Mobile Home Park News Briefing

New data shows the average sales price of new mobile homes in Pennsylvania skyrocketed in recent years. According to LendingTree.com, the average sales price of a new mobile home in Pennsylvania last year was $127,500 a 65.16% increase from 2018’s average price of $77,200. The percentage increase is the 12th highest in the United States. The site says new mobile homes sold in the U.S. cost $124,300, on average. Despite the seemingly large amount, new mobile homes are considerably cheaper than site-built, single-family homes. As of 2023, the average sales price of new single-family homes was $409,872 — $285,572 more than that of new mobile homes, per LendingTree.com.

I’m shocked the media isn’t having a fit about mobile home prices and whining that costs are up 65% in only six years. Of course, they can’t float that argument very well since single-family homes are now at $409,000. All that ever matters to customers is the actual dollar amount, not the percent of increase. It would be nice if mobile home park lot rents got the same consideration by the media.

Barnstable Superior Court ultimately found that the petition did not contain the requisite number of signatures and “the association did not meet its burden of proof.” Judge Michael K. Callan stated that the petition needed at least 41 signatures from owners living in the park to represent the required 51 percent of residents. Forty-nine signatures were submitted; of those, the court found that four were duplicates (from the same unit), five were subtenants (not owners), five were owners but did not live in the park, and four more freely rescinded and withdrew their approval. That left the association with only 31 signatures of support from resident owners. “No effort was made by any of the signature gatherers to verify whether the park residents who were asked to sign the petition were owners or simply tenants, subtenants, or guest residents at the park,” Judge Callan wrote in his decision.

Do you honestly believe that a group of residents who can’t even figure out the simple directions for signing a petition are competent to put together a non-profit and funding for a “tenant owned” property?

Last month, Habitat purchased Oak Grove Mobile Home Park, which is located at McKinley Avenue and Byrkit Avenue on Mishawaka’s east side. Habitat of St. Joseph County CEO Jim Williams told WNDU 16 News Now only 34 of the 117 lots at Oak Grove are occupied. Habitat is closing the mobile home park but working to relocate the people still living there. Williams added the families will be invited to take part in the Habitat for Humanity program starting in January.

And here we have another non-profit that bought a park to “save the residents from the evil corporate landlord” and then summarily evicted everyone to build an apartment complex. Still thinking the “tenant-owned park” concept is a winner?

According to a study by LendingTree, the average price of new manufactured homes — also known as mobile homes — is rising faster than that of new single-family homes.

Wait a minute – a positive article on mobile home appreciation? Wasn’t it just a couple years ago that there were hundreds of articles condemning mobile homes for being a bad investment? I remember being on several woke podcasts where that was the number one attack on our industry.

Well, there go those arguments!

But buying the park came with new challenges. The co-op was now responsible for the park’s maintenance and infrastructure needs, like water, electricity, roads and snow plowing. Because working-class Westbury is technically a private community, getting those services was complicated and expensive.

Sounds like the reality of “tenant owned communities” is finally kicking in. It all sounds great when the glossy P.R. people from the non-profits dangle the utopia of “let us buy your park for you” but then comes the sad reality that mobile home park residents are the worst property managers on earth, unable to collect rents or make tough decisions on rent increases. And that does not even count just a general lack of professionalism on capital expenditures and basic business sense. As I’ve said for over a decade: “TENANT-OWNED” PARKS HAVE THE SAME – OR HIGHER – RENTS THAN CORPORATE OWNERSHIP, BUT WITH A LOWER QUALITY OF LIFE. Want a second opinion? Read this article: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/22/sans-souci-boulder-county-mobile-home-park-challenges/

It has been three years since Mountain View approved a rent control ordinance for its mobile home parks. Now it is looking to update the ordinance to offer more protections for tenants who are struggling to keep up with annual rent increases. In a 2-1 vote, the Rental Housing Committee (RHC) recommended at their Dec. 12 meeting that the city cap rent increases for mobile homes below the rate of inflation.

