It’s been ten years since the article in the New York Times came out titled The Cold, Hard Lessons of Mobile Home U written by Gary Rivlin. It was a landmark piece of news at the time, as there had not been a single mainstream publication that had covered mobile home parks in decades. Originally designed as a “slam” piece to appeal to woke audiences, the story quickly changed direction after the writer lived in one of our parks for a week and realized how much the tenants loved it.
If you’re looking to master the skills of identifying, evaluating, negotiating, performing due diligence on, renegotiating, financing, turning around, and operating mobile home parks, then consider joining our next Mobile Home Park Investor’s Boot Camp. This event is fully live and virtual, eliminating any travel time or costs.
The 10th Anniversary of the New York Times Article on MHU - Transcript
Frank Rolfe: Tonight's lecture series event. We're gonna be talking about the 10th anniversary of the New York Times article on mhu.com. And then following that discussion, we'll have unlimited Q&A with no topic taboo. So let's just jump right into the initial discussion. Actually, we have a technical glitch here, the slides will not advance. So perhaps, Brandon, if you could advance the slide. Let me, we seem to be stuck, hold on one moment here, let's see if we can get a hold of Brandon and get this resolved, just a moment. The slides will not advance, you'll have to advance them? Okay, alright, very good. Alright, bye. Alright, we got that solved. Sorry for the technical glitch there. So here's the background, minding my own business back in about 2013, I got a call from a guy named Gary Rivlin.
00:58
Frank Rolfe: And Gary Rivlin called me up and he wanted to know if he could go to our mobile Home Park Investors Bootcamp, and so I immediately just googled him up and said, well, Gary, I see you are a writer for the New York Times. And he said, yes, yes I am, that's why I wanted to call in advance and make sure it's okay. And he seems rather shocked that I will even talk to him, and then he proceeds to tell me that nobody else in the industry will in fact talk to him. He's called various state associations, he probably called MHI may have called some other operators I'm the first one that will talk to the guy. And, in looking him up online, I know exactly what he is after because the last book he wrote, and I have a copy, I've never actually opened or read it, it's called Broke USA from Pawn Shops to Poverty, How the Working Poor Became Big Business.
01:57
Frank Rolfe: So obviously he's wanting to write a slam piece on the mobile home park industry he's trying to write another book, another series of articles, and he's thinking, okay, what other industries deal with what he perceives as poverty? He's burned through, pawn shops, payday lenders, I'm sure he already pondered cigarettes and alcohol, but gosh darn, there's a lot of books on that. So he came upon this idea of trailer parks, that was his new solution. And so I just, being the contrarian fellow, I am nothing to hide, not worried about our product, said, sure you can come to the bootcamp, Gary, I don't care, that's just fine and dandy. We'll even give you a free ticket, just come on to the bootcamp. And so he did, showed up in the bootcamp, sat in the audience, talked to people, didn't really ask many questions. And then when the bootcamp was over, he said, okay, well now that I have a rough idea of how the mobile home park business works.
03:03
Frank Rolfe: I have another request. And I thought, well, what would this next request be? Well, his next and final request is he wanted to live in one of our mobile home parks for a week, and so it was a strange request, we'd never had anyone asked to live in a mobile home park for a week, but we thought, you know what? We have nothing to hide, we're proud of our product, our people like us, so sure, Gary, you can live in our park for a week. Well, he was ecstatic, he thought, I would for sure say no. And then he thought he was being tricked. So he said, now wait a minute though, I get to pick the park, otherwise it's not fair, give me a list of every park you own and I will pick out the park. And of course I said, fine, I don't care, Gary.
03:47
Frank Rolfe: I'm not afraid of any of the parks. So we chose the park and it happened to be a park that we had at least one vacant park owned home in, so I rented furniture for a week, you can order and rent furniture for a week, believe it or not, at Rent-A-Center. So we furnished that park owned home, and he flew in to St. Louis and he went over and checked into his park owned home rental over at the mobile home park in Illinois, and we never heard from him again. And then about six months later, the article came out, no prior warning, he didn't say, oh yeah, you're coming out in this edition or anything, the article just simply came out, and here you can see this is what it looked like, it's a real printed article, big article two page spread, multiple pages in it.
04:36
Frank Rolfe: And it was called The Cold Hard Lessons of Mobile Home U. And yes, that's yours truly standing in front of that yellow mobile home in the article. And we were shocked as anyone curious, what would he say? He's an anti-business author, he wrote broke USA, everything he writes is negative on the industry. So we were curious what would he say? So we'll go to the next slide there. So one thing he said is the most striking aspect of their business is how happy their tenants seemed to be. A few months after completing Ralph's course, I traveled to St. Louis to spend some time in a couple of parks that he and Reynolds own, they let me choose where I wanted to stay. To a person the residents I met declared themselves satisfied with their landlords, well that is a pretty amazing statement from a guy that prior that wrote this book on business of taking advantage of the poor guy who's totally anti-business, anti-landlords, just as negative as can be.
