Mobile Home Park News Briefing

"Shark Tank" star Barbara Corcoran, a renowned real estate mogul, surprised many when she acquired a double-wide trailer in Los Angeles.

I’m sorry but a “real estate mogul” would not have bought a mobile home in Malibu for $1 million but instead one of the real houses next door which start at $10 million. These articles are making her look dumber by the minute and she needs to quit talking to the media. Nobody is buying this nonsense.

I love how the residents hired an “expert” to say that the lot rents should only be $850 per month. Well, maybe the “expert” doesn’t own a computer because a quick search of Bestplaces.net shows that Bradenton Beach has the following real estate prices:

Single Family Home: $775,100

2 Bedroom Apartment Rent: $1,620 per month

3 Bedroom Apartment Rent: $2,150 per month

The bottom line is that a lot rent over $1,000 per month is perfectly reasonable in this market and you can go hire 100 “experts” to tell the owner that $75 per month is right but nobody is going to buy that argument.

Sure, tenants were getting a ridiculous deal from mom and pop for decades. That has nothing to do with the actual value and new owners are not going to be compelled to keep lot rents ridiculously low like their predecessors did. Sorry, but it’s just not going to happen.

The city of Fresno, California is finally getting wise to how to keep mobile home parks from being torn down and redeveloped:

“We are now connecting mobile home parks to water and sewer systems to make sure that they have a sustainable water source and have a necessary sewage infrastructure,” Arias continued. “We are taking responsibility to inspect and monitor all mobile home parks within the city’s boundaries, and now we’re actually funding the renovation and preservation of mobile home parks.”

More cities should adopt this attitude.

I’m glad this had potentially a happy ending, but what I take issue with is that the concept of forcing tenants to bring property up to minimum standards is now taken by the media as an unfair request.

The inspections and subsequent notices of violation “are not intended to be an avenue for evictions and that is not our goal when we issue them,” Shah said to deFaria in an email. “Just like how an HOA operates, we expect residents to comply to the rules and regulations… to address safety hazards that are common with older homes and to improve the quality of homes and lots so that the community remains a high quality, safe, and clean place to live.”

The win/win here is that the owner got the property fixes done with volunteer labor. But the requests were never wrong and should not have been portrayed by the media in that manner. 

Am I crazy or is this perhaps the ugliest home ever created? How in the world can the U.S. designers screw up 3-D printed homes so bad when overseas they look so good. I feel like it’s the 1980s when U.S. car designers deliberately built some of the ugliest models ever made and foreign car companies stole all their market share.

Here’s the ugly truth: nobody is going to buy a modular home if it’s only 16% cheaper. The negative stigma and appearance of modular is worth way more than 16% to the consumer. Until the price of modular is more like 50% less than a stick-built home it will likely never get off the ground in a big way.

More folks drinking the Kool-Aid that owning their park will make unicorns descend from the heavens and end world hunger when, in fact, it will probably only usher in higher lot rents due to poor collections while the park slips into an infrastructure mess because they have no realistic financial plan to make cap-x repairs.

Read this carefully and see if you remember this park from 2017:

The Santa Clara County Housing Authority, which purchased the park at 3980 El Camino Real in 2017, submitted this week plans to redevelop the park and turn it into Buena Vista Village. According to the newly submitted plans, the rebuilt park would include an apartment building with 61 units, ranging from junior 1-bedroom apartments to 3-bedroom ones. It would also replace existing mobile homes and RVs, many of which fail to comply with local codes, with 44 new coaches of various types.

The goal of retaining residents marks the project as very different from the prior redevelopment proposal, which would have replaced Buena Vista with a high-end condominium development. That plan, which was pitched by the Jisser family in 2013, ran into massive community opposition and ultimately prompted the city and Santa Clara County to facilitate the Housing Authority's purchase of the Barron Park property.

This time, the project is expected to encounter little resistance. Earlier this year, Housing Authority CEO Preston Prince emphasized in a presentation to the City Council that in pursuing the redevelopment, it is "inspired by the values of equity, preservation and anti-displacement."

In the near term, however, the 260 current residents will have to decide what to do during the construction period and determine whether they want to return to the new Buena Vista Village once the project is complete. In response to an inquiry from this publication, the Housing Authority noted that residents are still living in the park and will continue to do so until the renovation starts.

I hope that all the cities and states that are hyped up on the residents buying their own communities sees this as a wake-up call that maybe the concept does not work as planned.

If you recall back in 2017 the media and the residents very publicly blasted the owner of the park who was going to redevelop it into high-end condominiums. They blocked and litigated him at every turn and eventually forced him to sell the park to the city for the perceived and widely promoted benefit of the residents (do you remember when they even pitched Steve Jobs’ wife to buy it and donate it?). Well, that was only 5 years ago and now Palo Alto is giving up on the concept and going to tear the park down themselves and do exactly what the prior owner was going to do only with the spin that maybe the residents can move back in some day – yeah, right.

