Like everyone else, I've had some great deals and some real losers. Fortunately, my track record of great deals has been a lot bigger. That's probably because I tried to take note on the loser deals of exactly what went wrong. From this I established a pattern that allowed me to avoid a lot of bad deals. In addition, I made many observations of what went so right on the great deals, and tended to look for those qualifications out of the great sea of mobile home parks that are available at any one time.

In real estate, a lot of people talk about their profits without ever actually achieving them. It is one thing to talk about your, "perceived" profit on paper if you ever went to sell the park, and another to actually put it in the bank. All of my deals in this book are 100% accurate because they really happened - they were really bought and they were really sold at these prices. Few people can make that claim. And believe me, when you go to sell that ?valuable? park of yours that you claim has a million dollar equity, you may find that the lesson learned is that you are a really bad guesser of park values.

Please notice that I have made a list of lessons learned from my good deals and my bad deals. Hopefully, you can overlay these thoughts on to the parks you are looking at buying, to see if they have similar traits. There is no better feeling than closing on a park that has all of the basics of a great deal, and no worse feeling than closing on a park that doesn't have a prayer of working out for you.

Frank Rolfe

Like the deals Frank discusses, I've had some great deals and some that were not so great. I have also had several deals that I owned for a month or less and some I never owned. As I continued to do more and more mobile home parks deals, I started to learn from my mistakes and focus my attention on parks that had certain qualities and were in good markets.

For me, I lucked out a lot in the beginning as my due diligence was lacking in many respects and I could have been burned more than I was.

As you will see in many of the deals that I have done I have sold the parks and left room for the new buyer to make money. If I had been more like Frank, I could have maximized the sale prices and made 1-2 million more than I did. My problem is I like to have things happen quick. When I sold my first single family house it took about a week and my second one about 3 weeks. When I was ready to sell and many times before I was ready, I wanted to price the deal at a good price so it did not sit on the market long. When I was brokering parks I did not like trying to defend an unreasonable price that I had a listing on and so I made sure that the prices I listed my parks at were realistic and made sense (with one exception that you will read about). Selling the parks at slightly less than they were worth has saved me a lot of time and has created many repeat buyers. In fact, I have sold two or more parks to six different people.

I have made a list of lessons learned as did Frank. I tried not to repeat myself too often but as you will see from many of these lessons learned that they are the same over and over.

Dave Reynolds