By popular request of our friends from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas and surrounding areas, we are taking the Boot Camp on the road to Dallas on April 30th to May 2nd.
If you have been waiting until the Boot Camp got closer to home to save on travel cost, here’s your opportunity. Read more »
Tags: mobile home investment, mobile home park and US Recession, mobile home park business, mobile home park investing, Mobile Home Park Loans, mobile home park opportunity, mobile home parks marketing, mobile home parks rules, seller finance trap mobile home park
mobile home advertising, mobile home park, mobile home park business operations, mobile home park investing, mobile home park news, mobile home park ratings, mobile home park selling | Dave Reynolds | 
February 11, 2010 5:44 pm | 
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The Department of Environmental Protection has fined a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania mobile home park owner $123,570 for allowing sewage from his treatment plant to discharge into a nearby stream.
Frank Perano, the owner of Dauphin County Mobile Home Park, has allowed repeated cases of discharge from his over-loaded treatment plant. Read more »
Nothing is uglier than a mobile home without skirting. Even a brand new, top-of-the-line mobile home with a shingles roof and vinyl siding looks like junk in the absence of nice vinyl skirting to hide all the tie-downs and concrete blocks and pipes.
So what do you do when the mobile home park you’ve bought has virtually no skirting on the homes? The first question to ask is what kind of finances do your tenants have? If you are like me, they live pretty much hand to mouth. So what do you do?
You don’t have a lot of choices. You can’t afford to kick all of your tenants out, and so threatening to kick them out if they don’t skirt their house is a bad bluff. You also can’t leave the skirts off since it will scare aware new residents and will keep you from getting a good loan or making a good sale down the road. Read more »
Written by Frank Rolfe and Dave Reynolds, MobileHomeParkStore.com, LLC
One of the biggest news stories emerging from the embattled mobile home manufacturing and sales side of the industry is the current and proposed litigation concerning formaldehyde contamination in mobile homes. As you may or may not be aware, formaldehyde is used in the creation of the products that are used to build a mobile home, such as wood products, I believe. Recently, there have been some studies that may suggest the level of formaldehyde in some homes may exceed the safe level. But my question is what the worst-case scenario might be from litigation regarding formaldehyde, as it affects mobile home park ownership and operations. 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 »
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
Unless you have spent time in law enforcement, there are certain signs of crime that you would never notice as a result of your sheltered existence. However, there are important crime signals that every park owner should know, but that nobody will tell you due to political correctness. So here they are:
Shoes don’t grow on power lines.
Have you ever noticed a pair of tennis shoes hanging from a power line? Read more »
Written by Frank Rolfe and Dave Reynolds, MobileHomeParkStore.com, LLC
I can remember when a good, well-located community could fill seven or eight lots per month with nothing more than some flyers at a manufactured home dealership. To even say such things today dates you as someone from the dinosaur age. And unless you’ve been in a cave, you know that you are lucky to fill one lot per year in that manner today.
So how do you fill vacant lots in your community? Well, a lot differently than you did in the past – and it takes a whole lot more effort. But you’ll find that once you put your program together, it will turn your life and spirits around to see new homes coming in to those old, dusty lots. Read more »
Many park owners feel that it is their duty as the owner to rule with an iron hand. They think that they can cure all of the park’s ills with rule after rule. At many parks, the rules section is longer than the lease itself.
But is the park any better off with “rules phobia”?
I have tested operating parks with extreme rules enforcement, and also with virtually no rules enforcement at all. And I think I have found the solution to successful park rules.
Think Subdivision
For inspiration on proper rules enforcement, look no further than the nearest residential subdivision. Read more »
Mobile home park tenants are not rich. Most of them live from paycheck to paycheck. As a result, they frequently don’t pay their bills on time – sometimes at all. To motivate these tenants to pay their lot rent on time, you must enact a late fee for rent that is not received by the due date. However, enacting such a plan is a lot more complicated than most park owners recognize. And messing up the plan can cause extreme legal and financial penalties. Here are a few initial points to consider:
How much to charge the tenant.
There is a law in most states as to the maximum late fee you can charge. Read more »
