Mobile Home Park News Briefing

Located in Malibu, CA, the park, known as Paradise Cove Mobile Home Park, has an illustrious history. In addition to Paulson, the trailer park also counts the likes of Stevie Nicks, Matthew McConaughey, Pamela Anderson, and Minnie Driver among its current and former residents.

Before I ever got into the mobile home park business, I owned billboards including a company I bought during the Los Angeles economy crash at the time of the Rodney King riots and the Northridge earthquake. Back then it was well-known that those mobile home parks were the home to stars on the way up or the way down in their careers. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that role, but to pretend that a 1960s trailer is a “jewel box” is as absurd as pretending that a 1980 Yugo is a “classic high-performance automobile”. Nobody is going to buy that outside of Los Angeles.

The group of investors who bought four neglected Spartanburg mobile home parks in July plans to fix up the units while also raising rent. “We're not looking to come in and be the highest rent in the area,” said Tim Woodbridge, one of the investors who made the purchase. “We're looking to increase enough so we can put enough money back into the parks. If you're not making money, you're not putting the money back into the parks, into the homes, and all of a sudden it just cascades into a bad situation.”

I commend the new owners on their narrative to the media, which is that you have to charge higher rent to offer a good, safe product.

And then, of course, the writer can’t help themselves to add this worn-out quote from a resident:

"If they’re doing an increase, they’re gonna put a lot of people out of a place to live".

You can use that same quote on literally every good and service in the U.S. right now, which are up a collective 20%+ under the Biden administration. It’s a meaningless statement. I wrote an article recently in which I highlighted that – under the government’s own budget-setting on-line help site for Americans – it shows that housing is not the #1 cost, but instead ranks behind healthcare, childcare, taxes and even transportation costs. When you get those four solved then you might start complaining about mobile home park rents going up! Give me a break.

Then, one of her neighbors reached out to Dan Rosensweig at Habitat for Humanity." A woman from the mobile home park came to our office in a panic," he told Radio IQ. "She showed us a note that’s been distributed to all of the residents at Carlton that said the mobile home park is being sold. It was basically a 60-day notice." Working with the Piedmont Housing Alliance, the Legal Aid Justice Center, and park residents, he offered to buy the place with $7.25 million dollars from the city. Over the next three years, Habitat will help residents plan a new community with plenty of affordable housing. No one will be forced to leave, and the group says it won’t raise rent more than $15 a month.

Yes, this is the same story – regurgitated for weeks now -- in which Habitat for Humanity pretends to be the savior of these poor residents who have absolutely no idea what is about to happen. It’s like watching a war movie where the soldiers are walking into an ambush while admiring how nice the weather is. Just look at the wording “… will help residents plan a new community with affordable housing …”. That means the trailer park is going to be torn down and put back as an apartment complex or something other than a mobile home park, in all likelihood. That’s apparently what Habitat has done in the past, according to a park resident in an earlier article. Sure sounds that way to me.

With rising property values in California, there is a growing concern that developers will buy out entire mobile home parks and displace residents.

No joke. Mobile home parks represent perhaps the most attractive re-development parcels in every market in the U.S. Not only do they have the right size (2 to 10 acres) for virtually every pad user, but they also typically have great street frontage, access to municipal water and sewer, and the city will grant any zoning or variance required to get the “trailer park” torn down. I have long said that eventually somebody would figure this out and build a business model around simply buying parks for the development potential. They’ve already figured this out in California. That’s why the national conversation on mobile home park lot rents needs to be “how high do they need to go to keep mobile home parks from being torn down?”.

"It's really disappointing that banks are not willing to see how stable the market is for manufactured homes in a land use community," said Dolan.

No, what’s really disappointing is that nobody appreciates the fact that probably 90% of every mobile home loan in a mobile home park is “backstopped” by the park owner in order to get the customer financed. Under that arrangement, if the customer defaults, the park owner has to abate rent, effectively take over payments, renovate the home, run the ads, and get it sold. The media gives 0% attention to this fact. Once again, without mobile home park owners the U.S. supply of affordable housing would be greatly reduced – yet we get zero thanks for that fact!

"Currently there are 10 counties that have a rent stabilization ordinance that specifically addresses mobile home parks in the unincorporated areas of their counties,” Nolen said, "We're not talking about section 8, we're not talking about homeless situations but if we don't have this conversation that is exactly what we're talking about."