If there still exist any mobile home parks in Mountain View a few years from now, I would be amazed. Who wouldn’t tear their park down if they can’t raise rents even in-line with inflation? What a bunch of idiots.

The Canadian company that was outbid by the Cedar Falls cooperative told the Bangor Daily News it had only planned to raise lot rents by $25 to $35 a year and were responsible park owners.

If the tenants buy the park they will face lot rent increases much greater than what the corporate buyer was proposing. But don’t worry, there’s no way the tenants will be able to raise the $8 million down payment by the due date since the clock has almost run out and all they have cobbled together is $1.5 million. The tenants’ lack of fundraising ability has luckily saved them from their lack of park management skills.

Now the mobile home park is vacant. The land, off Lakeshore Boulevard in the city’s North Collinwood neighborhood, is being cleared to become part of a park. And the people who lived there – some for just a few years, some for generations – are settling into different homes scattered across the region and beyond. “This whole experience has been unprecedented,” said Isaac Robb, vice president of planning, research and urban projects at the Western Reserve Land Conservancy. The nonprofit bought the 28.5-acre site in late 2021 to protect it from development and bring it back into local hands. After a planning process, the land conservancy decided in early 2023 to close the park, which was half-empty and hemorrhaging money.

Wait a minute … I thought that the whole “tenants buying their own park” schtick was supposed to be a forever story of unicorns and gumdrops? Nobody mentioned the reality that the non-profit (who IS the owner and not the tenants since they put up the money and have their name on the mortgage) is free to re-sell the park or even tear it down if they want.

These residents would still have a home if they had let a corporate buyer be in charge. That was a costly mistake on their part.

The moral of this article is simple: DON’T RENT MOBILE HOMES: SELL THEM. It’ something we learned 30 years ago and it’s as true today as it was in the 1990s. You want to be in the parking lot business, not the car repair business.

Here we have a non-profit that bought a mobile home park to shut it down and redevelop it into apartments:

Habitat for Humanity acquired the 9-acre mobile home park at Byrkit and McKinley Avenue in November, and neighbors will have until May to move out.

And here’s what the CEO of the non-profit had to say about the whole situation:

“We are looking for a new place to invest and create more affordable housing and the city of Mishawaka was anxious for us to do something along the McKinley corridor,” said Williams.

A resident weighs in:

“It's hard this time of year to get a letter like that, and especially people who lived on fixed income. That's the shocking part about it because I thought they were supposed to help people like me not you know put me on the streets,” said Michele Harfert.

For those who think that non-profits buying mobile home parks are superior to those “evil, out-of-state owners”, you need to take this article, frame it and hang it on your wall.

And here’s a city that approved a mobile home & RV park on this property years ago and now has inexplicably changed their mind. You don’t see that every day.

“Our focus is entirely on rent increases, because that is the issue that is scaring the pants off of all manufactured home park tenants across the state,” VanLandingham said. 

Sure, Oregon already has rent control, which allows for 7% plus inflation with a cap of 10%. Now the Free Rent Movement folks say that’s not good enough and want to reduce the increases to just the CPI and drop the 7 point addition. And I’m sure they will next want it to be capped at .000001% of the CPI.

Apparently, they forgot to add basic classes in economics to the high school curriculum in Oregon as all this concept will do is make the parks shut down and be redeveloped into uses that have no rent control. What a bunch of idiots.

Bangor city councilors have agreed to kick in $500,000 towards a group of mobile home residents looking to buy their park and stave off investors from purchasing it instead. The move has drawn mixed reactions from those behind the $8 million effort. The nonprofit backing the residents of Cedar Falls — a 129-lot mobile home park on Bangor’s Finson Road — is excited by the council’s decision. But the president of the residents’ co-operative is disappointed the city didn’t allocate more and fears it could set them back from meeting their January fundraising deadline.

