A mobile home park is like a chess board with many options to place your pieces, not just the ones that come with the owner’s manual. In this Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to explore the reasons that you might want to change the positioning of your mobile homes, the typical rules regarding that customization, and where these slight park redesigns may be heading in the future.
Episode 377: Home Placement Solutions Transcript
Mobile Home Park buyers and owners are typically very intolerant and work very well with what mom and pop gave them, whether it's the number of lots, certainly the location. Mobile Home Park owners typically are happy go lucky group who don't try and find fault with mom and Pop's creation, but to work within its boundaries. But there is one item that mom and Pop did that you might want to alter to have a better running community. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're going to talk about Mobile Home placement on the lot, the orientation of the lots to the overall chessboard known as a Mobile Home Park. Now, most Mobile Home parks, if you get your certificate of zoning, which you certainly should do, whenever you buy a Mobile Home Park, it will state the zoning of the land. It will tell you whether it is legal conforming, which means you could put it back again today, legal non-conforming, which means grandfathered or illegal, which means you have no right to be there at all. And they will also stipulate how many lots you have on that parcel, how many spaces your Mobile Home Park has.
And many city inspectors, zoning officials, they don't really care how those Mobile Homes sit on that land as long as you don't violate the sheer number. And that's a very important piece of the puzzle when you're trying to bring these old Mobile Home parks back to life and make them fit modern homes. Because the average Mobile Home Park in America was built within the period of probably about 1955 to maybe 1970, and in that short window of time, most Mobile Homes never exceeded about 50ft in length or so. There's lots of Mobile Home parks out there, in fact, where the lots themselves are only 50ft long. And when you take into account front and rear setbacks, they can only hold maybe a 36 foot trailer. And that was a huge trailer back when many of these properties were built. But of course, the modern Mobile Home is far longer the gold standard of the industry. The three bedroom, two bath is typically 76ft long from the front wall to the rear. And additionally, Mobile Homes back when many of these parks are built typically range from 8 to 12ft in width, whereas today's modern homes range from 14 to 18ft wide.
So as a result, we've got a little bit of obsolescence here on the way the lots were constructed, configured based on modern home sizes. And don't forget that those modern home sizes have some other items you'd have to worry about. For example, when a 76 foot home goes into a Mobile Home Park and it tries to swing around the corner. Perhaps you've got a park that's on a horseshoe and they have to swing around. Well, that thing needs a much wider turning radius for it to swing around that corner. There's all kinds of little complications that come from the fact that modern homes are bigger. So when you buy a Mobile Home Park and it's set up for small homes, what can you do about it? Well, one obvious thing that many people do with Mobile Home parks is they will go ahead and set the home over two lots. Let's assume you've got two lots that are each 50ft long. You've got a home that's 76ft long. You would put the Mobile Home across not only your one vacant lot, but also the vacant lot behind. That's a pretty common fixture in many Mobile Home parks.
And in fact, if you've got four vacant lots, what you can often do is you can put the 76 foot home across two end to end vacant lots and another one against maybe a neighboring two end to end vacant lots. And then you can put a third home running parallel to the road. That's called a three for four configuration. So now we're kind of testing the boundaries of what we can do, given the fact that no one really cares how many homes we have in the park, as long as we haven't exceeded the number that we have on our permit. But yet there are other considerations you might have as far as reconfiguring your spaces. Now, I had a Mobile Home Park once out in Oklahoma City, and it was what was called a radial park. Radial parks, which are nice looking, but it's kind of weird, today. It's a series of small cul de sacs. You've probably seen these parks. So you go in the park and then there's a little cul de sac coming off the main road. They're kind of like a shotgun park, only there's cul de sacs going off both the right and the left.
And in these cul de sacs, the homes are like a ray of sunshine. If you look at an aerial picture, that's exactly what it looks like. It looks like little rays of sunshine emanating off the main road. But the problem with those little rays of sunshine is when you put longer homes on those little rays, they hit each other because they're far longer today. And as they stick out, they literally will whack the homes on the other little cul de sac. So what do you do in parks like that, well, I had a park just like that in Oklahoma City. So I started reorienting the homes. Instead of little rays of sunshine, I had them all aligned straight. Imagine, picture that, a Mobile Home Park with little cul de sacs. But instead of having them like little rays coming off of the center of that little turnaround in the cul de sac. I had them oriented at a right angle to the main street. By doing that, they no longer hit each other. By doing that, I was able to bring in larger homes. So now I'm actually going in and revising the configuration, the orientation of the home to the street.
