Decide to save money by reusing old rickety wood steps without hand rails on all your show homes

It's exciting. You just purchased a manufactured home community. It has fifty (50) sites, forty eight (48) of which are occupied by home owning tenants paying $300/month in rent. You were pleased to purchase it for $960,000, or $20,000 per site. And now that it's time to begin managing the community, you discover three things. First, four of your tenants own large dogs (a German Shepherd, a Pit Bull, a Rottweiler, and a Chow). Second, your insurance agent has advised you that your insurance company strongly discourages allowing tenants to own such dogs and will non-renew or cancel your insurance if you don't force the dogs out of the park. Third, all four dog owning tenants have nice homes, are good neighbors, pay their rent timely, manage their dogs well, and will leave if their dogs have to go.

With single-family homes, a legitimate zero down deal is about as likely as sleet in San Diego. However, with mobile home parks, they are as common as rain. of the 25 mobile home parks I've bought, about five of them or 20% -- were zero down.

Failure to list/insure all your improvements on your policy. Many simply don’t include above ground utility infrastructure, signs, fences and smaller buildings

When you first buy a mobile home park, you are a little terrified of your water and sewer system. "What if it breaks down?" you worry. "Can I afford to fix it?". "Will my tenants get mad and leave if the water goes out for a couple days?".

Just about anybody who watches late night TV, or receives email, or reads, knows that there are hundreds of people promoting concepts to make money in single family homes. "Buy foreclosures", "profit from short sales", "wholesale houses" there are at least 1,000 different concepts. Unfortunately, the only people who actually make money in many of these ideas are the promoters. There are so many people chasing after single-family homes to invest in that the market is beyond saturated, and any profitability has been extinguished.

Mobile home park tenants are not rich. Most of them live from paycheck to paycheck. As a result, they frequently don't pay their bills on time sometimes at all. To motivate these tenants to pay their lot rent on time, you must enact a late fee for rent that is not received by the due date. However, enacting such a plan is a lot more complicated than most park owners recognize. And messing up the plan can cause extreme legal and financial penalties. Here are a few initial points to consider:

When you write about mobile home park returns you always run the risk of being branded a liar, as nobody believes that you can make 20% plus returns on anything anymore. With a stock market that makes 2% a year, and CDs that make 1%, and single family homes that lose money, investors are just conditioned to expect a low single-digit return - and if you suggest more, they just discard that thinking as a bunch of hype that they've heard before in the days of the dot com and housing bubbles.

So how do I determine what a specific mobile home park is worth? I want to know how many lots there are, how many are occupied and paying, what the lot rent is, what expenses the owner is paying, and who is responsible for the water lines, sewer lines, and roads.

Most every mobile home park owner in the U.S. has a list of rules attached to their lease which is longer than the lease itself. While it's always a good idea to cover your bases and address every possible behavior concern, it's another to expect people to follow more rules than the local prison.

Am I supposed to take the roof off and smell manufactured homes to see if they've spoiled like milk? Do they have an expiration date stamped on the frame? Can you fit one in a curbside polycart?

When considering the purchase of a mobile home park as compared to an RV park there are many factors to consider. While mobile home parks and RV parks are often sold by the same brokers and are combined in one facility, they are not the same and both require different amounts and types of management. The following comparisons are for Overnight/Destination RV parks as compared to the typical mobile home park in which the lots are rented out on a monthly basis. In many cases, the seasonal or extended stay RV parks will have more of the qualities of the typical mobile home park rather than those of the Overnight/Destination type RV parks.

Everyone knows that commercial air travel is the safest in the world. But that's because of the high level of training of the pilots. From the pre-flight checklist, to the flight plan, to dealing with problems in the air, the pilot knows everything about what they're doing. The pilot who successfully landed in the Hudson River recently, did so because he knew every possible strategy of what to do in an emergency - he knew the options and could make an intelligent decision.

Top 10 Mistakes Park Owners Make That Result In Avoidable Liability Losses

There are few things more attractive about the mobile home park business than seller financing. Non-recourse seller financing allows the buyer to escape the hassle and scrutiny of bank lending, while at the same time offering some degree of insurance against fraud (you have not yet paid the seller in full), the ability to give the park back and walk clean in the event of catastrophe, and often includes a below-market interest rate and longer loan term.

Most mobile home parks I have bought come with a standard sign design - a 4'x8' sheet of plywood with a faded poorly written name on it and no phone number. This must be a popular design because I see it everywhere. There is also the design of metal or wood letters on a brick or masonry wall with some of the letters missing. My favorite was on where some kid had yanked off the letters and then spray painted some replacements so that the sign said proudly "F___ Y__ Estates". What was equally funny what that the owner cared so little about the sign that he did nothing about it -- I drove by several years later it was still that way.

People often ask me how many stars my park has. I always tell them that I've got a five-star cash flow. That totally confuses them, and allows me to change the subject.

With the national economy in free fall, and millions of jobs being cut across all industry segments, many people are trying to formulate a plan to replace their income if they get laid off. And to many people, that income can approach $100,000 or more. So how do you replace $100,000 of income. For many people, the answer may be in a good old fashioned trailer park.

When you buy a Mobile Home Park that needs to be turned around (and most parks need some type of turnaround), the first thing you need to do is disengage the prior ownership/management. Face it, if the park is not running like it should be, you will most likely want to start over with a new management team. Even though the prior owner is usually to blame for the poor operations of the park, it is difficult to keep the prior managers that have been trained poorly or incorrectly. So, in most cases, fire everyone and start over. There are always exceptions to the rule, but they are few and far between. I have found that it is easier to train a new manager than to retrain the existing one.