05:34
Frank Rolfe: And here he admits that he could not find one single person in the mobile home park who was unhappy, that's a pretty amazing declaration. And then he went on to say, and if Brandon change the slide there. Brandon, if you'll change the slide, we seem to have, ah, there we go. The people involved with Mobile Home U instructors, enrollees, alumni investors, represent the best thing going in affordable housing at a time when the nation's need for low cost places to live has never been greater, so he literally said that Dave Reynolds, myself, Mobile Home University, we are the best thing in all of affordable housing in America, which is a pretty wild claim, I would say coming from a... Before they coined the word woke author, who was a well-known business basher, to suddenly have all of these accolades for our what he felt to be amazing achievement. So let's go to the next slide.
06:44
Frank Rolfe: But that's not everything that transpired, let me give you some of the backstory to what happened in the article that no one knows because they weren't there and it was never written, and one of the most interesting vignettes of Gary Rivlin being in our mobile home parks occurred not at the park he stayed in, but another park we had in St. Louis because the day he arrived, he wanted to look at some other parks too, just to get kind of a feel for the mobile home park business. So we went to a mobile home park we had over in Festus, no in Arnold, I'm sorry, in Arnold, Missouri. And, we went by the manager's house. She lived in the park and she officed out of her mobile home, and when I opened the door, I said, hi, I'd like you to meet this gentleman, Gary Rivlin.
07:42
Frank Rolfe: And he immediately says, what's it feel like to be the poorest of the poor? The lowliest of the lowly living in a trailer park? It was a shock jot question and clearly was designed to try and make her say some outlandish thing, which she was going to print, but her response was a little shocking. She didn't respond, her husband who was there responded, he was not the manager, and he said, who are you? And he said, "I'm Gary Rivlin from the New York Times." And he said, "well, Gary, where do you live?" Gary said, "I live in Manhattan." He said, oh, do you own it? "No." So you rent it? Yeah. Do you own a car, Gary? No, don't own a car. I live in Manhattan, I don't drive, I just take the subway or I take a cab. Okay, so lemme get this straight.
08:35
Frank Rolfe: You don't own anything. You don't own your house and you don't own a car, and I own this mobile home and I own two cars, so technically you are poorer than I am. That was an interesting rebuttal, which Gary did not get over. He had been deathly put in his place because he was not a guy with massive assets. And he was trying to one up this person basically based on, I don't know what his academic standing, the fact he worked at the New York Times, but in many ways he was correct, he had nothing. And here he is trying to tell someone in the mobile home park, oh, I'm better than you are, but based on any scientific measure of wealthy, he really wasn't. And it was really interesting seeing the amount of pushback he got because he did not expect that.
09:26
Frank Rolfe: Another item, which no one knows about the article, and I'm not sure if you can see on the screen here, you can reference the article, see how every picture in this article is old, old mobile homes. The park that he stayed in was almost all 1990s and newer mobile homes, but they didn't wanna photograph any of those. So basically all the photographs you see in this article were staged, including the one with me in front of the yellow home, that yellow home was not even in the park he stayed at and half of these are not, this picture here was from another park, not the one he stayed in. And in this picture here that's not even in the office of the park, they set this set up, they removed the furniture and put in just this one sofa, and you can tell that their whole goal was to make it look trashy.
10:12
Frank Rolfe: They didn't wanna film any of the nicer homes, not at all. I would even say to the guy, look, the lighting is better on this home over here. And it probably was from 1998 with a nice pitched roof and vinyl siding. The photographer was, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm told we know we don't do that one. He would search out the worst old flat roofs he humanly could. And in so doing, in searching out these old flat roofs, he would attempt to lower kind of the base the way that our product looked. It was really, really very insincere to be honest with you, very, very odd. And then we come to find out behind the scenes that the editor hated the article. So the New York Times absolutely despised this article, and they said, you can't be this positive, Gary, are you crazy?
11:06
Frank Rolfe: Or the New York Times? And that's why he had added in something nasty. So he told me, that's why he added in all of his nastiness on me personally. He said that I was a slouchy man with sad eyes, I can't remember what all he just slammed my appearance throughout the article, that was okay. Wasn't that concerned about my appearance but they had to put some negativity in because they thought that he was overly happy about the mobile home park business. Ad then when the article came out, I had one more conversation with Gary because they posted it, it was also in the online edition, and people started putting this crazy stuff on it. They would put on there, all mobile home park landlords should be shot, and Frank Rolfe is a terrible person and.
