In this interview, we sit down with Bob Vahsholtz, author of Dueling Curves: The Battle for Housing, to explore the history, challenges, and future of mobile home parks. Bob shares his insights on how the industry evolved, the key battles that shaped housing policy, and what today’s park owners can learn from the past. Don’t miss this deep dive into one of the most overlooked yet critical sectors of affordable housing.
Bob Vahsholtz’s book, Dueling Curves: The Battle for Housing, is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and future of mobile home parks. This insightful work dives deep into the industry’s evolution and the challenges that shaped it. Don't miss out—download your free copy now and discover the untold story of affordable housing!.
Dueling Curves & The Battle for Housing: An Interview with Bob Vahsholtz - Transcript
Frank Rolfe: Welcome to our first Scholar Series event. This is Frank Rolfe with mhu.com you might say, why do we need to discuss literature concerning the Mobile Home and Mobile Home Park industry? And the reason is there's been a giant vacuum in our industry. When I got in the business back in the '90s, I could only find two books on the topic of manufactured housing. One, a roughly 1955 little tiny hardbound book, I believe, called how to Develop and Operate Mobile Home Parks. And the other being a 1970s paperback which focused on Mobile Homes. And the problem I had and struggled with was that all the other real estate sectors, office buildings, retail, apartments, they all had voluminous quantities of good, accurate scientific information, and yet our industry seemingly had none. And that's always been a problem for lenders and larger corporate investors because they look at Mobile Home parks and say, this can't be a legitimate sector because it's lacking information. Where's the information?
01:11
Frank Rolfe: So just as science has Nikola Tesla, manufactured housing has Bob Vahsholtz. Now you might say, who the heck is Bob Vahsholtz? Well, we were minding our own business one day back in 2014, and I had just been doing or was about to come out in the New York Times, and we got an email from Bob Vahsholtz saying, hey, I have this book about the industry would you want me to send you a copy? So he sent us a copy of this book. I read the book. I immediately responded to Brandon, "Oh, my gosh, this book is incredible. This is like the best book I've seen yet on the industry." And we liked the book so much, we bought the rights to the book because we thought it was very important that the industry know all these things that Bob had been studying. And so we're very excited to have as our first ever scholar in the scholar series, none other than Bob Vahsholtz. So, Bob, are you here with us?
02:13
Bob Vahsholtz: I'm there. Hi, Frank.
02:16
Frank Rolfe: Hey, Bob. All right. Well, Bob, let me ask you a few questions here. And the first thing, I know you're a Kansas farm boy. And in fact, my family are all farmers from Kansas also. Their farms are all around Effingham and Atchison, Kansas. But to me, it's always interesting talking to people who have a farming background from Kansas because you seem to be much more impartial and much more observant when you're a farmer, because all the time you have to worry about the weather, crop prices, a million items. It's very complicated. I didn't realize. So I've talked to farmers it's probably one of the most scientifically complex things on earth. The simple action of raising corn or beans or some crop. So do you think being a farm boy helped you out as far as being able to write really good books?
03:21
Bob Vahsholtz: Well, I'll tell you, Frank, the farm background was not exactly my cup of tea. I had an older brother who was a natural farm boy, but I never was. I was kind of the nerdy type and I never took to the farming, but I grew up on it and I learned like the, I like the countryside and I feel at home in places like Kansas. It's a good state and real folks down there.
04:02
Frank Rolfe: So Bob, how did you get from a Kansas farm into Mobile Home design? Tell people that journey. How did you go from something which had nothing to do with affordable housing into being, you know working in the entire design and production of Mobile Homes?
04:22
Bob Vahsholtz: Well, it was a kind of a circuitous route actually, Frank. I wanted to get off the farm because it just wasn't to my liking. And my dad said that he would pay for my education. So I was bound determined to take him up on it as a means of getting a little bit of knowledge so that I could get off the farm and make my living elsewhere. I didn't know where, I didn't know how, but I wanted off that farm. So I said to my dad when I set off for college, I said, "Hey, what should I study?" I really kind of hadn't really thought this thing through. Small town boys. And he said, well, he said, you should be an engineer. I said, I should drive trains. He said, no, no, no, no, no. There's a different kind of engineer. Engineers are people who see things and figure out how to make them work better. And that sort of thing that's what engineers do. I said, well, yeah, okay, that sounds good. I am a figure outer. So we agreed that I would go off to K-State and become an engineer.
05:52
Bob Vahsholtz: There was one little problem with that, is that engineers do their magic with mathematics. And I never learned any mathematics. I went to lousy schools and I loved to read. And I got by doing the minimum amount of work and never learned math, never learned much of anything. When I got to K-State, boy was I in trouble. So I wound up taking all kinds of tests to see what I might be qualified for because clearly engineering was not gonna work. And at KU they suggested that I might be competence as an industrial designer. Well, listen, I love cars. So I said man, that's for me. I'm gonna be a car designer. So my dad, bless his heart, I was gonna go to KU and study industrial design. He said, is that a good school? I said, well, they're just starting up. He said, if you're gonna do such a stupid thing, he says you ought to at least go to a decent school because that industrial design doesn't sound like a promising career. Well, I said, there's two good schools that I know of.
