You may call your mother weekly, but that’s not the appropriate way to check in with the residents of your mobile home park. Instead, there are systems that have been developed to keep in touch but in a structured way that it best for the owner and residents alike. So what are the correct and incorrect way to stay in touch? In this episode of the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review how smart owners stay on top of resident contact.

Bringing old mobile home parks back to life is the basic business model in our industry. You take an asset that is a half-century old – often undermanaged – and restore it back to its former prominence, giving the residents back their pride of ownership and sense of community. This video shows the real-life progression with a “before and after” synopsis, supported by visual evidence of that metamorphosis.

To get a mobile home from Point A to Point B you have to haul it – and you need a hitch to make that possible. But what about after it arrives? In this episode of the Mobile Home Park Mastery pocast, we’re going to dig deep into the facts about these “hitches” and the best policies regarding them going forward. Until mobile homes come with engines and drivetrain, then hitches will be a fact of life for all mobile home park owners, so it’s time to discuss the topic.

Webster’s Dictionary defines a “shed” as “a structure built to shelter something” but in many mobile home parks it’s more like “the ugliest thing on the property”. Why are sheds such a problem and how can a park owner turn the situation around?

We are pleased to present an "Ask Me Anything" event this week, hosted by Frank Rolfe, probably the best known authority on mobile home parks in the U.S. – a right he earned through 25 years of buying and operating mobile home communities. This is a continuous Q&A session with no subject taboo. 

When buying a mobile home park, the most important moment is the transition of the property from the old owner to you, which typically happens at the title company upon signing of a pile of documents. So what can you do to make this transition more smooth and successful. In this week’s Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review the key items to do before and after closing to make for a happier and less stressful community ownership change.

Bing Crosby once sang “Don’t Fence Me In” but his song did not apparently reflect the desires of many mobile home park residents. Indeed, fencing inside mobile home parks is a standard feature, despite the fact that mobile home park lots do not have technical boundaries. Yet many resident fencing choices and maintenance will not work with you desire to make the property desirable (such as the one shown above). So how can you make the best of the residents’ innate desire to mark and secure their property with a fence?

We all associate age with wisdom, and rightfully so. Nobody knows more about any subject than those that have experienced it – particularly through many cycles. And I am forever indebted to those older mobile home park community owners who gave me words of wisdom in my early career, and still do so for new investors on a regular basis. So what is some of this old-timer wisdom? In this episode of the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review some of the best thoughts of experienced owners and how they relate to today’s mobile home park industry.

Most mobile home parks have some form of office – whether it’s a free-standing building or inside the manager’s home. And it’s pretty standard practice to set office hours so residents know when they can and can’t come by to pay rent, look at homes, or discuss problems. So how do you set effective office hours?

When you decide to sell a mobile home park there’s only one option, right? You list it with a broker and try to find someone who wants to buy the community at your target price. But there’s another alternative that’s working for many sellers and that’s selling the park to the residents.

Back when I was an economics student at Stanford in the 1980s, the most important theory that would help on any essay was the law of supply and demand. It’s a simple concept: if you have greater supply than demand then prices go down, and greater demand than supply makes prices go up. Never in American history has this economic treatise had more meaning or more unhappy endings. In this week’s Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast we’re going to discuss how supply and demand are shaping all sectors of U.S. real estate and mobile home parks in particular.