Let’s assume you need to get your property looking good quickly. Maybe you have a bank inspection or a critical date for launching your marketing campaign to fill vacant homes. When you want to make major improvements in property appearance fast, here are some methods that cost very little but have a big impact and, in many cases, will last for a decent amount of time.
Episode 368: Quick Fixes That Really Work Transcript
Webster's Dictionary defines a quick fix as an easy remedy or solution, especially a temporary one, which fails to address underlying problems. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about some quick fixes you can utilize in almost any mobile home park to hide and improve the beauty of the mobile home park, particularly at times when you have to move quickly. Let's assume you've got a bank inspection coming up, or perhaps you're about to start your marketing campaign on some vacant homes and you really wanna ratchet that park up a notch fast and additionally inexpensively. So here are some quick fixes that do really, really work. Now, again, a quick fix, as is mentioned in the definition, is not a permanent fix, you're not really solving whatever that main underlying issue is, but instead you're trying to gloss it over and make things look as good as they can for the moment, while perhaps you have then the luxury of time to make the big fix or maybe save up the money required.
So, let's start off with things you can do with asphalt, when your asphalt isn't looking good, and the most important of which is potholes. Now, many, many mobile home parks have potholes 'cause almost all mobile home parks are old, often those roads can be anywhere from 40, 50 years or more in age, and as a result with asphalt over time, it tends to break down, and one of the feature is the most common problem you'll see in many of these old park roads are potholes, both large and small. And while this quick fix doesn't address the issues that cause the pothole, which is normally the breakdown of the road base that holds the roads up, it does make it visually more appealing for the moment, and that's utilizing a product called cold patch or under any other name, any type of air drying asphalt.
Now, if you want is to make regular asphalt, what do they do, they mix tar together with rock, and it's very hard and nasty, and they put it all together with the asphalt after cutting out a nice square, and that's the correct way to fix a pothole. And before you even go there, you fix the road base beneath it, and it's very expensive, very time-consuming, you can't even do it at certain times of year because it's too cold out. But cold patch is a product that is basically a kind of fake or false asphalt, it air dries. So we're not heating things up to a higher level like you would with normal asphalt, but the good news is you can use it pretty much any time, no real limitations to it. You literally go and buy bags of it down at Home Depot or Lowes, you pour it in the hole, and then your pothole is seemingly fixed, at least visually now, the root causes aren't solved. But will it get you through a load inspection? Will it get you through any other time where you need to make the roads look good? And the answer is, yeah, it will.
And I'll give you a tip on this product, if you're gonna use this, it's all about how you install it, that separates the winners from the losers as far as its longevity and how good it looks. What you wanna do is you wanna over-fill the hole with the product, and then you wanna buy while you're there at Home Depot or Lowes, a big old 4x4 foot post, and you want to then pick that post up as high as you can and let it drop down and compact that air drying asphalt mixture. That's what's really gonna make it look good, is how hard you can compact it. And on top of that, how hard you compact it will have a huge bearing on how long it will last. Now, we've used cold patch on some holes, particularly in the middle of roads, because sometimes you'll have potholes, not where the tires go, but just from the freezing of water over time will break the asphalt out, and if you put it in and you really tap it down hard, it may last a really long while. So we have some that have lasted for years. Now it will normally not last if it's where the tires go, 'cause the weight of the car will knock it out. But cold patch or any kind of air drying Asphalt is a really good quick fix.
Now, another quick fix that you find that can help you out is the use of astroturf, even green carpet can do this next fix. Let's assume you have an area of the park where there was no grass, it's just dirt, yet it's an area that has a lot of foot traffic, maybe it's where people cut the corner to go to the office, maybe it's there at the entrance of your park. If you wanna put in grass, the problem is it takes it a long time to take root, sometimes it won't take root at all, maybe the area has too much shade. But in the interim, all you're gonna get is a big old muddy mess every time it rains. So, what's the solution? Buy online or anywhere you can some astroturf and cut it in a size, it covers over this muddy area and then get some old circus tent stakes or some kind of really long nail and just nail that stuff into position. Now, you're not really nailing it down because there's... You can't nail things into the earth, but if you put in a big long stake on that stuff, it will hold it in position enough, it won't move, and you'll be shocked that the night and day difference that your property will then have. You've eliminated this muddy issue because now people walk on it and it doesn't create any mud, and from a distance, heck, It looks like nice green grass.