07:18
Bob Vahsholtz: And he said, which one you want to go to? I said, well, ArtCenter. But I said, gee, that's clear on the west coast and you have to be practically professional to get in there and I don't have any credentials. You have to have a portfolio. And besides the class is filled, I couldn't possibly get in there. So anyway, he said, pack your clothes, off we go. And he drove me out to Los Angeles, parked in front of the ArtCenter school and said, now go in there and talk your way in. And I did. And so that's where I graduated from ArtCenter as an industrial designer. But I found out that farm boys and Detroit designers are quite two different things. And I didn't care much for the farm, but I certainly didn't want to live in Detroit and I certainly didn't want to work on kind of committees and so on that they have down there in Detroit. I got to meet the professional designers and learn how things work in Detroit and said, that's not for me. Anyway, I switched over to product design. And when I graduated, my wife Marge actually put me through school because my dad forbid us to get married until I graduated.
08:53
Bob Vahsholtz: But I kind of stood up to him and we got married anyway. And as we were driving away from home, I said to Marge, let's see if we can do this on our own. And she was, bless her heart, she was all for it. And we never took another nickel from home and made our way through ArtCenter going year round with her, earning enough to scrape us by. And we graduated with the same $600 we started with. Anyway, I got drafted and sent to Alaska. And in Alaska they said that if those of us who were married could bring our wives up there if we could provide housing. Housing was very expensive. So I looked around and indeed my army pay would not even pay for an apartment. But I had a little money and so I went and bought a Little secondhand trailer, 23 foot rebel built in California. It was all put together with nails. It was a pretty shaky old trailer. But I moved it in the dead of winter into Fairbanks and spent the summer fixing it up. And we were quite happy there. And we fixed that little old trailer up and spent a lot of time talking about what we wanted to do then with our lives once I got out of the army. And I said, these little trailers are actually pretty decent little homes. And I had shopped around and studied the matter and I said I think I will make my future as a Mobile Home designer because it's a small town oriented business and they certainly could use some design help. And that's how I got started to answer your question.
10:58
Frank Rolfe: And Bob, what year was that that you entered the business?
11:05
Bob Vahsholtz: Well, I actually started in 1960. I was in the army the last two years of 1950 in Alaska. And we left there and drove to Elkhart, Indiana which was the, I had learned was the hometown of the Mobile Home industry. And I said to Marge, I said, "There's gonna be all kinds of beautiful parks there and there's gonna be secondhand Mobile Homes because they'll have lots of Mobile Homes there. And I'll bet we can afford a decent secondhand Mobile Home and put it in a nice park and life is gonna be good." Well we drove into Elkhart, Indiana and it's a kind of a miserable old town and the parks there are no better than any place else. That was the biggest industry in town and really it was kind of disgraceful the parks in Elkhart, Indiana. But I managed to get a job with the Richardson Homes which was the Bob Richardson had just built the biggest Mobile Home factory in the world right there in Elkhart. And I managed to get a job there at production line workers wages. And first thing we did was bought a brand new Richardson and moved it into the best park we could find. And we were happy as plans at little old park.
12:42
Bob Vahsholtz: It turned out to be a wonderful thing and I really learned a lot about business starting from scratch and working on, not on the production line but working with the guys out in the factory. And nobody knew what to do with industrial designer, they'd never hired one before. So I kind of made my own way and learned how it all works and it was wonderful. I've never regretted that. And I've dedicated my life to trying to accomplish what I set out to do up there in Alaska make Mobile Homes into the best possible affordable housing.
13:26
Frank Rolfe: Now Bob, you got in the industry then right in the glamour era I mean, it's like a time capsule. If you watch the old Elvis movie, it happened at the World's Fair, which I think came out in 1963. And he lives in a Mobile Home Park in the movie. And in the movie, in the Mobile Home Park, it seems that everyone's driving a sports car. Everyone's wearing coat and tie virtually. The women are all wearing cocktail party attire. Was that representative of how the industry really was back in the '60s? Was it an upper end thing or what were things like back in the '60s?
14:09
Bob Vahsholtz: Well, the industry was really just getting started. It all kind of grew out of travel trailers. And it was very much a small town business. That Richardson factory was brand new and elegant, but it was a crummy factory. It was poorly laid out for its task. And a lot of the factories there in town, there were probably, oh, two or three dozen Mobile Home factories in Elkhart and most of them were pole barns and they had very small staff. I had envisioned great machines stamping out bits and pieces and so on. It isn't that way at all. It's like a bunch of guys getting together in a garage and building houses. Back in those days it was quite primitive. They didn't even have electric drills out on the land. People used Yankee screwdrivers and hammers and nails and all kinds of stuff. It was pretty primitive back in those days.