So let me get this straight. 129 mobile home park tenants are planning on raising $8 million in cash by January. Are they nuts? Why would anyone think this is possible? Clearly the City of Bangor made this gesture because it gave them free publicity with absolutely no risk of having to fork over a penny. This is exactly how 99.999% of tenant “first options” work out and why everyone knows they are a complete waste of time.

In 1933 Prohibition ended. The U.S. government had tried to stop Americans from drinking alcohol since 1920 but the will of the people ultimately prevailed. Then you had the emergence of Uber, which violated most city taxi laws but, once again, the will of the people won out. And it’s pretty clear to me that a large number of Americans prefer having the option of tiny homes, park models and container homes in addition to the traditional mobile home product and, at least in Venice, Florida, the will of the people has prevailed again.

I know that most mobile home manufacturers will fight this reality, but the advent of new technologies – such as 3-D printing – makes them no longer the only game in town. It’s only a matter of time until more municipalities adapt to what the public desires and allow more than just HUD-code mobile homes on the park’s lots. Park owners have no downside from this eventuality, as we just rent land and are more than happy to have the customers highly satisfied with whatever housing type they choose. However, this competition might actually be healthy for mobile home manufacturers, as these housing alternatives are fairly pricey and make the cost of the traditional mobile home product – which is nearly twice as large – look like an absolute bargain.

We’ll see how this turns out in the decades ahead.

Town officials are at the end of their rope. The solutions they see include zoning reform and manufactured homes that have faced decades of stigma and local laws banning them in certain parts of Maine. They are considering putting a mobile home park on town-owned land to provide embattled locals an attainable homeownership option.

So while Mountain View is trying to run their parks off, here we have a town in Maine wanting a mobile home park so bad that they’re willing to provide the land for free. Interesting, right?

The Rental Housing Committee (RHC) recommended at their Dec. 12 meeting that the city cap rent increases for mobile homes below the rate of inflation. Committee members Kevin Ma and Edie Keating voted in favor of limiting rent increases to 60% of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), with no floor and a 5% ceiling. This went a step further than what the city had proposed, which was to limit rent increases to 75% CPI, with a 2% floor and 5% ceiling.

Apparently, the Mountain View Housing Commission has uncovered a large stockpile of economic heroin and have some crazy idea that mobile home park owners should not be allowed to raise their rents, even in tandem with inflation. This is the wildest rent control proposition in the history of mankind. Let me lay it out for the commission once their heroin runs out: your idiotic actions are going to make each and every mobile home park in the town shut down and be redeveloped into other uses that don’t suffer from similar rent control issues. Don’t lie to your constituents and claim that you are somehow preserving their affordable housing as you know full well that all you’re doing is giving these affordable refuges a death sentence. But, then again, maybe that’s your real goal?

"Our top priority was keeping housing affordable for the people here," said Ben Ward, president of Olga Dor Homeowners Cooperative. "Without this opportunity, many residents couldn't afford another rent increase. Cooperative ownership lets us manage our community - setting our own rules, overseeing the budget and securing a stable future. Achieving this goal brings financial stability and peace of mind. We're deeply grateful to everyone who helped make this possible." 

Here's the problem with this narrative, which is a darling of the Free Rent Movement folks:

1. The loan payment is the same for non-profits and for-profits, namely the amount borrowed at the prevailing interest rate, plus principal reduction. So the residents have no advantage there.
2. The operating cost of a mobile home park (water, sewer, electric, insurance, property tax, etc.) are the same with a non-profit or a for-profit. So the residents have no advantage there.
3. As a result, the lot rent to the residents is going to be the same whether it’s bought by a non-profit or a for-profit. This is just a mathematical fact.
4. The for-profit has a huge advantage, however, over the non-profit in operations. The residents will never vote for the necessary lot rent increases, invest in required cap-x, or even collect money from their friends. So the quality of the park goes down the drain rapidly.
5. In the end, the residents are actually better off NOT owning the park. Just ask the residents of the park called Sans Souci as described in this article.