Another thing you can do is if you have homes you're gonna be renovating but they're not renovated yet, that's to put signs in front of them that say, "Pardon our dust, under renovation". Even if there's no renovation that's happening right now, the fear mere marking of homes, that need to be fixed, so you're now affirming to someone driving by that, "Hey, we know these look bad and we're fixing them, that's the plan". That puts people at ease. They think, "Oh, okay, well, this is a well-run park, they know they've got these own homes they inherited from mom and pop, they're gonna be getting those things done", or they may think you're working on the inside and haven't worked your way around to the outside yet. You can get signs made like that at any fast signs or any place that manufacturers quick signs. I'd do the ones that are in the mental frame, not the ones that are just on plastic with one or two little flimsy wires coming at the bottom that you stick in the ground, I'd go ahead and spend them a little extra money and get the nice ones made of metal with metal framed with final lettering, typically use a black background with white lettering, and literally have put on there, "Pardon our dust, renovations in progress", or something similar. You put that in front of any old beat up Park owned home, and it's as though you're a night and day specialist in improving the looks of the park.
Another thing that can buy you a lot of time and is a quick fix to any ugly issues going on inside homes, including things like hideous beach towels and sheets that tenants put in their windows sometimes, is to put nice white mini-blinds between that sheet or that towel or just that wide open window looking into an expansive ugliness. They're not expensive, you can buy the least the bottom of the bin in price mini-blinds often for five or $10. But if you go out to the most hideous window in your park where someone has the beach towel of the lion eating the antelope, you can put that in between the streets and that beach towel on the inside of that window, and it's as though there was never any problem. Mini-blinds are an incredibly effective solution, very, very inexpensive, and I will add that they do last for years and years and years. So that's a quick fix, it will really buy you perhaps all the time, as long as you own the Mobile Home Park.
Many residents are fine, if you simply go to them and say, "Hey, under our regulations, we have to have a neutral colored surface to the street, I know you have your beloved wall covering, which isn't. But we'd like to go ahead and install this". And often, if you do the installation, they will not have any problem with it at all. Finally, the greatest quick fix on Earth is paint. You can fix a deck, you can fix a home, you can fix anything in a Mobile Home Park and do a significant upgrade just by the use of paint. What's important though, if you're gonna use paint is what color you select. If you're typically painting a deck or a shed, you wanna do something in the color family of the home itself, obviously, and with most mobile homes, the skirting is wide, so in order to freshen up that deck, you wanna use white paint, but on everything else out in the park, which is hideous, which they can be any number of items, you wanna use instead a really attractive shade of green. Now, the National Park Service, they have their own green, and even The Broadmoor hotel out in Colorado, it has its own green, and those are both great greens, it's a dark green with a little gray in it, a little brown in it, it fits in the nature perfectly and it really upgrades a look of almost anything that you paint in that color.
I don't care what the issue is, you can virtually paint a tire in a yard with the stuff and it would just blend right in, but paint is a wonderful quick fix. And again, although it doesn't solve the underlying issue, if you have a rotting deck that needs substantial carpentry, it doesn't fix that, the paint doesn't make the wood any stronger, it doesn't add any nails, but visually paint is one of the greatest assets to any Mobile Home Park. And any list of quick fixes wouldn't be complete unless we got out the can of paint and the paint brush, 'cause you can solve so much with that. The bottom line is that there are always quick fixes to almost any issue with a Mobile Home Park. Some will last a modicum of time, most all of these are very inexpensive, and they'll definitely improve the looks of the property. This is Frank Rolfe, Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast, hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.