Mobile Home Parks
Anyone active in the mobile home park market? Any owners? Im looking to start in the mid-atlantic and southeast and wanted to see what people thought. Would love to bounce some ideas off of someone. 
[{"id": "d8zm173", "text": "Be prepared to manage your units in person until you find someone you can trust to collect rental cash. Learn some Spanish. Have a plan to deal with people who leave their trailers in the middle of the night and trash their units. Who will pay to fix them up and release them? Also approach local banks with an appetite for trailer parks and ask them for referrals to owners looking to sell. You may find lenders but the loans will likely be low leverage. Your issue is also going to be finding owners who can prove the income and expenses they claim to be receiving as many trailer park owners deal in cash and do not report earnings to the IRS ", "replies": [{"id": "d8zmojq", "text": "This is super helpful - thank you. Do you own any parks?", "replies": [{"id": "d948ev3", "text": "I took a hard look at buying multiple parks and could not find a seller able to prove income and expenses -  concluded this was due to their cash collections and apparent tendency to hide assets from the IRS - these were smaller parks and oftentimes not bigger than 50 pads FYI - bigger parks i imagine are easier to underwrite ", "replies": [], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "d900uzk", "text": "I'm a real estate agent in Kansas and Missouri. In Missouri, there was no restriction against selling mobile homes on our MLS, but in KS there is, because they're considered vehicles. I have had only a bit of experience with mobile home parks, so I probably don't have a lot to offer you, but here goes: \n\nWhere I practiced real estate in MO, it was different than where I practice in KS. Here, there are very few places where mobile homes can be placed, but it really has very little to do with restrictions and a great deal to do with the financing. We have maybe half a dozen parks here, and of those, two have good reputations, while the rest are sort of scummy. The difference is largely due to the competence of management and the ability to get financing. Both of the successful ones have programs to buy back homes (at a fraction of market value) and to help sellers sell their homes (to keep lot rent coming in and avoid people walking away from their homes), and also to help get financing. ", "replies": [{"id": "d90i3mf", "text": "Thanks this is great. It definitely seems like this is very market dependent - as the price and ability to place parks varies greatly. I like the idea of buying back the homes and providing financing - do you know if this is done by the owners themselves or a third party company?", "replies": [{"id": "d90k0uf", "text": "The two \"good\" parks here are located near each other and operated by the same company, but have different management teams. Both of them have have an ongoing agreement with a specific finance company. (This is on their website, where consumers would locate both communities: http://www.bayshorehomesales.com/financing.html - and it's the same website for both parks.) \n\n\n\n", "replies": [], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "d90dym8", "text": "My company owns just over 2,000 pads - feel free to DM me with any questions. I'd be happy to help out. ", "replies": [{"id": "d90i18z", "text": "Pmd!", "replies": [], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}]