Oh, I get it, the park owner is responsible for the tenants’ lives in perpetuity and must be held accountable if the tenants fall into Section 8 or homeless status because of their own failure to manage their finances and live in a modern world.

Only in California.

Now this is an interesting article. A rent control board member is accused of deliberately keeping the mobile home park rent increase low in order to try to buy the park themselves at a reduced price. I hope the park owner wins and that puts the fear of God into every other rent control board member out there that they may actually have personal liability from their decisions. It reminds me of the zoning case in Dallas in the 1980s in which a real estate speculator went to the Dallas City Council to renovate an abandoned K-Mart into a movie theater. The neighbors hated the idea and got to the board members and convinced them to vote against it. The property owner reminded the board members that the property already had the zoning for a movie theater and they had no option other than to approve the plans. Nevertheless, the board voted it down. So the developer filed a personal lawsuit on each and every member of the board that voted “no” and within two days they had an emergency meeting and approved the theater.

Amazing how a little personal accountability takes the fun out of things, right?

Baez says the real problems remain: parking policies she claims are aggressive and discriminate against the park's lower-income families – policies that she said eliminated free street parking, charged monthly fees for extra parking spaces, and charged additional fees for visitor parking.

Virtually every mobile home park in the U.S. was built for a maximum of two car parking per mobile home. It is not the park owner’s fault that residents have more than two cars. Despite this, most park owners try to accommodate this issue with overflow parking and dicussing if those with one car would allow others to park on their spaces. But the contention that mobile home park owners are required to provide unlimited parking is pure insanity. I dare you to find an apartment or condominium in the U.S. that allows you to park as many cars as you want there.

So what private equity found it could do was coming and raise lot rent — sometimes by as much as 60% and 70%. Which, you know, may not sound like much if you're going, "Oh, it went from $320 to $405." But think about if your mortgage was increased by 40%, 60% ... that is a huge impact on people…

No, that’s not correct at all. Raising rents from $320 to $405 is an increase of 27% NOT 60%. If you raise the lot rent from $320 to $405 that’s a $85 increase. The average mortgage payment in the U.S. is $2,715 per month (per Google). If you raised that by 27% that’s a monthly increase of $733 per month. THERE’S NO WAY YOU CAN COMPARE AN INCREASE OF $85 PER MONTH TO AN INCREASE OF $733 PER MONTH – that’s nearly a 10-for1 difference! Using this logic, McDonald’s raising the Dollar Menu price of the McChicken from $1 to $1.60 – a 60% increase – represents a much greater offense and financial burden than either of the above.

When you talk about price increases, the percentage means nothing and the actual amount means everything. If milk goes up 50% and a car goes up 5%, guess which one is a bigger problem for the average U.S. household?

How math challenged is America, anyway?

NIMBYism certainly plays a role, but what is it about modern, well-kept developments like Kathleen Manor and Olde Stone Village that puts off prospective neighbors? We find nothing objectionable about them at all.

Whoever wrote this obviously lives in an apartment as no homeowner on earth would welcome a mobile home park being built in their neighborhood. If this writer did own a stick-built home, and there was suddenly a zoning request to build a “trailer park” next door, you know they’d be the first one marching on city hall with a flaming torch. Give me a break.

The land on which the mobile home park sits, with some ancillary properties, was purchased by Joy and Eddie Hanks in 2020 for $600,000, with plans to redevelop the park into “Digs on the River,” a 23-acre mixed use area with plans for apartments, a restaurant and commercial space.

What part of the residents’ “fate” is uncertain here? They have been formally given notice to leave and the owners of the property seem to be following all the correct steps.

What’s really interesting is the price paid for the property, which equates to only around $15,000 per space. Once again, this park could maybe have been saved with higher lot rents, as most well-run parks today are worth around $50,000 a space and that would have made the redevelopment plan less appealing.

Once again, as always, LOW LOT RENTS = REDEVELOPMENT.

Residents of the community said the park's owner got permission from the rent control board in Ludlow to raise their lot fees by 150%. They're hoping to have that decision reversed in court.

So let me get this straight. The park is subject to rent control. The rent control board approved the increase. So how is this even a story? Do the “free rent movement” folks now want a rent control supreme court to watch over the rent control board – just because they don’t like the outcome?

These residents are sending a definite message to the park owner: “time to redevelop into something else”. If they keep this up they won’t have a mobile home park to complain about.