If they had simply given the residents that park money back in 2017 – of which I publicly wrote articles on back then – those folks could have pocketed about $400,000 each and bought a nice brick house in an exurban California market with lower home prices. Instead, they are now the proud owners of … homelessness. Ronald Reagan once said that the nine scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” – and he nailed this one.

The park manager summed it up well:

“At Paradise Cove Resort & RV Park, we have a majority of our residents who live here peacefully. We also have some instigators who want to make it more difficult to do business and maintain the peaceful environment which we have known here for so many years. It is a shame that the contemplated reporting will be highlighting the efforts of the instigators”.

A couple people are mad because the rent went up. So, they are using the media to ignorantly harass the owners.

I will bet you $100 that this property gets redeveloped in the near future. Who would put up with this abuse?

A quick search on Bestplaces.net shows that the average home price in Petaluma, CA is $839,600 and the average 3-bedroom apartment is $3,850 per month. That’s what makes this article so asinine:

As at most parks, the residents of Little Woods own their mobile homes but must pay a base rent for the land underneath the home, with rents ranging between $457.13 and $1,195.00 per month – though most pay roughly $500 a month, according to documents submitted by the owners to the city. This means that under the proposed rent hikes, residents face increases between 128% and 352%.

The reporter is distorting the facts here, as the percentages are meaningless and all they prove is what an outrageous deal the tenants had before the change in ownership. Those rents could double yet again and still be way under market levels. Why should mobile home park lot rents be at $500 per month when apartment rents are 700% higher?

You have to be crazy to own property in California.

Washington state is apparently pushing a new woke initiative: live rent free and still get service just like a real, paying customer.

While landlords have a duty to keep units habitable, if they don’t, tenants must be current on rent and utilities to enforce a demand for repairs, according to RCW 59.18.080.

If you recall, last week there were a number of articles trying to brainwash you into believing that Washington state should do more to force park owners to sell to the residents. Gee, I wonder if that’s what this new push is all about?

What San Jose, CA is doing should be concerning for any property owner. They are basically taking away inherent property rights and not even being coy about it:

“I think this is a clear statement of intent from the council that these should remain mobile home parks,”said Mayor Matt Mahan. “And should a developer propose redevelopment, the bar would have to be extremely high.”

I hope that the San Jose mobile home park owners pool their resources and sue to block this action from a city council and Mayor that clearly have elevated their opinion of their powers to a ridiculous level.

Yet another article aimed at brainwashing you that residents can only live in a land of unicorns and rainbows if they band together, pool their resources, and buy their properties from evil park owners. And, of course, it’s another article based out of California. Clearly the folks that do resident-owned community deals are working around the clock to get these articles published but it’s still not going to fix the inherent problem that the success rate is about as big as a 3’ tall person making the NBA, and then winning Powerball after hitting a half-court jump shot.

Look, when somebody buys a mobile home in those two old parks in Malibu it’s typically a sign that their career is ending. Hillary Duff lived in one of those mobile homes, as did Pam Anderson – but only when their ability to fund a stick-built home deteriorated along with their incomes and desirability as stars. I know nothing about Barbara Corcoran, but this article is the same nonsense that we would be told if we caught a celebrity driving an old Ford Taurus in a parking lot who would then proceed to tell us how they fell in love with the car’s styling and now prefer it to their old Ferrari. Give me a break.

“From the outside, it looks like a home you might find in any trailer park. But step inside and the reasons behind the $1.4 million price tag reveal themselves, including luxury finishes and a huge private deck that offers sweeping canyon and ocean views”.

So let me get this straight. You slap a $50,000 kitchen on an old singlewide, toss in a $10,000 deck, and the $15,000 value of the home leaps to $1.4 million? Pretty bad logic. I admit the view is good, but there’s a million real houses that can beat that overlook and sell for a fraction of that price. One good reason that Millennials are lousy home shoppers and pay way too much is simply that they read too much nonsense like this.

Demand for mobile homes has surged in recent years as people struggle to find affordable housing. That’s also made mobile home parks attractive to investors, who are snapping them up and raising rents. In Washington state, some mobile home residents are fighting back, offering to buy the land themselves. But experts say few resident communities will win the bidding war without more help from the state.

Yes, you knew it was coming after the earlier article. The media mob runs in packs like wolves and this story is an extension of the earlier one that is trying to brainwash you that Washington state needs to require park owners to sell to the tenants. In other words, back to the same tired narrative based upon a fantasy that resident-owned parks are the solution – not bothering to mention that these deals rarely matriculate and only about .007% have ever successfully been put together on a national level.

I can brainwash, too. This idea is stupid. This idea is stupid. This idea is stupid. Are you convinced yet?