The whole “tenant owned” initiative is – for the most part – nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

The classic manipulation in which you focus only on the percentage increase but not the actual price:

As of 2023, the average sales price of new mobile homes exceeded $124,000, while the average price of a new site-built home cost $409,872 during the same time. Between 2018 and 2023, mobile home prices increased by 58.34%, outpacing the 37.66% increase in site-built single-family home prices. 

So let me get this straight. Mobile homes are evil because they went up $72,000 while stick-built homes went up $160,000 during the same period? Well, that’s what the article is saying. Good thing for McDonald’s that they didn’t include the McChicken Sandwich because it’s the most evil of all at a 300% increase during that same period, going from $1 to $3. News flash: there’s more to cost than percentage. It’s the actual dollar amount of increase that is all-important.

Yes, this is the same park that, last week, the residents were demanding $40 million in compensation from, even though it appears that the law says they are entitled to nothing. To quell the rebellion the property owner has “offered $14,000 for those who leave by January 31, $7,000 by April 30, and $3,000 after that. Despite these offers, many residents, some of whom have lived there for decades, are protesting what they see as unfair treatment and an abrupt upheaval of their lives.”

So now the residents have apparently started to physically threaten the park’s management.

I’m sure the Free Rent Movement folks would say that all of this is warranted. But the fact remains that the park is shutting down. And why is it closing? To build apartments on the land, as usual, because the lot rents were too low to make it compelling to leave it as a mobile home park instead of an apartment complex.

“I just don’t understand what would possess someone to do something like this, to people like this”

It’s a fact that it costs a mobile home park owner around $10,000 between lost rent, legal fees, home demolition, etc. when you evict a resident. Park owners only do this as a last resort. It all begins with unpaid rent or really bad rules violations and escalates when there’s no payment or property clean up after repeated warnings in-line with state law.

This is yet another article sponsored by the Free Rent Movement with no apparent basis in fact. I’m sure that if you flew out to the property right now and inspected the premises you would say in two seconds “OK, now I understand why they’re being evicted”. The property owner is too good-natured to expose the facts.

I always find these articles confusing. The park looks very nice in the photos yet somehow the residents claim they are living in “deplorable” conditions. The rent hike from $225 to $500 sounds like a lot until you take the five seconds to go to Bestplaces.net and see that the Princeton, West Virginia single-family home price averages $141,000 and the average apartment is $1,010 per month – so the lot rent has gone from ridiculously low to only just spectacularly low based on all competing housing options. And then there’s the fact that the residents complain that at $525 they’ve had to move back in with family members and can’t afford to live which means – based on the Federal Government’s claim that 33% of income is a reasonable housing cost – they must earn less than $1,500 per month, despite the fact that the minimum wage in West Viginia is $9 an hour. $9 per hour works out to exactly $1,500 per month, so these folks must be earning less than minimum wage and should immediately report that to the employment commission.

What’s also confusing is why there is such a fury in the article about “the purchase of the Mercer County mobile home community by out-of-state companies”. Is there something wrong with being an “out-of-state” company vs. an in-state? If that’s indeed a bad thing then there must be real problems in Princeton because a quick review of just about every business there – from McDonald’s to the Hampton Inn – is owned by an “out-of-state” group.

So, let’s just be honest. The former mom-and-pop owners of this park were out of their minds charging $225 per month in lot rent. That was the typical rent back in the 1970s. The rent should always have been $500 per month or higher for the last decade. The residents surely know this but, gosh darn it, it was a great scam while it lasted. So don’t pretend that it’s evil or that “out-of-state” ownership is the problem here. This is just another article promoted by the Free Rent Movement which simply wants all rent to be free. To them, even the $225 rent was too much.