15:17
Frank Rolfe: And Bob, back in, I think it was 1954, Spartan brought out a home which is in the MH/RV Hall of Fame and Museum. It's the last item in the exhibit, I think. And I looked at the price of that home once and it was not much less than a stick built home. And that was in the mid-50s. By the 1960s. What kind of, what were the prices on these homes you were building, do you think? Do you remember what the price was? Some of those were.
15:51
Bob Vahsholtz: Yeah, typically they were Mobile Homes in those days were 10 wides of about 50, 55 foot length and they were selling for $3,000 to $5,000.
16:11
Frank Rolfe: Go ahead.
16:13
Bob Vahsholtz: Yeah, there were more expensive ones, but the volume was always in the low end. And that's what Richardson specialized is in value for a dollar.
16:30
Frank Rolfe: And Bob, if you look at the dollar in 1965, a dollar in '65 today is $10. So if a low end home was 3,000 to 5,000, that's 30,000 to 50,000 today. And the high end homes back then were, some of those went up close to 10,000, didn't they? What were the high end back then?
17:00
Bob Vahsholtz: There were like you mentioned the Spartans. And Spartans were always a premium. They were the Airstream of the Mobile Home industry and they were wonderful homes. But they used that stress skin aluminum and that started out as Spartan aircraft. So it was like aircraft construction. They were quite different. And there were other pricey Mobile Homes, but Spartan was the class act. And most of the manufacturers were not really manufacturers. They were just assemblers. We bought material and marked up the material about as much as a wholesale distributor does. And our labor content was only about 10%. There was not a lot of manufacturing going on. We mostly bought materials, hammered it together and mounted wheels on it and shipped it to dealers.
18:05
Frank Rolfe: And Bob, a typical factory today in Elkhart produces about seven floors a day, which means seven single wides or a double wide cast is two floors. What were factories producing back in the 1960s? What would a typical factory produce per day?
18:23
Bob Vahsholtz: It was already back in those days, the typical output was 3 to 10. Richardson biggest factory in the world, we were building 20 a day. But that was very unusual. Very few outfits produced that kind of volume. And most of those little factories were pole barns building three to five a day.
18:49
Frank Rolfe: Got you. And so back in the early days when they were building these, there must have been moments in which the product could have gone in a different direction. Were there any different prototypes or directions where you thought things might go back then? I mean, instead of just the single wide being kind of a shoebox looking thing, I know that Raymond Loewy did a prototype for a factory, and I think his was more rounded, art deco looking. And then I think even Frank Lloyd Wright did a design, but neither ever went into manufacturing. But could it have gone in a different direction?
19:32
Bob Vahsholtz: Those are somewhat later. Loewy never really got serious about Mobile Homes and Frank Lloyd Wright, it was mostly his disciples that did the innovation there. And they were really never serious. They wanted to make architecture out of Mobile Homes. And I got to tell you, Frank, Mobile Homes are not architecture. They're just nice little houses that people find comfortable to live in. You asked about the direction I was of course, bound determined I was gonna find some new directions. And I had the good fortune of working for Bob Richardson, who was an innovator. He wanted to do things differently, and that's one reason that he hired me. He really wanted to explore the outer limits and see where we could go. And working with him, we did a fair bit of innovation, but it was really, really hard because our product design was dictated by dealers. We were utterly dependent on dealers. We had lousy contact with the actual market. The people who lived in Mobile Homes and manufacturers themselves wouldn't even think of living in a Mobile Home. Bob Richardson once established a Mobile Home Park in town or a Mobile Home in the best park in town and said, okay guys, now each of us is gonna spend a week living in this Mobile Home so we know what it's all like.
21:10
Bob Vahsholtz: Well, he had revolt on his end. Nobody wanted to do that. I was one of two people in the office who actually lived in a Mobile Home. I bought a brand new one off the production line. But Mobile Home builders didn't really have much interest in their product. Anyway, Bob wanted to change all that and he wanted to do great things. And so we built some double wides and that was one of the early big things. Take two trailers and park them next to each other and put pointy roofs on them and make them look like a house. And we built some of those there. But mostly our work at Richardson was innovating on interiors. We found that the dealers and customers liked furnished interiors and we had contact with the suppliers and good relations with the suppliers. And my team and I were mostly interior designers and we put together stylish interiors and packaged them up and sold them. But after a while we built some double wides and we got a reputation as the leading design company in the industry. And we were contacted by Alcan Homes of Canada to design double wides that looked like houses.
22:58
Bob Vahsholtz: Alcan Aluminum was one of the biggest home builders in Canada and they thought the idea of building Mobile Homes that looked like houses were the proper thing to do for Canada. And they hired Richardson Homes to design product for the Canadian market. And we had a prototype shop and we built four prototypes for them in our prototype shop. And we shipped those to Canada and worked with Canadian mortgage and housing CMHC got Canadian approval for long term mortgages on those Mobile Homes using almost entirely regular Mobile Home parts. The CMHC is a good outfit and we worked well with them and we got those prototypes approved. And then we took the Richardson old factory and we ran a series of a whole run of those double wides through that factory, shipped them to Canada and then Alcan when that project was finished and they were happy with the product and the price was right and everything, they wanted to joint venture with Richardson Homes. But Bob Richardson choked on that. He did not want to get involved with a foreign company. I always thought he should have, but I don't know exactly why he didn't.