Here’s the basic article boiled into two sentences:

The sales prices of new mobile homes rose much higher than those of traditional, stick-built houses, according to a recent report from LendingTree. The online financial services marketplace found that the average sales price of mobile homes shot up 77.1% between 2017 and 2022, compared with 46.7% for single-family homes (excluding the land).

The problem is that the reason that mobile home prices in this study are up is probably not re-sale but new home prices that nearly doubled from manufacturers between 2017 and 2022. Virtually nobody bought a mobile home in 2017 and then sold it in 2022 for a 77.1% gain, right? The numbers for mobile home sales in this report are probably based on new home sales only, which is probably the only data that the government could attain.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law that offers additional protection to mobile home park residents, who often face eviction or sharp increases in land lease costs when mobile home parks change hands. As Lacey Leonardi explains for Spectrum Local News, “Landowners cannot be prevented from selling. The new law means homeowners in the parks – most of them own their trailers and rent their spaces – now have the first right of refusal to purchase the land.” Manufactured housing provides a significant pool of affordable housing in the United States, but residents often lack protections when park owners decide to sell or hike prices. According to a press release from the governor’s office, the legislation also authorizes mortgages and mortgage pool insurance for manufactured homes. “This legislation will help homeowners in manufactured home parks safeguard their affordable communities, without unduly hindering unopposed investments in manufactured home parks,” the press release states.

When virtue signaling bureaucrats get together at the National B.S. Convention one of the top ten concepts is giving a “right of first refusal” to people who cannot even remotely afford to buy the property. Resident-owned communities account for something like .009% of all mobile home parks in the U.S. And probably only .001% of those were accomplished within the first refusal time frame, but instead were enabled to get the deals closed via multiple extensions from an accommodating seller.

Kathy Hochul forgot to mention that the reason that so many mobile parks are being torn down and redeveloped right now in New York is because it passed rent control so there’s no reason not to knock them down and build new real estate uses that are not encumbered by those rent controls. If you really want to help mobile home park residents (not just pretend to be doing that) you should repeal the very rent control that is causing the wrecking ball to swing wildly, leaving those residents homeless.

The headline says it all:

When 80-year-old Gordon Hastings moved into Glenbrier Park 15 years ago, he paid $320 monthly rent. Now he pays more than $700.

But here’s the problem. That’s only around a 5% per year increase – and that’s not much more than inflation.

The cost of virtually everything is America has gone up more than 5% per year since 2008.

Does nobody have basic math skills anymore? Do these journalists at least have access to calculators???

If the roles were reversed – and an all-age park wanted to convert to senior – the city would agree in a heartbeat.

What’s at stake here is nothing more than protecting city dollars. The city does not want to pay the cost of tuition of the tens of students that would move into the park at $10,000 per year per kid in school costs. Seniors don’t have any such expense and that one item could saddle the city budget with literally a $1 million a year loss in tuition alone (assuming just 100 kids) from this one park.

So, could we please cut out all the virtue signaling and just tell the truth?

I know nothing about this case and have never seen the property, but I had a similar experience in Texas in the 1990’s. Turned out that the city had never bothered to subtract the individual tenants’ meter readings (for which they paid the city directly) from the master meter reading. They’d been doing that for decades. The amount they had overcharged the park was probably a million dollars. Cities make mistakes and – with scale – those mistakes can be gigantic. Before they shut this park owner’s water off, the water dept. better investigate what he’s saying because if he’s correct his damages against them will be crushing.

Look at these photos and tell me who in the world is idiotic enough to pay $2 million for a mobile home in a setting like that? By any unit of measure these are the worst values in American real estate. No offense to Montauk fans but is that really the best you can do with $2 million on the East Coast?

In a 28-page suit in federal district court, park owners challenge the ability of the city to regulate, saying steps taken amount unconstitutionally depriving them of their right to an adequate rate of return. The suit cites hefty inflation and the city's effort to shield residents from it by reducing the cap on rent increases to below inflation. They argue they're being required to run their business at a loss. The suit also challenges the constitutionality of requirements that should park owners wish to close a park that they find comparable space in another park for the home or purchase then from tenants at 'in place value.'

Observation #1: you have to be nuts to own property in California.

Observation #2: thank heavens these park owners have the guts to fight this unjust treatment.

This was not a hard one to call – just read my predictions in past issues. When you pay $25 million for 12 acres (which works out to $2 million per acre or $46 per square foot) the buyer is going to tear the park down, not introduce a new mobile home park prototype with a lot rent of $5,000 per month. There should never have been any question as to the future of the property.

In some cases, development can be delayed or eliminated with higher lot rents, but in this case that was not an option because of the park’s location. Some parks were born to be a temporary use, and this tract is one of those situations.

Replacing an equestrian center with a mobile home park is kind of like tearing down a Rolls Royce dealership to make way for Kia. That being said, all real estate has a higher and better use. And horse stalls do not rent for as much as mobile home park lots (which rent for less than apartments so that’s where this property probably ends up in 20 years).