For how many years now has the White House and FHA been talking about this topic, with basically zero success so far? The problem is that academics cannot legislate solutions to a free-market problem caused by the simple issue that Biden’s inflation has outpaced workers’ incomes. I don’t see any immediate solution other than for people to accept the need to commute farther out from urban centers. You have to remember that 60 million Americans live on 97% of the land mass and 240 million Americans are jammed into just 3%. The clear solution is for a large portion of those 240 million Americans to move out into the suburbs and exurbs where land and housing is cheaper. It’s not rocket science. Do you remember that chapter back in high school social studies in which 1800’s Americans headed out west in search of cheap land to settle on? Same concept.

Based on this writer’s arguments, every single product and service in America – which have risen a collective 20% under the Biden administration – is a part of the “economic eviction crisis”. If gas costs $4 a gallon and eggs cost $5 a dozen, that takes away money that could go against higher rents, right?

But the bigger issue – and one that nobody wants to talk about – is the simple fact that seniors may need to move to more inexpensive areas of America in retirement since they no longer need to have access to employment. These type of articles always give the narrative of the expensive urban market with lot rents approaching $1,000 per month as opposed to the rural mobile home parks in states like Arkansas, that rent for $150 per month. And that’s not fair or constructive.

The bottom line is that most seniors, as part of their downsizing in housing and costs, need to move to cheaper states and more rural areas. If they don’t want to do that, then that’s their choice. But the option is always there and if they refuse to embrace it then they shouldn’t complain.

“We were looking for a place that was almost a presence within this community. And we have members that live within this community, and through them and being around, we noticed ‘hey, there’s a building that’s not being used,” said Pastor Preston Pratt.

We are also big believers in converting every inch of common area in every mobile home park into an amenity for residents. Abandoned clubhouses are low-hanging fruit and, with the addition of working heat and air-conditioning, sturdy carpet, fresh paint, and a vision for what the residents need, we have converted such structures into party areas, game rooms – even libraries.

Getting help from non-profits to augment the amenities is as simple as asking. We converted an old laundry building into a library and the local library donated all of the shelves and books – simply because we called and asked if they could help. We even had a Lions Club donate a giant playground.

Want to enhance your amenities for residents? Call and ask other non-profits.

Wow, the free legal aid attorney got the residents a few weeks more time. Big deal. The fact is simply that the park is being redeveloped apparently into apartments. It’s the same old adage week after week: LOW LOT RENTS = REDEVELOPMENT. How high would the lot rents have needed to be to make a mobile home park in this location more valuable than an apartment complex? Not sure. But that’s the key issue people need to explore.

Residents say new management for the land their homes are on arrived in March and have since been making changes to property rules. People with cars have been told they have to pay to have them parked in the community now, and some of them have lost their dogs because they’re not allowed on the property anymore.

One look at the homes in the photo and any idiot can tell why certain residents are being asked to leave. The new owner is obviously trying to bring this downtrodden park back to life and, with progress, some people get displaced.

Park owners can’t win with writers like this. If the new owner left the dilapidated homes alone, they would be tagged as slumlords in these type of articles, and if they get them torn down, they’re identified as being cruel.

You can’t please everyone, so you have to please yourself, your good residents, your bank, your city inspectors and the surrounding community. It’s that simple.

Another article about a mobile home park being redeveloped into a different use. This only happens when the park does not yield as much income as alternative uses. Want to stop this from accelerating? Stop criticizing higher lot rents. That’s the only thing that can stop the redevelopment mania.

What a laughable pile of nonsense. You cannot legislate affordable housing. It has to come from the free market. When bureaucrats pass more regulations, it just hurts more housing from being built, as opposed to helping the situation. You have to have zero common sense to think these six new laws are a step in the right direction.

Additionally, East Hampton Town conducted an electrical report between the mid-July outage and the Aug. 7 meeting that was then presented to R.H.P. Properties.“There were several code violations present which are contributing to the heating and overloading condition that currently exists,” the report stated, concluding that certain systems are “not properly wired, not properly grounded, and overloaded.” In the end, it recommended replacing the electrical distribution network and restricting “use of certain appliances” in individual homes, which place a greater load on the network.“Upon being notified of the power outages at the Oakview Manufactured Home Park, the town contacted the property owner and retained an electrical underwriter to investigate the situation with the fire marshal,” the town said in a statement. “With power now restored the town is engaging with park management to permanently resolve the issues recently faced by the residents.”