24:44
Bob Vahsholtz: But anyway, he did not. And so Alcan wanted to hire three of us, myself and our head engineer and the guy who had run the little prototype line. And John Slater was the engineer. And he and I decided that we did not want to go to work in Canada. So we set up a consulting office. And that's how we got launched into the notion of modulars. And that was the big, that was the big innovation. Bob Richardson had attempted various ways to turn double wides into better, ever better kinds of houses. And we did some experimenting along those lines. But John and I got a contract to design the Alcan plant in Canada. And then we ventured mostly into modular design. And we thought that it was gonna be very much like doing those prototypes for Alcan up in Canada. But it's a whole different ball game in the United States. The housing was not nearly as open to innovation as the Canadians were. And by the time you got modulars approved through all the processes and all the approvals and all the red tape, they didn't really save any money.
26:36
Bob Vahsholtz: And I'm sorry to say that I spent about five years, John and I together, doing a lot of experimentation with modular homes. And we concluded, well, I concluded that Mobile Homes are the way to go. John was gung ho for modulars, and he hung in there with modulars all the rest of his career. I switched back to Mobile Homes because Mobile Homes you were talking about my first book, DUELING CURVES. What that book is about is how we used experience to bring the cost of production down. Learning curve. That's the whole secret of manufacturing. And I learned a bit about that when we were in that consulting business. And it was the start with recreational vehicles that were, you built whatever you could sell and refine the product as he went along and just figured out how to make things better day after day. And that is learning curve. And when you, every time you double your production, you make an increment of progress theoretically. And we were never able to establish a learning curve on modulars. And the secret to doing it on Mobile Homes was we had dealers and parks.
28:28
Bob Vahsholtz: There was a place to go with the product. Dealers sold our product and parks absorbed the output. And we were able then to turn out vast volumes 20 homes a day and sell them. And we turned our inventories fast and we learned how to make homes in volume. There's no secret to it, it's just learning curve. And you pick up little tricks here and there. And the whole thing comes together with industry experience. The Japanese demonstrated that in cars, but we demonstrated it first in Mobile Homes and before that it was done in travel trailers. And that was what DUELING CURVES was all about, was the learning curve that made Mobile Homes possible. And the marketing of Mobile Homes through dealers and into parks was the absolute critical ingredient. Because without parks there is no market. If you're a manufacturer and you're gonna go sell Mobile Homes to somebody, they got to find land to put them on and you get caught up in the whole nonsense of home building which is bureaucratic and over regulated and you cannot assemble volume. Levitt and a few others did that after World War II but you simply got to have volume of similar products, building them and learning step by step. And that has been the secret of the Mobile Home industry from the beginning.
30:22
Frank Rolfe: Now Bob, in 1976 roughly the federal government kind of did a takeover of manufacturing and required that everything be based on designs that they approved. And you had to have a HUD seal on the homes. Talk about for a minute how that came to pass and what the impact was on manufacturing from when HUD came into the picture.
30:47
Bob Vahsholtz: Well, it should have been good and it was good in many ways. But in fact, before HUD came along, there were no real standards. When I entered the industry, everybody just built Mobile Homes best they could and made the best of it. But there were a lot of those little manufacturers who really didn't know what they were doing. And so there was a lot of bad product. Not a lot, but some, companies would start up and fail and build some bad product because they didn't know what they were doing. And so the industry got itself together and decided to, first they came up with a gold seal program where we did a version of the national building code for Mobile Homes that adapted to the Mobile Home product but met the performance standards of the national building code. But that was a little over sophisticated and it was not widely taken up by the manufacturers and so the gold seal didn't go anywhere. But later we got certification by independent by, oh, I can't think of the name of it the previous. But we had an industry association where we built our homes according to the national building code and the key to it was a performance clause because the national building code specifies materials and bits and pieces.
32:44
Bob Vahsholtz: But Mobile Homes are built quite differently. So we had to prove that our homes would perform. And we had independent certification that did that. And we started with construction and plumbing and wiring and gradually adopted more and more of those standards. And we were making progress on that, but that was not getting us long term housing. So the industry, after the collapse of the industry in 1973 and '74, the industry decided they needed HUD approval. And so we went to HUD with our code that we had and negotiated with them, said look, we've developed this product and if you will certify it and provide the financing, life will be good. And they agreed to do that. And so it was really, HUD really adapted the performance code that we had worked out with other agencies over the years. And it had come about fairly slowly, but over a period of four or five years while I was in the industry, we got those standards in place and HUD adapted them with not, well I was telling you how CMHC approved our double wides with virtually no changes.
