WHAT DO
YOU DO WHEN YOUR PARK HAS LESS SKIRTING THAN A MEN’S STORE
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.
Here’s the solution, send a
letter stating that effective immediately every home must have a skirt, but that
you will organize to have all of the work done and then bill it to the tenant,
broken down into six installments of $________ per month. Then, bid the project
against several different contractors and then start the project.
But what if you don’t have
the capital to install skirting for every home? Forty homes at $1,000 each
require $40,000 capital. If you budget is more modest, you will need for the
tenant to put in at least the required labor to install the skirts, and then you
will need to think creatively. I would be more flexible than to demand only
new, vinyl skirting. I have seen great skirting jobs done with metal or
fiberglass (see through roof panels for sheds) or even plywood – the important
thing is that they paint it to match the house. Offer to donate the materials
if they will install and paint it. Even if they are lousy carpenters, anything
looks better than no skirting. And what if you have only a little money? Then
start out with the most visible houses first or you can just do the skirting on
the two sides of the home that are seen when driving though and pass on the rest
for now. Those two sides are the front nearest the street (about 14’ to 16’)
and the side seen most frequently from the street based on normal traffic flow.
Or you can do just the front half of either or both sides. The point is to hide
the ugly part of the home from the street, so that it does not turn off
prospective tenants, banks or anyone else, while buying you time to complete the
project.
One important point I can’t
emphasize enough is the enormous impact of paint. Even the ugliest skirting in
the world, like a hybrid of old pieces of plywood, looks acceptable if it is
painted to match the color of the trailer. Sure, new vinyl is your best
option. But is it worth the extra cost? In many parks that have high density,
you can’t even see 75% of the skirting anyway.
The important thing is to
get something up fast to block the ugly underside of the mobile home. This one
action will make you thousands in immediate re-sale value and new move-ins.
Frank
Rolfe, MHPCollege.com
