Mobile Home Park Mastery

Not too long ago, mobile home park owners could order new homes to fill vacant lots. Now they find that delivery times are far into the future, prices are up $10,000, and some manufacturers even have caps on the number of homes you can order. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to discuss the U.S. home manufacturing crisis and how to overcome this hurdle to fill your vacant lot.

When you buy a mobile home park, you are in a race against time to improve it’s appearance for a number of reasons. Higher existing customer retention, higher new resident attraction, better city government relationship and stronger banker satisfaction are all made possible through simple aesthetic improvements. So what are these key improvements that can be made rapidly? That’s the focus of this...

Mobile home parks are known for high density compared to single-family subdivisions (their closest cousin). While this is not a problem most of the time, you can reach a density that causes potential issues with the fire marshal as well as simply moving homes in and out. So what do you do to fix density that is too high in a property? In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review...

The Surfside condo tower collapse is more than just a tragic tale of the unthinkable occurring. It’s also a wake-up call that there is massive risk in owning large, aging man-made objects and now that this is on the radar, we will now begin a period of bureaucratic over-analysis, a fee-grab by opportunistic engineering and third-party report companies, a liability windfall for personal injury atto...

Mobile home park owners rely on happy residents to make their business work. However, sometimes the community manager can be a blockade to the owner’s knowledge of his customer’s satisfaction. Without providing a good value, no mobile home park can succeed, as it will be unable to obtain or retain residents. So how can you keep a constant tab on this feedback? In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podc...

Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975, and went public in 1986, at a stock price around $1. By 1996, the stock had risen to around $4 per share – a 400% increase in only ten years. Many investors jumped at the chance to sell, thinking that Microsoft had reached its maximum value. Today, Microsoft stock trades at around $250 per share. In many ways, current mobile home park values are like Microsoft...

Finding the right mobile home park requires sifting through a huge number of deals, and separating them into two buckets: 1) has the right raw material and 2) does not have the right raw material. But what does that raw material look like. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review what makes a deal possible apart from a deal impossible. Mastering this one skill will allow you...

Lay’s potato chips has long used the slogan “bet you can’t eat just one”. But is that also true for buying mobile home parks? In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to discuss what happens after you buy that first property and bring it back to life. Do you buy another? Do you buy a whole portfolio over time? Or do you hold steady with one proven success under your belt? There are a n...

I am often asked what the “future” of the mobile home park industry is. And I think it’s most appropriately called “the Great Race”. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to discuss what I mean by “the Great Race”, how to enter it, how it will end, and what you need to know about the contest. Since we all live under “time urgency” it’s only appropriate to have a talk about that tick...

Webster’s defines “tough love” as an expression used when someone treats another person harshly or sternly with the intent to help them in the long run. Right now our nation has never been more off track and that’s filtering down to your residents. In this episode of the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast, we’re going to talk about current trends in personal accountability, political missteps, and h...

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over four years since we started the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. If you linked all those episodes end to end it would last almost 35 hours. So to celebrate our Bicentennial we’ve selected the five top most-viewed episodes and we’re going to discuss how those topics have changed over the course of these broadcasts. And we want to take this opportunity to th...

Joe Girard was the highest-selling car salesman in U.S. history, personally selling over 1,400 cars in 1973 alone. He had a simple rule to hit those kind of numbers: focus on volume of leads. And smart mobile home park buyers and owners share this same sentiment. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to discuss how Girard developed this attitude, and how we should all adopt it immed...

Nobody likes last-minute changes: particularly not mobile home park buyers. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast, we’re going to discuss how to work around sudden changes in deal terms that can happen during diligence, financing – or even closing. You have to be flexible in forging some deals, and this topic should be of interest to anyone who has faced making a sudden decision on a property.

Painting and sculpting requires creative thinking. But it doesn’t make any money. Indeed, creative deal making has limitations. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review what you can and can’t accomplish with creative thinking when it comes to successful deals. While coming up with unique ideas can often salvage a property’s shortcomings, it’s not always the solution.

Mobile home retail dealers are typically all about selling new homes – mostly to people putting them out on their farm or ranch. But there’s another side to the retail story. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to discuss strategies to have dealers bring in and sell homes inside your mobile home park. It can be a win/win business model if handled properly. And with the average occ...

There’s a huge demand for affordable housing in the U.S. and one of the best ways to drive a mobile home park’s net income and value is through filling vacant lots. However, not all parks are created equal in this regard. In this episode we review the factors that can make a mobile home park incapable of filling lots in the correct manner, and this may well lead you to pass on that deal. 

Just as cicadas come out of the earth around every five years, so does the concept that there is a solution to affordable housing in placing mobile homes on vacant single-family residential lots. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to expose why this has always been a doomed idea and the reasons that it keeps coming up in conversations on a cyclical basis.

Mark Cuban recently said that “the intrinsic value of anything – Bitcoin, an ounce of gold, or a share of GameStop – is simply what people believe it is. Nothing else matters.” That has to be the worst investing theory of all time, and is the root of all speculative bubbles. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to discuss the concept of actually “investing” as opposed to “speculati...

The slang term for signing the documents and closing on a mobile home park is often called “pulling the trigger”. It’s a major commitment and one that can create angst with many buyers who are concerned if they are making the right decision. So what are the key factors that must be aligned to feel good about making this big step? In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review the v...

The definition of a mobile home park is “two or more mobile homes on one platted piece of property”. Of course, with just two people on one tract, that would not be too complicated, but the reality is typically 50 to 100 households or more, and that can create issues. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review what the key problems can be and how to mitigate these issues. As yo...

Every mobile home park must have a manager, and not all of those work out. So what are the key reasons why mobile home park managers fail and what can be done to mitigate these issues? In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review our lessons learned from hundreds of managers and how to improve your odds of success. Since firing a manager is never fun and can be costly in time and...

If you talk to mobile home park owners about the best parts of property ownership, most will tell you that it gives them a very high-quality lifestyle. But what does that mean? In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review the top benefits of owning mobile home parks from a quality of life perspective. You’ll see that it’s not all about the money, but something much more that come...

January single-wide sales of new mobile homes are down 7.5% from last year – and park owners could care less. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review why there is no correlation between mobile home manufacturing and mobile home park performance. While many Americans believe that mobile home retail is where the money is, that couldn’t be farther from the truth and the future...

Warren Buffett has long championed the concept that all great business models share one big attribute: a “moat”. This “moat” protects that business from competition and from other damaging risks to profitability. Mobile home parks have long held the position of having one of the largest “moats” in the United States, and it just keeps getting wider and deeper, to the chagrin of many who find it “un...

America is in the grips of an affordable housing shortage so large it seems impossible. But the solution is not a structural one – that’s easy – but a political one that is insurmountable. In this episode of the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to talk about why the government is unwilling to make the tough political choices that could solve affordable housing once and for all.