Under the California Mobilehome Residency Law (MRL), senior parks are defined as those where at least 80% of the residents are 55 and older. In an October letter to the city, Dowdall Law stated that mobile home park owners have authority over the MRL after the U.S. Supreme Court ended 40 years of precedent set in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. earlier this year. The court’s June 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo states that courts are no longer required to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of ambiguously written law and restores the right to the court to interpret these laws independently.

OK, this attorney is smarter than most. He’s exactly correct to attack the California law itself that is potentially no longer valid after the Chevron ruling by the Supreme Court. That needs to be fully litigated before any defense of the park owner is warranted.

I’m hoping that MHI and others are going to litigate everything from the HUD installation standards to OSHA, the CFPB and every other rule and regulation that were crammed down the throats of park owners in violation of the new Supreme Court ruling. One MHA insider told me that it may take at least a decade for all these key regulations to be shot down after all appeals are exhausted. Need to start that process now.

Cimarron Park and Golf Course has seen rents for the lots — the land that each mobile home sits on — rise by some 30% since 2020, according to Brey Mafi, a park resident and a member of the Residents Association. For residents living on a fixed income, each rent increase has left them with less money for groceries and other essentials. The next price hike of 6% takes effect on Jan. 1, she said. Resident John Murphy said the increases seem to be excessive when compared with inflation; the residents say services at the park haven’t improved significantly to match the price increases, either, citing problems ranging from inadequate lighting to restrictive hours at the park’s swimming pool and poor upkeep of the park’s golf course. A spokeswoman for park owner Equity Lifestyle Properties, based in Chicago, said rents have risen 5.6% each year over the past five years. The raises have been commensurate with what’s happening with apartment rents across Washington County, said spokesperson Jennifer Ludovice. The average price for a new home at Cimarron was $76,500, while the median price of a home in Lake Elmo was around $650,000 this year, based on numbers provided by Realtor.com,

The response by ELS says it all. This is just more Free Rent Movement insanity. Under Biden, everything in America has gone up just as much as the mobile home park rents have (20% to 30%). As I’ve written before, rent only ranks as 5th on the average American’s expenditures list, outranked by healthcare, childcare, transportation and taxes. Where’s the Free Health Movement, the Free Childcare Movement, the Free Transportation Movement or the Free from Taxation Movement?

But you gotta love the residents’ claim that the park is a mess due to “inadequate lighting, reduced hours at the swimming pool and poor upkeep of the golf course”. Is that seriously the best you could do to try to make your case? That would be like complaining to the Ritz Calton’s management that you should not have to pay for your hotel stay because the mint under your pillow was not large enough.

This article is similar to the one above – and equally misguided. In this case, the residents acknowledge that the rents will pretty much be the same as if a professional owner bought it, but somehow what really matters is this false sense of security that this situation will yield lifetime safety from re-development:

“To know that our neighborhood will be here long-term with reasonable costs … We will still have monthly (lot) fees because we must pay the loan, our operating costs and build our reserve, but to know that it is going towards just securing our long-term housing — that makes it worth it.”

But if anyone had bothered to read their own articles – or use a calculator – they’d quickly figure out the problem with this concept. In this case, the non-profit (who really owns this) is paying nearly $200,000 per lot.

The Milner Park Community cooperative, a group that includes Stewart and five other residents representing the 40 homes, offered $7.75 million for the property.

There’s no way that they will ever be able to handle that debt load. This is a guaranteed foreclosure down the road, unless the rents go into the stratosphere (like $1,500 per month or so).

Santa’s take on this: Non-Profit Naughty

Officials from the nonprofit Western Reserve Land Conservancy (WRLC), which owns the 28.5-acre mobile home park on the shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland’s North Collinwood neighborhood, announced in 2023 that the park would close this year. The grounds would be converted into green space and turned over to the Cleveland Metroparks as a part of a major redevelopment of adjacent Euclid Beach Park.

Now wait a minute – I thought non-profits were the folks that guaranteed safety from redevelopment in all those earlier articles? Well, apparently NOT.

Santa’s take on this: Non-Profit Naughty