Could this be any more predictable? New owners buy the park and raise rents and enforce rules. A few residents try to get back at the owners by claiming that somehow the park is going down the drain (when it’s really being brought back to life). Some young reporter who makes less than the cashier at Dollar General writes an article about it without probably doing any fact-checking at all or attempting to get the other side of the story.

As required under the Florida Mobile Home Act, they first offered the park to the homeowners association for purchase. The law requires a park owner to give 45 days notice of an intent to sell to unit
owners and gives those homeowners the first right of refusal. Homeowners in February voted to form a cooperative to rally for the purchase of the land but negotiations between the property owner and the HOA failed April 20 due to a lack of funding, according to Bill Gorman, a real estate professional hired by Pines homeowners to help facilitate the purchase of the park from the ownership.

Could somebody please explain to the world that mobile home park residents are not going to come up with not only $16 million but with $1 million non-refundable on day one (which was required to match the offer). 

Look at the photos in this article and tell me how these people are not complete idiots for turning down $502 million for this land – that’s over a million dollars to each resident, free and clear. If this is the best you could do for housing on $1 million then I’m speechless.

Yet another article about New Hampshire replacing mobile home park infrastructure but only if the tenants own the park. The writer somehow thinks this topic will brainwash all park residents to buy their parks. Unfortunately, this writer does not read my weekly submissions, or they’d realize that it’s a ridiculous narrative. They might as well write an article stating that if you get a perfect SAT score you will get free tuition in college (which is true). In last week’s articles I highlighted a group of park residents that were trying to buy their property at a price of $16.5 million and had only been able to raise $4,400 towards that goal when the timeclock ran out. That’s the truth in 99% of all cases.

This journalist is apparently offended because of the“feudalistic arrangement” between the tenant and the mobile home park owner. My question is “what form of real estate does not have a feudalistic arrangement”? In all property rights, the owner holds all the cards and the tenant has none. Is there some other arrangement the writer proposes? Maybe one in which the owner puts up all the money and risk and then the tenants choose the rent level? Even Karl Marx would tell you it’s a hard sell.

If you consider that home “stunning” then you either have poor eyesight or have been looking at the tiny home shows for too long on HGTV. Only in California would someone pay $495,000 for that thing. In Missouri you’d be lucky to get $49,500 for it on the banks of the Lake of the Ozarks.

It seems odd that the only mobile home parks that qualify for this program are those owned by the residents. What is the deal with the media and bureaucrats trying to force all mobile home parks to be owned by the residents when the fact is that a incredibly tiny number can ever meet those requirements? New Hampshire has one of the tiniest number of mobile home parks in the U.S. so it doesn’t matter much, but it’s sad that bureaucrats don’t see the benefit in helping ALL mobile home parks to get infrastructure repair where appropriate. It would be policies like that which would reduce the number of mobile home parks that get torn down and redeveloped each year.

What an absurd article with quotes like “In mobile home parks around the country, millions of tenants and owners are being mercilessly exploited and regularly evicted, often by giant Wall Street firms like Blackstone.” Who wrote this nonsense, AOC? Blackstone and other private equity groups are injecting millions of dollars into these parks and bringing them back to life. That’s like criticizing the doctor that brings the patient back to life and then the relatives complain “I liked him better before”. Give me a break.

This article is pretty funny – I would recommend reading it.

Transporting mobile homes is a dangerous business. That’s why – despite the high price for the consumer – nobody wants to get involved in it. It’s also the reason that old homes should be demolished on-site and not carted off to the dump.

Where does California get all this money? Who in the world would give $100,000 per household to all 150+ of the residents in this mobile home park to help pay for their relocation. Not sure if anyone in California has ever been east of the Rockies but you can buy a really nice house in Missouri for $100,000 and have no mortgage or lot rent. Wouldn’t it be smarter just to give each of these families $100,000 in cash and an airplane ticket to Kansas City?

It depends on what the promise was. If the promise was to adequately fill vacant lots in mobile home parks, then the answer is “yes”. If the promise was to sell a whole bunch of units and be a neck-and-neck competitor with stick-built dwellings then the answer is clearly “no”.

Yippee, another article that announces that the residents of this park are going to raise $15 million to buy the property:

According to a state notice, the 178-lot community went on the market April 28 for a listed price of $15 million.  The Virginia Manufactured Home Lot Rental Act requires mobile community landlords to provide their tenants and the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development with written notice at least 90 days ahead of accepting any purchase offer.

The odds of this occurring is probably equivalent to the Houston Texans winning the Superbowl every year for the next decade.

This is what happens when the park does not charge continually higher lot rents.

It’s the same old story. You get the one resident that fancies themselves an “activist” and then browbeats city administrators to do things that they know are wrong but are easier than having to listen to them scream. Here’s a quote from the article:

A Landmark Estates resident, who is an activist for improving mobile home park conditions, acknowledges some upgrades have been made to the Warren park but that conditions for many residents are still far less than ideal. “They worked on the water and they are still tearing out homes, but about half the park is still having issues with water pressure”.

The article says that the park owners have spent $500,000 in upgrades to infrastructure and homes so far but apparently it’s still not enough to satisfy this resident. If the park spent $500 million, it would still not be enough, in all likelihood.

It’s a problem in this nation that a few screaming people – that do not share the thoughts of 99.9% of the population – are able to bully good-natured people into making bad decisions just to shut them up. I don’t know the facts in this case at all, but it seems odd that the city gives so much weight – and journalistic focus -- to one resident.

It kind of reminds me of the assistant professor in Boulder that was able to get roughly 40 media outlets, including John Oliver, to do slam pieces on park owners – an accomplishment she raved about in an interview later. And it goes to show how the media is completely unhinged at this point.

