Articles

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...

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 i...

There is no shortage of difficult to handle tenants inside of a mobile home park. In fact, the challenge is to find nice, rational ones. Until that changes, it is important to know how to diffuse the difficult tenant to minimize stress and disruption to your business.

You can't be a mobile home park owner and not realize that the good old days are over in filling up vacant mobile home park lots. Those of us who owned parks in the late 1990s became spoiled with how easy it was to fill up a mobile home park.

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:

When I got in the mobile home park business, many of the sellers I bought from called the mobile homes "coaches" and "trailers". Roger Miller even wrote a hit song with the lyrics "trailers for sale or rent". But manufacturers and dealers thought the business needed an upgrade, so they changed the name to "mobile home".

Some mobile home park buyers have this erroneous idea that the goal is to buy a great looking asset. They even rate the parks they look at based on physical appearance. The star system is a good example. Most people think a five-star park is always superior to a one star park.

It is impossible to be a landlord and not receive frequent requests to "help" your tenants. These requests normally revolve around payment of the rent either to pay late or to pay a reduced amount. And the way you handle these requests has a huge impact on your business, and the life of your tenant.

In Kung Fu, the concept is to combat aggression with the least amount of human effort and movement. Evidently the oriental masters' theories can be applied to mobile home parks. The best way to handle mobile home park tenants is to use very little effort to pretty much ignore 99% of what they say and do.

Warren Buffet once said of Berkshire Hathaway "we only get greedy when others get fearful". That statement has never been more accurate in describing the opportunities in the mobile home park business. We are approaching a time in the industry when the owners of parks for sale are fearful, and their fear is amplified by a struggling, nearly dead mobile home retail industry and a sudden reversal of fortune in lending.