And in many Mobile Home parks, that's not a bad idea to do. To look at it very seriously and say from a long term perspective, particularly filling a lot of vacant lots, is what I have here even workable? And if the answer is, well, no, not too good an idea, then why would I do that? Why would I do something that was built for the 50s and the 60s when nobody cares if I reorient those into a different format?
Also, there are parks that I've seen that we've done diligence on, particularly down in Florida, where you can't even fill the vacant lots down the streets because no home built in modern times is able to negotiate the sharp turns required on the layout of the park. You could often have a single home blocking you from filling 20 or 30 vacant lots down the street. And you end up having to buy tiny homes to get around that bend in the road. Once again, you may want to reorient the lots. You may say, you know what, that home there, which is blocking like a traffic jam, all the incoming traffic, we're going to go ahead and take that home and turn that an entirely different direction.
You may even like to take that home out of your park to allow you to then move homes freely in and out to get those lots occupied. So once again, we're taking an old Mobile Home Park and we're bringing it back to life by changing the orientation of the homes to the park. And then sometimes you've got Mobile Home parks that you look at buying and when you get your survey, you find that the back of some of the Mobile Homes cross into the neighboring property, not because they needed to, but because mom and pop, when they were bringing them in, they never knew truly where their property boundary was and they were too cheap to pay for a survey. So as a result, you've got, say, four homes or five homes on one street that stick two or three feet into the neighbor's property. And that's going to cause you nothing but grief down the road, because when you go to refinance that park or sell it, it will be immediately flagged as a survey issue. And now you've got to go ahead and solve it. Now, sometimes you might say, well, I already owned that right to be like that.
Some kind of adverse property right. Some states have that rule. If you don't get notified in writing by the neighbor that you encroached on their land after a certain period of time, it triggers what's called adverse possession. And you have the right to continue on in that use. But that's not going to satisfy many lenders or many buyers, that argument. And you don't have the time to go through court at that point and try to get some judge to rule in your favor. So instead, in those cases, you're better off just moving the homes forward if you have the room and being done with it. So once again, we're changing the orientation of the trailers that you got when mom and Pop gave it to you, because what they have is no longer working. Also, some parks have floodplain. It's a common feature of many Mobile Home parks. But it's been a much more severe issue these days because we've all seen all the flooding in North Carolina and Florida and other states. And you can sometimes fix the issue by taking the homes that are in the floodplain and moving those lots elsewhere, or somehow vacating the part of the land that's in the floodplain.
We had a park like that in Kansas once. There was a street which had flooded. So we just elected to not put homes back on that street till we could solve the flooding problem. And when we did solve the flooding problems, we again did not fill the street, but we left the portion that would still flood without any homes on it. Mom and Pop could have done that, but they didn't. Maybe they weren't too focused on the floodplain at that point, or maybe the flooding has grown worse over time. Nevertheless, what I'm trying to do is take the old Mobile Home Park and find new ways to bring it back to life, to reorient it so that it works more efficiently. Now, of course, before you do any of the things we just discussed, it would always be a good idea to go to the city to ask the zoning department to ask the inspector, hey, do you have a problem with us doing this? But typically, their answer is they don't really care, because as far as they're concerned, you've got a single platted piece of property which is all personal property. It's your roads, it's your land, it's your homes.
The only thing they are always obviously concerned with is how many Mobile Home lots you have on the property. Many of them don't care the way they're oriented whatsoever, just as long as the share account of homes does not exceed what's on your certificate of zoning. But in many jurisdictions, they typically like the fact you're trying to reorient things to work better. Most cities are tolerant of Mobile Home parks as long as they are well maintained and don't create any problem for anyone. And often the changes you make are going to do nothing but benefit the residents. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.