This is the craziest article of the week. A resident installs no less than 10 security cameras because without them “she doesn’t feel safe”. Then the park owner requires them to be removed because they are an invasion of privacy and against Florida law. Then the resident says that the park owner has ruined her life and the park owner offers the classic response: “I don’t think I would believe her because she’s vengeful and hateful and mean”. It’s a shame that Jerry Springer has died because that would be a great episode.

As I recall, last week a different group of residents were trying to raise $16 million to buy a different property but had only raised $4,000 by the time the first option ran out. This article is about as stupid as giving newspaper space to a high-school basketball team wanting to raise $10 million to buy a Lear jet to take them to their games. Actually that would have better odds of occurring.

When will the media accept that residents buying their own park has about a .000001% chance of success?

This comment in the article confuses me: “without affordable places to live, new employees and employers will look elsewhere”. 84% of New Hampshire housing is a single-family home on an acre or more. That is reflected in the home prices which, for example, are $360,000 in Concord. New Hampshire is one of America’s oldest states, and it’s been running just fine with highly restrictive housing. Why would they want to suddenly loosen those restrictions? Sounds like some type of woke narrative to me, or maybe fast food franchises have taken control of the legislature. I doubt that even 1% of the state population would welcome this concept.

I love these articles where the city bureaucrats suddenly realize that there might be problems in this mobile home park. They seriously didn’t see these dilapidated trailers sitting there even once over the past 30 years? The home in the photo is 50 years old and it didn’t just pop in there two days ago. Neither did those residents. If you call the police about a problem tenant or squatter in your park they will typically tell you they don’t have time to deal with it given all the other issues in the city. If you try to remove a problem tenant for rules violations, the judge will not back you up. And then, after you can’t get any help from anyone, the media makes out like somehow the park owner is the problem.

Yet another example that the scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Some bureaucrats are making these 100 families homeless because they have decided – on their behalf – that they’d be better off homeless than living in the mobile home park. And, of course, in the background is probably a city council that is having a party and doing high-fives that the “trailer park” is being shut down and the land can now be made into classier and higher tax-paying apartments. What’s the true story? The park sure doesn’t look that bad in the photos..

If you want to expand mobile home sales, this is the wrong way to do it:

“As the regulator of interstate commerce and state restrictions, Congress can preempt unreasonable constraints on interstate commerce like New Jersey’s requirement that manufactured homes only go in designated “parks.” Congress can also use its spending power to encourage states or local governments to allow fair competition between HUD Code and site-built homes. As the building code regulator, HUD can enable more novel designs and other innovations to allow greater flexibility in home design that blurs the distinction between manufactured and site-built homes.”

You can’t cram mobile homes down the throats of the population by force. You have to do it by making them actually like the way they look and want to live in one. Until that is achieved you will never see mobile home manufacturing even remotely approximate the 400,000+ units sold per year in the old days.

I’m sorry but you can’t add the word “luxurious” to tiny home living. That’s like adding “whip cream” to a bologna sandwich – they just don’t go together.

And the winner of Dumbest Quote of the Week goes to this MHAction member:

“The general trend is for owners to increase rent and decrease maintenance to maximize profits,” Patrick McHugh with MHAction said. “Many residents are evicted or self-evict, allowing owners to rent out the property at a higher value.”

Why is this dumb? Two reasons: 

1. I do not know of a single park owner who has a goal of increasing rent and decreasing maintenance. When you buy a park, you have loan covenants requiring the property to be kept at a high standard. Most park buyers inject large amounts of capital to bring failing infrastructure back to life. The current playbook is also to add and/or improve amenities to make higher rents equal higher value in lifestyle. None of this is consistent with “decreasing maintenance”. Increasing rent is a given when you buy and improve a park – nobody would argue with that.

2. If the argument is that the lot rent is too high (which is what this article is all about) then how can the “owners rent the property out at a higher value”. I know that some would like America to be socialist by economic system, but in a capitalist system of competition, if the rent was too high there would be no takers. You can’t have it both ways. So MHAction is admitting that the new lot rent is, in fact, not too high. And that defeats the entire theme of the article.

Here’s the most essential quote from this article:

“Homeowners formed a cooperative after the park partnership announced its intent to sell the land leased by residents. Although Gorman and the HOA worked to negotiate the purchase of the park, their efforts proved unsuccessful. “I think everything had to do with the fact that the community itself is an incredible location and the owner could demand a higher price than the worth of a normal mobile home park and the lenders were reluctant to make a loan on that basis,” Gorman said in an April 27 interview with The Islander.”

The truth that nobody wants to hear is that you could easily make the park worth the $16.5 million if you simply raised the lot rents significantly. By having the owner keep rents low it signed the death warrant for this property in all likelihood. As I’ve been saying for over a decade, if you don’t push rents to market levels the land always gets redeveloped for a more profitable use. It’s called basic economics.

This quote from the article explains why the best thing that can happen to any mobile home park is to be purchased by a new buyer with the capital to bring it back to life, the professional management to collect the money and keep it as a running business, and higher rents to make it all worthwhile and keep it from the wrecking ball:

“In a letter dated April 10, the trailer park’s owner and manager, Michael Baker, told residents that he’s closing the park in August due to financial difficulties. Some tenants have consistently paid their rent over the years, but others have fallen behind. Baker can no longer meet operating expenses, the letter says. Baker has covered shortfalls out of his own pocket, he said, but can no longer do so. In addition, the sewer system is over 60 years old and requires frequent, expensive repairs.”