34:34
Bob Vahsholtz: We made very few changes to accommodate CMHC. HUD was not quite that malleable, but they were fairly decent about it. And the cost of conforming to the HUD code and the HUD certification process maybe raised the price of Mobile Homes maybe 8%, something like that, but bearable. But the problem is that HUD is a government agency and they have their own way of going. And that code has been refined and refined and it's still performance oriented, but it gets more and more specification oriented and more and more rigid as time goes by. And it kind of ruined the innovation. It's much more difficult to innovate these days than it was back when we had independent agencies certifying our product.
35:47
Frank Rolfe: Now Bob, you just mentioned the industry had hard times in '72, '73. What was that about? Most people are familiar with the Chattel collapse in the late '90s, but what happened in '72, '73?
36:03
Bob Vahsholtz: What happened in '73 was we simply got completely ahead of ourselves. The Mobile Home industry when I entered it was almost entirely reliant on parks for dealers and parks for sales. But when you go to build Mobile Home Parks, which we, hey, we were builders, we didn't know anything about building parks. We depended on dealers and small town developers to put together parks. And it was fairly simple process. But as time went by and more and more parks were being built, regulations came in and it got harder and harder to build those parks. And in Florida and California they got into all these fancy parks with swimming pools and all that sort of thing, trying to go upscale. And Mobile Homes kept getting bigger and bigger and old parks became obsolete and those developers were busy building parks as fast as they could. But the economics depended on filling those parks fast and the dealers did that and it was all working just fine. But what happened was the developers could not keep up with production. We were growing like crazy during the '60s and we just out produced our ability and the developers ability to build parks.
37:48
Bob Vahsholtz: By the late '60s, half of our production was going on to private lots. And that was simply because we couldn't find developers to build parks as fast as we wanted. The association sponsored developers and worked with them to develop parks. At one time the Mobile Home Manufacturers Association was the largest land developer in the country in terms of projects. But they were basically consultants to small developers. But those developers could not keep up. And of course their business was developing parks. And when they got them, when they got those parks built, they would typically sell them to local investors and the local investors would hire managers and operate the parks often in conjunction with dealers. But as the parks filled up, the dealers lost interest and they were out there want to sell new Mobile Homes, they wanted new parks and they wanted private land and there was nobody really in charge. And when things just kind of petered out and they stopped building parks because the economics weren't working, the Mobile Homes were getting bigger, the lots had to be bigger and the regulations were smothering things and the whole park industry kind of ground to a halt.
39:27
Bob Vahsholtz: And us smart guys building Mobile Homes didn't even realize what was happening. First thing you know, we just kept building faster and faster and we couldn't, the dealers couldn't find land, they couldn't find parks, there was no place to go and we just simply over built. And when that oil crisis came along in the early '70s and interest rates went up, the whole thing just collapsed like a house of cards. Half the manufacturers, half the plants were closed, volume was cut in half and we never really recovered. The whole problem, Frank, was we lost our mojo. The parks were the key to the industry and we lost the parks.
40:26
Frank Rolfe: Bob, let me ask you this on the manufacturing died. It's long been said that one mistake or opportunity that HUD missed was that they could have had the homes detached from the trailer upon arrival. Is that true or is that just something that people have said kind of as urban legend? In other words, the concept was that HUD somehow required manufacturers to leave the trailers on the homes when in fact it could have been detached. Is that true?
41:01
Bob Vahsholtz: I'm not sure I understood what you said there Frank, would you say that again?
41:05
Frank Rolfe: Sure. Some people say that when HUD took over the industry back in '76, roughly that some manufacturers had floated the idea of removing, upon delivery, removing the chassis with the wheels and the hitch from the Mobile Home and then sitting the home on the blocks. And therefore the homes could have been much lower to the ground to kind of remove that up in the air look of trailers. Is that really true or is that just something that people have made up in modern times?
41:46
Bob Vahsholtz: That was an evolutionary process. It never really made sense to leave those wheels and tires under there to rot. As you well know, once a mobile home is delivered and placed in a park or on a private land, it rarely moves. Maybe 10% of them move at some point, but mostly they just stay where they are. So it makes no sense to leave the wheels under there. But we were churning them out so fast that we never really kind of got around to those little details like recycling the running gear. And that was evolving as time went along. And with HUD, they encouraged better foundations, which was a good thing. And they encouraged taking that running gear off and recycling it. And so the industry really developed that. It had little to do with HUD, but it was just something that needed done. And frankly, lowering them was not a big factor because you need access under the Mobile Home to hook up the utilities and to block them properly, and you need to get under there for service work and one thing, another. So, yeah, once the running gear came off, they got lowered a little bit, but it was no big deal.
43:27
Frank Rolfe: Bob, if you go to California, a lot of the Mobile Homes in California, their skirting is they take a mirror image of the sides of the home and bring it to the ground. And then in most of the rest of America, the skirting is vinyl, and it appears in no way like the home exterior, nor is it even the same color. But in California, often they will take the wall all the way to the ground, which looks pretty good. I mean, I think we'd all admit that having the skirting match the home looks better, I think.
