Why leases with an option to buy may be a better way to go for sellers and buyers. Instead of an outright purchase of a Mobile Home or RV Park, a lease with the option to buy can make more deals happen. Here are some benefits that often occur in these type transactions:
Seller Benefits:
1. Instead of selling a property with seller financing, when a seller does a lease option Read more »
Written by Frank Rolfe and Dave Reynolds, MobileHomeParkStore.com, LLC
Most mobile home park owners today have vacancy problem, thanks to chattel mortgage crisis that began in 2000. It is not uncommon for a park that was full in 2000 to now be at 60% occupancy due to repossession of homes. If you have been waiting for the mobile home dealers to fill you back up, you are probably depressed and making no progress. So here are some ideas to get you back in action at increasing occupancy;
First of all, you need to locate the folks in your area Read more »
One question we frequently get from individuals and companies that are listing their mobile home park for sale on our site is “How much information should I include in my listing to be posted”?
We have always taken the stance that you can place as little or as much information on the site and will continue to do so. However, based on my experience with selling my own parks on the site I have found that the following formula works the best: Read more »
One of the most difficult and time consuming tasks of a mobile home park manager is in the collection of rents. It has been my experience that about 50 percent of your residents will never have a problem paying on time. Then about 25 percent may be late on occasion and are also not a major problem. It is the other 25 percent that will take most of your time and efforts.
It is this last 25 percent that will often make or break the deal. Read more »
After 10 years of helping mobile home and mobile home park investors buy, sell and operate their mobile home park, MobileHomeParkStore.com will be having it’s first ever seminar on April 12, 2008.
Frank Rolfe will be teaming up with Dave Reynolds to conduct this live mobile home park bus tour in Dallas, Texas. Unlike the typical seminar where you sit in the room and wait to get pitched product after product and walk away with a hole in your wallet and sketchy information, Frank and Dave will be doing something a little different. They will be hopping on a luxury bus with no more than 50 serious mobile home park investors and visiting mobile home parks all over the Dallas and Fort Worth Metroplex. Read more »
By: Dave Reynolds, MobileHomeParkStore.com
When I am looking to market my mobile home park whether it be to potential residents to bring their homes in or to sell homes in the park, I believe that the first contact with the potential customer is key. This first contact may be via a telephone call to your office, a drive-by by the potential resident, or in many cases could be a referral from a current resident or some other local business (chamber of commerce, dealer, broker, etc).
Let’s face it, if you or your manager is rude when they call in, they probably will call the next park. If they drive in and the roads are in bad shape, the sign is falling down, Read more »
By Frank Rolfe
Some people invest in Google. Some buy shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Other invest in Apple. But sheer investment geniuses invest in bushes. And trees. Because if you own a manufactured home community, these are, dollar for dollar, the best investments you will ever make. How good are the returns? I would estimate that one well placed $20 bush might add $1,000 of value to a manufactured home community. That’s a 500% return on investment. And that’s a lot better than any of the aforementioned stocks have produced lately. In fact, compared to the current stock market, if the bush was worth $10, it would still be better than the market has produced. And, unlike the market, at least the bush creates oxygen and has other productive uses. Read more »
By Frank Rolfe
When I first got into the manufactured home community business, everyone was obsessed by the concept of a “star” system – 1 for poor, 2 for mediocre, 3 for average to good, 4 for better and 5 for best. Owners would love to outdo each other by boasting “my property is a four-star, how many is yours?” Of course, the system was highly flawed, and there was definitely star inflation (people always seemed to add a star or two to their score), but it made for some apparent meaning to somebody (I’m not sure who). Unfortunately, unlike the hotel business, which takes it’s star system seriously, and has many independent judges who allocate them and promote the highest winners, the manufactured home community star system has long been a joke, and about as accurate as a world atlas printed before WWII. Read more »
The 2008 Olympics in Beijing offers an important lesson to the manufactured housing industry. Here you have an event where athletes have taken a certain specialty, a certain strength, and turned it into an extremely advanced skill. Some of these people you and I could beat in at least a dozen parlor games, but in their specialty, they are the tops in the world. So that begs the question: what is the specialty that the manufactured housing industry has to offer – what can it alone focus on and excel at?
In my opinion, our specialty is affordable housing. That’s what we do well, That’s our strength. We can put a customer in a detached home for less money than anyone else on earth. So why can’t we accept this specialty and run with it? Read more »
By Frank Rolfe
Of all the barometers of park performance, from a profit and loss statement to the annual license renewal, one of the crudest and simplest is the fine art of analyzing grass. Because you can tell a lot about a mobile home park just from looking at the grass.
The simplest first question is: “is there any grass?” If not, you may be in a desert, or under water. But if there is grass present, then here are some of the things to look for: Read more »
mobile home park investing | Dave Reynolds | 
December 7, 2009 11:03 am | 
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