HOW TO
GET ALL THE LEAKS OUT OF YOUR MOBILE HOME PARK WATER SYSTEM
By Frank Rolfe
Mobile home park tenants use, on average,
about $30 per month of water & sewer. In some parks, however, that amount
can run around $100 per occupied lot. Whenever you become suspicious that
your water is running too high, here are the steps to find out where the
water is going and proactively solve the problem.
Install water meters and read them.
Even if you have no interest in billing back tenants for
their actual use, there is no way to track where the water is going without
measuring how much tenants use. This will help you identify if your usage
problems are tied to just a few tenants who abuse the system. I once had a
tenant who was spending $600 per month in water. How? He sneaked into the
park a large commercial construction water truck, and filled it up with his
hose every night. That one tenant was the entire source of my water problem,
and I found him through sub-metering.
Compare the master meter reading to
the individual lot aggregate.
Once you have the individual readings, you can now add them
up and see if they are the same as your master reading, from the main meter
that you get your bill from. The difference between these two
readings is the amount of water leaking in your system. Most parks have a
small amount of leakage, so don’t demand perfection. If, however, the
difference is significant (say many thousands of gallons), you have a real
problem.
Look for visual signs of leaks.
Before you put a lot of money into testing, see if you can
find the leak yourself by walking the property and looking for signs of
saturated land and tall, green grass. While this can also be caused by
artesian wells and sewer line leakage, big-time saturation requires the kind
of constant water pressure in line with a serious leak. Fix these leaks and
see what the impact is to your readings.
If that fails, then hire a leak
detection company.
It is amazing what a leak detection company can find. Don’t
ask me how they do it, as I do not fully understand the science. But I have
been the thankful recipient of their work. The world record was a leak that
had no surfaced evidence of any type, but it was huge – maybe 400,000
gallons per month. That would fill 20 commercial hotel swimming pools. In
the end, it turned out to be a crime scene – someone who had their house
downstream on a creek had tapped into the park’s main line and run a line to
the creek so that the babbling brook was running year round.
Once you find the leaks in the
system, fix them.
Regardless of the cost, there is no way that you will be
money ahead by letting them keep on leaking. The only exception is the
natural, tiny leaks of a large system, caused by trace seepage in the
connections.
Before you start evicting tenants
for water use abuse, find out why it’s occurring.
One of the best things you can do when exploring where your
water is going, is to hire a plumber to come out to the park at 10 am on a
weekday, and take all the clean out covers off and listen for running water.
Most lots will have none. But some will have Niagara falls going down the
line – even though nobody is home! Why? Because they have all kinds of leaks
in their house. Toilet leaks, leaky faucets, you name it. I once had a
tenant who left all of his taps running 24/7 because they were broken and he
couldn’t turn them off. In these cases, you are better off having the
plumber go to these tenants’ houses and spend 30 minutes to fix their leaks,
rather than evict them and try to find a new tenant. If you evict a tenant,
you will have court costs, loss of income, and probably an outgo of cash as
an incentive to bring in a new home. If you can fix the leaks for $100 you
are much better off.
Conclusion
Water and sewer is the largest line item expense for most mobile
home parks. That means that saving money on it is going to be the biggest
savings you can make. Your park usage is not magic, it is just science. If
you take these steps you can get a complete handle on where the water is
going, and then take steps to reduce the usage. Always remember that,
assuming a 10% cap rate, even an $80 per month savings increases the value
of your park by nearly $10,000. And you should be able to save much, much
more than that.
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