44:09
Bob Vahsholtz: That's true.
44:10
Frank Rolfe: What are your thoughts on that whole thing and skirting? Are you a fan of vinyl skirting? Or do you think there's better ways to skirt? Are the people in California smarter about that? And why did the plants not do that kind of skirting? Why did they do the vinyl stuff?
44:28
Bob Vahsholtz: Well, actually, skirting evolved over a lot of years. Back when I bought my new Richardson Mobile Home, I went and bought some, oh, what do they call them, those snow break snow fences. Remember the woven snow fences?
44:56
Frank Rolfe: Yep sue do.
44:57
Bob Vahsholtz: I bought a roll of snow fencing, whacked it in two and made my skirt out of that with, on a 2x2 frame and backed it up with a fiber board and worked dandy. But back in those days, everybody used plywood or whatever they could get their hands on to do the skirting. And there was a wild variety of stuff going on. Over the years vinyl came along, it's easy to cut, it's reasonably inexpensive and it's fairly durable and it turns out to be pretty decent stuff to make skirting. White is the default color that's the cheapest. And it's a terrible idea those skirting actually trying to match the siding of the home is not maybe the best answer because in fact houses set on concrete foundations, the proper color for skirting really would be gray because it doesn't show the dirt and it's, you know, it'll do the job. You put white skirting down there and it's gonna look dreadful because the water splashes up against it and it gets muddy and so on. So I favor concrete colored vinyl. Why not? But no one does that. It just isn't available, you know.
46:38
Frank Rolfe: Yep. But let me ask you this. For most people who've been in the industry, and I've been in the industry for 30 years now, we weren't there for the '72, '73 production collapse, but we were there for the Chattel collapse of the late '90s and the subsequent decline in production from about 400,000 units down to as low as 60,000. And the industry has been stuck now for about 20 years, longer than 20 years at around 100,000 units and under.
47:22
Bob Vahsholtz: That's true.
47:23
Frank Rolfe: We've never been able to climb out of that rut. But at the same time, the demand for affordable housing has never been higher than it is right now. So what's holding it all back? What's holding it all back? In other words, if people need Mobile Homes now worse than ever in American history, why is our production still 75% off do you think?
47:54
Bob Vahsholtz: That is a very good question and a very difficult one to answer briefly. But in my view, the main problem is that we have no system of marketing Mobile Homes. Once we lost the park business. We're utterly dependent on odd lots and finding places. Every Mobile Home has to find a place to live and there is no mass marketing system for Mobile Homes. And of course the stigma has come along because so many dealers were dealers, many dealers did not maintain a good image and they allowed Mobile Homes to go on crappy lots and parks ran down and didn't get maintained. And over the years we have lost the glamour of the industry and Mobile Homes have become just cheap housing. Nobody wants to live next to a Mobile Home. Very few people want to live in a Mobile Home. And there is no, yes, there's a demand for low cost housing, but there is no demand for cheap housing. People want to live in a nice house. And that's what we built in the '60s. We built nice little houses and put them in nice little parks. And they were fashionable, they were competitive, they didn't cost much because they were small back in those days 600 square foot.
49:53
Bob Vahsholtz: My brand new Richardson was only 400 and some square. Yeah, only 400 square feet. The size of a tiny home these days. So they were not cheap, but they were small and nicely built and nicely decorated and fashionable. So people loved them and communities were built around. I've lived in two different parks. Mobile Home Park communities are wonderful places to live, just like any other good community. People work together and they're neighborly and life is good. But now we've lost all that. Now it's willy nilly. Mobile Homes, they're cheap and you put them any place you can and too many people don't maintain them. They get seedy and the stigma has ruined the industry.
50:56
Frank Rolfe: And Bob, do you think the industry can ever get that back in the years ahead. When I got in the business in the '90s, the stigma was already bad and every property I looked at was in terrible condition. I mean, it wasn't like the turnaround park was a rarity. No, the turnaround park was the norm and the nice park was the rarity. And there were so few nice parks that when you bought a park it was a turnaround. And you asked anyone, okay, well how do I turn it around? They'd say, oh, well, go to this park at this location, because that was really good and just copy what they do. But for example, in all of Dallas there was only one park that was considered to be decent and everything else was in a shambles. It was awful. There's no home maintenance, no rules at all. Just a gigantic disaster. And so I wasn't there in the good times. You were there in the good times. I learned about the good times just from doing diligence on properties. For example, one time there was a park for sale, virtually abandoned in West Dallas, but had been owned by Stanley Marcus. And it looked like a Neiman Marcus store when you got into it. Not from the outside looked horrible. But when you got to the park office it had these round windows. It was 80 shades of classy. And I thought now wait a minute here, this thing was rockin back when he built this and he built that thing back in the '60s. And my first park, Glenhaven, which was built in 1951.
