S. has not been taken seriously by mobile home park buyers – or commercial real estate investors, in general – for decades. Even Groucho Marx made jokes about the region in 1930. But all that is changing now.

Buying a mobile home park is a lot like diving into that lake: it seems like there is no risk. After all they are not like factories, gas stations or urban tracts. The environmental risk is not obvious.

It’s becoming pretty common for mobile home parks to be torn down to make way for a new and more profitable use. But this story is different, because the owner of the property it the city itself, not your typical park owner. So how did this 15-acre mobile home park meet its fate? And what are the lessons learned for all of those out there that complain about higher mobile home park lot rents?

There is no better feeling on earth than when you own a mobile home park and you have absolutely no money into it. Not only do you have no worries (assuming your debt is non-recourse) but your rate of return is infinite (since it’s based on your down-payment and you have none). You can literally own an empire of mobile home parks and have zero money at risk. So if zero-down is living the dream, how do you accomplish it?

Selling 11 homes on the first business day of 2021 is quite an accomplishment. But many park owners are similarly having the highest level of demand in industry history. And we didn’t get those 11 sold in just one “hot” property but spread out about evenly across five states: Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Kansas. So what’s with all the demand out there for mobile homes?

Prior to the pandemic, most economists predicted the next U.S. recession would begin in 2021. However, they still do. Effectively, the Covid-19 outbreak was simply a prelude to a larger economic event, which historically always falls immediately following the U.S. Presidential election. In this case it’s all about the final reckoning of the debt of those businesses that failed (hotels, restaurants, retail stores, etc.) coupled with displacement of workers in non-essential industries and state/cityfiscal calamity as the result of plummeting tax income. The bottom line is that if you think it’s all upside in 2021, you’re not aligned with economic models and probability, nor are you being realistic. Talk is cheap – and we heard a good bit of it during the election – but the fact is that America is well positioned to go further down the tubes in 2021 and with perhaps greater acceleration.

Tony Hsieh is known for being the founder of Zappos, as well as personally funding the renaissance of portions of Las Vegas. But I will remember Tony for a different reason, and one that has received zero media attention. As a trailer park pioneer.

“Inflation” is defined on Wikipedia as “a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money”. In mobile home parks it has a different definition: “the ability to raise rents and produce higher values while being fully protected from economic danger”. In a nutshell, inflation is a friend to mobile home parks. Why?

Blackstone – one of America’s largest private equity groups – has announced that they are buying around 40 properties from Summit Communities, expanding their foot print in Florida and Arizona and significantly increasing their mobile home park holdings https://www.cpexecutive.com/post/blackstone-to-buy-550m-mhc-portfolio/. In so doing, they are continuing the love affair that institutional investors are having with the mobile home park industry and its brilliant business model. Why have they become big fans?

In every election there is a winner and a loser. But with affordable housing, the outcome of every election is the same: the demand for affordable housing goes up and nobody does anything about it. As a result, the mobile home park business always does well as the sole provider of quality affordable housing in the U.S. Why does it always turn out this way?

We always think of mobile home parks as being great income properties – but what about the land underneath? Surprisingly, mobile home parks may be the most valuable development site in any city. And it’s been proven over and over again. Why is that?

Values of mobile home parks have been skyrocketing over the past decade. At the same time, so have municipal government deficits. Where these two lines intersect is with property tax, and that’s why this is an important item for all park owners and buyers to understand. So how can you take control of your property tax costs?

The approach of winter often brings forth mental images of the holiday season. But for mobile home park owners, it also brings forth other items: some dreaded and some good news. Here are the winners and losers of winter as far as community owners are concerned, and how to mitigate these issues before the snow starts falling and the temperature dips below freezing.

There are few things more predictable in life than the seller’s expense numbers being lower than they should be in reality. While mobile home park buyers know that the typical operating expense ratio runs 30% to 40%, there’s no question that those seller numbers reflecting 15% to 20% are not accurate. So what’s typically missing in the seller’s numbers?

Let’s first clarify – we’re talking a million in value, not in cash out. But we’re still talking an increase in value of over $1 million in one year. That’s a huge number in any business, but not that uncommon in the mobile home park industry. How is this possible? Let’s examine what community operators can do to increase value, and model out how much value they can tap.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued an order temporarily halting residential evictions for failure to pay rent until December 31, 2020 if the resident provides the “declaration” that they meet certain criteria. This misguided concept is re-writing eviction laws once again and causing mobile home park owners to thank heaven that they are not apartment owners. So why will mobile home park owners fare better than apartment owners in this latest restriction in making some tenants pay rent?

Webster’s Dictionary defines a “shed” as “a structure built to shelter something” but in many mobile home parks it’s more like “the ugliest thing on the property”. Why are sheds such a problem and how can a park owner turn the situation around?

Bing Crosby once sang “Don’t Fence Me In” but his song did not apparently reflect the desires of many mobile home park residents. Indeed, fencing inside mobile home parks is a standard feature, despite the fact that mobile home park lots do not have technical boundaries. Yet many resident fencing choices and maintenance will not work with you desire to make the property desirable (such as the one shown above). So how can you make the best of the residents’ innate desire to mark and secure their property with a fence?

Most mobile home parks have some form of office – whether it’s a free-standing building or inside the manager’s home. And it’s pretty standard practice to set office hours so residents know when they can and can’t come by to pay rent, look at homes, or discuss problems. So how do you set effective office hours?

Sam Zell is the largest owner of mobile home parks in the U.S. He’s also been the largest owner of apartments and office buildings. But regardless of the sector, his strategy has always remained to buy assets that are near death and then bring them back to life. Why has this strategy worked so well?

Mobile homes are an engineering marvel: they are the only form of housing that can go down the highway at 55 miles-per-hour. But even though they have this unique skill, transporting a 15,000 pound object down the interstate can frequently cause minor damage to the home by the time of its arrival. What do you need to know when you order a new home to be delivered at your property?

Closing on a mobile home park can be a very stressful experience. Making it go smoothly requires proactive preparation and strategy. So what are some concepts to improve your closing experience?

Industrialist Andrew Carnegie once said “problems are only opportunities in work clothes”. And J. Paul Getty, the nation’s richest person during the 1950s and 1960s, held the belief that depressions were a great time to make acquisitions and to refine business operations – he, in fact, was only happy when times were bad. Throughout American history, most fortunes were built upon the bedrock of times of economic collapse, when values were lower, distractions few, and the fundamentals of business were easier to enact.