Ouch. These residents are making a terrible mistake. My first park also had a master-metered electric system and when it failed the reason was that residents had snuck all kinds of window air-conditioners and other items into their units and overloaded the amps the park’s system could handle. I guess they don’t realize that the only way to permanently fix these occasional outages is going to fall on the tenants for all types of illegal electrical work they have done on their personal homes. They’ll find out soon enough.

STUPIDITY LEVEL: HIGH

Median home sale prices in New Hampshire recently hit $500,000 and rental vacancy rates remain below 1 percent statewide. With this landscape, they fear they have nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, McGahey said he has no choice but to walk away. “He’s holding me hostage here because I cannot sell my house and I have to get out of here,” McGahey said. “I never thought I’d be in this kind of predicament where I’m just going to turn the house back over to the bank. I just can’t do it. The stress alone is enough to drive anybody crazy.”

Well, obviously this woke writer didn’t take debate in high school – his opening statement negates his theory, rather than support it. If this mobile home owner is in a market with $500,000 homes and less than 1% housing vcancy then how exactly can he fail to sell his mobile home for $80,000? Clearly, he probably never ran an ad, answered the phone, or endeavored to sell it at all. The worst salesman in the world could have sold that home in a week, but you have to put in at least 1% effort.

And, using this same preamble, it’s very clear that mobile home park lot rents are going to go up exponentially over time as they are a tiny fraction of local apartment and stick-built housing prices.

I thought that people in New Hampshire were smarter than this – they don’t deserve this writer.

STUPIDITY LEVEL: HIGH

Peach County commissioners approved a moratorium on mobile home park and RV park permit requests on Aug. 13. It was a 4-1 vote. Post 5 Commissioner Wade Yoder told 13WMAZ the pause will help them draw up comprehensive regulations for mobile and RV parks. He said they hope this will better protect property owners and ensure quality living conditions.

Oh my gosh, quit lying to people! You shut down the permit process for mobile home parks because you don’t want them to move in. I will bet $5 that the sudden re-write of the “comprehensive regulations” will ensure that every parcel of land in the county cannot possible have a mobile home or RV placed on it. I saw a town once re-write the regulations to require 100’ setbacks from the front and back of the mobile home lot.

Give me a break. I’m betting the amusement park did not need “overflow parking”. They needed the park town down because it scared their customers and hurt their property value. 

STUPIDITY LEVEL: MEDIUM

“Neither Barrel Consulting Group or the property owner responded to a request for comment regarding whether expansion plans had changed and why an extension was not requested.”

They probably withdrew the plans because they knew the city was hostile to the idea and there was no point in continuing on. I have personally appeared at many zoning meetings to expand parks and nearly had people throwing tomatoes at me. I don’t blame them for pulling out, if I’m correct. Cities hate mobile home parks, plain and simple.

STUPIDITY LEVEL: LOW

SPARTANBURG — After an anonymous buyer purchased four mobile home parks in Spartanburg County, residents are wondering what their futures hold and whether the new owner plans to fix their units.

Or if they’ll eventually be made to leave.

“Just by how they are, I feel like they might do something like that,” said Tyquan Smith, who lives in one of the parks. “You never know.”

The buyer purchased the parks for an undisclosed price, according to a news release by brokerage firm Marcus and Millichap, which listed the properties.

The parks included in the purchase are:

• Gateview mobile home park on Gateview Circle in Woodruff.
• Oasis mobile home park on Oasis Park Lane in Roebuck.
• Chelsea mobile home park on Chelsea Street in Moore.
• Spring Valley mobile home park on Jamies Creek Drive in Woodruff.

Together, the properties contain 98 mobile home lots and two single-family homes.

The sale of the properties doesn’t appear in online property records.

Sarah Grace Pugh, a public relations specialist for the brokerage firm, said in an email that she couldn’t disclose the buyer or the price but noted that “the new owner plans to continue operations as manufactured housing communities.”

The Post and Courier visited two of the parks, Oasis and Chelsea, and found that residents there received letters at the end of July from Woodruff-Moore-Roebuck LLC informing them that the company was the new owner and operator.

The LLC was organized by Tim Woodbridge, according to records from the S.C. Secretary of State’s Office. Woodbridge could not be reached for comment.