52:46
Frank Rolfe: I talked to someone who lived there in the '50s and they said that thing was literally like an Elvis movie. Everyone had a British sports car, they wearing jackets and ties. They said it was spectacular. So I knew there was a moment before the '90s because all of these things were in the '90s. They were already 30, 40 years old. But is it possible, can you imagine a universe in which the stigma changes? I mean already the average park today is light years ahead of where they were in the '90s. Almost everyone has a nice entry now. They do have rules enforcement, they've gotten rid of a lot of the old abandoned and just screwed up homes. But can we break through the stigma wall? Is it possible for Mobile Homes to get their glory mojo back or not? What do you think?
53:46
Bob Vahsholtz: I think it is absolutely possible and that is what we must do if we're gonna save this industry. Because in order to build low cost housing you have to build attractive low cost housing. Nobody wants to live in a slum, nobody wants to live in a cheap house and a lot of people will do that. But we are a nation, we're a very rich nation and even welfare people don't want to live in crappy places. And if we clean up those parks as you guys are doing, those old parks, a lot of them have long time residents and are good people. Get rid of the crappy pot smoking tenants who abandon their cars in the driveway and that sort of thing. Clean up those parks and turn those communities back to what they once were. It's not such a big difficult trick. When we lived in our park in Elkhart, Indiana, it was oh, I suppose 10 or 15 years old at that time and it was just a fine community. You know it was all middle class people back in those days, yes the people with their British sports cars were a bit rare.
55:23
Bob Vahsholtz: But in fact the median income of Mobile Home residents was above average in the early '60s. Now it's way down. Now it's what you call Dollar General type people and Dollar General type housing. But back in the '60s, it was just ordinary people who chose Mobile Home living because it worked. And there's no reason we can't do that again. The trick is to demonstrate that it is possible and show that Mobile Home living actually works just great. But you have to do it right. And that requires the owners of the land to respect their property and make the investments necessary to keep the property up and hire the kind of management that, a Mobile Home Park manager should be exactly the same kind of person that an apartment manager is. People that the residents respect that handles their problems and does their job and you need decent maintenance. And that all has to be paid for. But Lord knows we can afford to pay for it because Mobile Homes have such great economic advantages. Because, not because they're so wonderfully manufactured or anything, but because they're rather small little houses, they don't require much maintenance and they're easily maintained and they're adequate.
57:23
Bob Vahsholtz: We've gotten overboard where everybody thinks they got to have a 2,500 square foot single family house and the country simply cannot afford that. 30 year mortgages on a house that you live in for 10 or 15 years make no sense at all. Mobile Homes of apartment size are the answer. And that's what we were building in the '60s, apartment size single family homes where you rented the land and the rent was reasonable and life was good.
58:04
Frank Rolfe: Now Bob, let me ask you a question on the book DUELING CURVES, 'cause on the cover of the book you say the battle for housing. And to have a battle you have to have two opposing armies, right? Or at least two opposing armies. So who are the armies that are battling for housing?
58:24
Bob Vahsholtz: Well, one is the Mobile Home industry, which is battling for market share. You know, in the '60s we were kind of neck and neck with builders of starter homes. We built approximately equal numbers and we were winning that battle. But we lost that battle and we lost the war because we went cheap, Charlie.
59:00
Frank Rolfe: And let me point out, Bob, and why I like this book so much. If you turn to chapter 14 in the book, which Bob has titled A Few Market Opportunities, he nailed all of these. So this book was written in 2014. So a decade ago, and a decade ago, you identified the first market opportunities being the Southern, we call the Southern Strategy, which has proven to be completely accurate. So Mobile Home and Mobile Home Park valuations have gone up probably most dramatically since 2014 to the south. Now, there's been also been good play in the Great Plains, in the Midwest, but you nailed that one. Then you had another one here on small towns. You nailed that because small towns have been one of the great success stories in the park business since 2014.
1:00:00
Bob Vahsholtz: Yes that's because the regulations are small and land is cheap.
1:00:04
Frank Rolfe: That's right. And what happens is people are willing now to drive an extra distance out to get lower home price, but often a better school district and lower crime and a small town feel. So that's proven to be correct. And that's been proven out in the new terms that have come out since you wrote the book, which are exurban and super commuter neighborhood. And so you nailed that one and then you've got the youth market. And again, Bob is completely correct on that because a huge percentage of our customers and most everyone's customers are now millennials, which didn't exist back in the '90s. In the '90s, it was all boomer greatest generation. We had almost no youth input at all. In fact, a lot of times when you bought a park, if you did have any youthful people, they were horrific. Normally, literally drifter people that were paying the manager under the table by the week or something to live there. But, in fact, the youth market has been a huge thing. And in many of our parks millennials outnumber non millennials. So you nailed that one.
