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This story is a companion piece to the podcast The Magic City of the Southwest, produced by Magic City Studios in partnership with KSUT Public Radio. New episodes air on the first Sunday of each month at 2 p.m.
In 2016, a few Colorado lawmakers were hearing concerns from residents of mobile home parks. At the time, Edie Hooton was a newly elected state representative from Boulder.
“We started having town halls, then more mobile homeowners would come to my town halls,” Edie Hooton recalled. Hooton heard complaints about rent increases, unfair evictions, and a lack of landlord transparency.
By 2018, Hooton and other lawmakers received a...
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Can we just be honest here? Having sold more than one mobile home park to the residents I can tell you that there is a reason why only 12 parks out of 900 in Colorado (yes, that’s only 0.013%) are resident-owned communities. I’ll lay it out in simple terms:
- Most residents don’t want to own their own community. How do I know? Just go ask the tenants.
- These type of transactions take at least two times longer normally that a regular sale and most sellers are not willing to wait around for it.
- A huge number of these deals fall apart in the end so after wasting months of time the seller is left to start over again.
- Non-profits are required to guarantee the loans, and most have zero interest in guaranteeing a “trailer park”.
But then there’s the reality of what happens after these incredibly rare and few deals actually close, namely:
- Rents seem to go up just as fast or faster (the park we sold in Austin to the tenants had to raise rents faster than we ever did just to cover the bills because they had no idea how to manage a property).
- Tenants are often miserable because their elected officers play favorites and there is no uniformity in rules enforcement, etc.
- These properties often look terrible as without professional management nobody follows any codes at all.
I love the fact that the writer of this article used New Hampshire as the gold standard of how great the concept is … since New Hampshire has among the fewest mobile home parks in the U.S. That would be like me comparing the cost of snow skiing equipment in Hawaii.
Now I know that the folks that facilitate these transactions really work the media to make dumb articles like this possible, but those are the facts and no amount of B.S. can change them.