1:01:22
Frank Rolfe: And then the big one you nailed was the thing you have in here called Rethink Finance. Because when you wrote this book back in 2014, the cash program, which was the first adopter of trying to provide capital to buy homes for park owners, was still in its relative infancy. And then over the ensuing decade, finally came to prominence, and then was followed by the folks over there at PEP and Zippy and Triad. And you are exactly correct in the book that the future of everything to make it work was coming to grips with home financing in a new style, because we all saw chattel lending fall off a cliff back in the late '90s. So you nailed that. So the bottom line, Bob is in the entire book, you pretty much nailed everything. That's what I love about the book, is that everything I've learned in the industry, which I've learned from talking to people who were in it in the past, what I've observed on parks, what I've observed on homes, going to different museums. There's a Mobile Home in the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA I've seen that. Your book is stellar because it nails everything.
1:02:45
Frank Rolfe: And what's great about Bob's book is he's got all kinds of graphs and data which is so lacking from most of the industry publications. He's got photos of everything in here. It's easily the best book on Mobile Homes that I've ever read. And so let me just tell people how this Scholar series works. So we wanted to introduce you tonight to Bob Vahsholtz. And on this first book we're gonna go ahead to anyone who says I want a copy, we're gonna send you a PDF of the book, give you about 30 days to read it. And then we're gonna have our first, what we call book club event. And the book club, we're gonna discuss the book and answer questions that people may have on the book. And once we go through Bob's first book, which is called DUELING CURVES, we're then gonna move on to Bob's second book, which is all about not the homes, but the park side of the business, which is obviously near and dear to all of us who own parks. But I think, and Bob would agree, you can't really be in the park business unless you understand the home business.
1:04:04
Frank Rolfe: And that's why we wanted to start off with the DUELING CURVES book because the two completely go hand in hand. The narrative, the tapestry of the industry is completely laced together between the homes and the parks. You heard tonight, for example, when Bob is talking about the history that what shut Helm manufacturing down was home park development basically being shut down. And we all know for those of us who looked at enough parks that there were parks built by HUD or helped to be built by HUD, who offered financing and planning back in the '60s. So really this industry was kind of all laced together. It looks to me like in the '60s and the '70s between the homes and the parks. And you can't separate the two narratives. You can't really be a park owner and feel like you really have a handle on what you're doing unless you understand the whole 360 degree universe of how it all ties together. And that's the great part about Bob's books is the first one is on the homes and the second one is on the parks. And when you read those two, you basically have a master's in mobile homology.
1:05:14
Frank Rolfe: And so that's why we wanted to have Bob as our first ever Scholar series guest. So that's how this is going to work. So if you're listening to this and say, oh yeah, I definitely want to read Bob's book, which you can't just run out and get at the local Barnes & Noble. We will happily send you in PDF format the book only under the condition that you read the thing and then participate in our first book club event in about 30 days. We give you 30 days to read the book. The book is not that difficult to read. Surely you can set aside a few moments a day to read it and then we'll have a book club meeting and we'll go over the contents of the book, Bob's concepts, we'll debate them, answer questions, then we'll repeat the exercise again with the book on parks. And again, we understand that everyone has many uses for your time, but if you're gonna be in the Mobile Home and Mobile Home Park business, you have to understand the history, you have to understand the issues at bay. Because if you wanna make good decisions, you got to kind of see the future.
1:06:25
Frank Rolfe: And the best way to understand the future is to learn from the past. And that's what Bob provides here. Let me just tell people, I've been trying to find since the '90s people who had experience from Bob's era. There are very few and far between. I one time saw a Jay Leno show about Jay Leno's car collection and they brought in a guy who was America's foremost Lotus automobile manufacturing technician. And he starts off by saying, hey Jay, I started Mobile Homes, can you believe that? And he was in the industry back in the '70s, I think Bobby may know him, his name was Detlef, I forgot his last name. And I reached out to the Jay Leno show people and they said, oh yeah, here's the guy's contact. And I called him up and said, hey, tell me everything you know about the Mobile Home industry if you could from your era. And he said, nah, I don't really wanna, you know, that's in the past. But I'll tell you what everyone know about Lotus automobiles. I said, no, that's not my thing. Bob is a unique rarity.
1:07:39
Frank Rolfe: You can't find many Bobs out there. There aren't any, there's just Bob. So again, we're gonna send email everyone to get a copy of the book. And then in about 30 days we're gonna have our first book club event. Discuss the book in detail, answer questions, whatever anyone wants to debate on it. And Bob, we really appreciate you being here. We love the book, love all your stuff. Park book is just as good as the home book. And that pretty much concludes this lecture series event on our new speaker series. And we hope everyone reads the book, learns from it, we'll debate the book, and then we'll move on to Bob's second book about parks. So, you know, on behalf of myself, Brandon Reynolds, my partner, Dave Reynolds, everyone at mhu.com, you know, we think this is an exciting opportunity to learn more about the industry. I think if we all learn more, we'll do a better job. And again, Bob, thanks for being here. Thanks to Bob's wife, Marge, who's also in the background here working the controls of the spaceship. And we will talk to everyone again real soon. Thanks, everyone. And we'll talk to you all in about 30 days.
1:08:58
Bob Vahsholtz: Good night, Frank.
1:09:00
Frank Rolfe: Thanks, Bob.