11:53
Frank Rolfe: He should be thrown out of America and all this stuff. And so I didn't know if I was supposed to post the reverse or not, a lot of the assertions were absolutely absurd things about the park, which were not true. So I didn't know what to do, so I called up Gary and said, Hey Gary, am I supposed to be rebutting these comments? He said, oh no, don't worry about the comments. They eventually will always evolve into something concerning Nazis, and then the whole thing goes nuts. And then they just shut it all off he was exactly correct, they went from mobile home park owners are terrible, they should be shot, then it became that mobile home parks are the Nazis of the new era. And then it just all blew up. So apparently this is very, very commonplace in the New York Times to have these bizarro, social media comments on every story, and if you really look through them, yeah, they always end up coming up with the word Nazi, and apparently when they hit Nazi, then the whole thing gets done. Okay, Brandon, we'll go to the next slide there.
12:52
Frank Rolfe: So why did Gary Rivlin go out on a limb, make his boss bad, and write a positive story on mobile home parks? Which just seems like a very odd thing to do if you are a career journalist trying to make a living and obviously wanting to stand the good graces of everyone. Why would you write a positive story, so easy to talk, write negative stories, all the stories today on mobile home parks are always negative. So, what was he thinking? Well, he told me the first problem he had was he just could not find a single unhappy tenant and that's what he so needed, he needed just that one person to say, I hate living in this mobile home park, it's a horrible, horrible place, he couldn't. He went around everywhere, he went to playgrounds, he walked around the block.
13:41
Frank Rolfe: If he saw anyone in their yard out on the swing, said it didn't matter. He would say, "hi, I'm Gary, I just moved here. What do you think about this place?" But every single one would say, "oh, well I like it", or "I love it." And, this is the best living experience I've ever had, so it just deflated his ability to write negative things, he couldn't get a single witness, a single quote, anyone who could tell their life story of how they were unhappy living in the mobile home park. And what was really crazy, which he could not comprehend, is we had raised the rent 50% since purchase and not that many years, this was a heavy lift turnaround park in horrible condition, we bought the thing, we redid everything, we redid the roads, redid a bunch of homes, common areas, you name it, we did it all.
14:26
Frank Rolfe: And after doing all that, what happens? Well, we obviously have to raise the rents. The thing has to make money, otherwise why do it? It was so bad. We bought this park in foreclosure. We bought the loan in foreclosure and got the the borrower to do a deed in lieu of foreclosure, that's how much this part was on life support, it was coming to the end of its useful life, and we brought it back to life. We made it nice, redid the roads, redid the office, redid everything, but the rent went up 50% from when we bought it. I think when we bought the park, it was up. Rent was probably about $250, we took the rent up into the mid $300s and despite all that, Gary would've thought, someone would've said, wait a minute, I hate this place, their rent goes up so much.
15:16
Frank Rolfe: But he couldn't find anyone the people were all absolutely delighted with what they had, even at the higher price, and something which I've tried to explain to journalists now for years, it's all about the value if you feel like you're getting a good deal at that price, you don't find paying more. We all do that. So will I pay more for a really great hamburger as opposed to one at McDonald's? Yes, why? Because it's a better value for me, 'cause I like the really great hamburger and I think the price is is fine relative to the much better hamburger. Now the other aspect to Gary's state or park was he liked it, he told me that he could see living in a mobile home park, why? Well, remember this is a guy coming out of Manhattan.
16:04
Frank Rolfe: He's in a little cramped apartment. He has no yard, he's got no neighborhood, it's scary on the streets, noise is 24 hours a day, terrible smells. If you've ever been to New York, you know what I'm talking about, they throw the trash out on the street, just awful, and I was in this mobile home park, we had tons of space, happy neighbors, the ability to walk around without being accosted trash going in a poly cart, not out on the street, no strange smells, no loud noises. And he liked it. So that's how we turned a negative guy into someone who liked mobile home parks, let's go to the next slide, Brandon.
16:44
Frank Rolfe: So then why were the editors of the New York Times so upset with his article? Why could they not just let him tell the truth and say, yeah, I was at the mobile home park and everybody loved it. So I guess mobile home parks are pretty great. Well, obviously it didn't fit the evil landlord narrative. All media has embraced forever, seemingly the concept that all landlords are evil. And is it true? No, it's not true. Is it a great way to sell newspapers and other media? Sure, because what person doesn't hate paying the rent? Everyone hates paying the rent because they think of all the things they'd rather do with the rent. Average apartment rent in America now is two grand a month, I could think of a lot of things those people could probably do with the two grand if they just didn't pay the rent, they had a chase for that during COVID. So yeah, people don't like paying rent. And so anything that talks about landlords being evil, there will be some subset of people that love that topic they love just jumping on the landlord. But my story didn't fit that bill because they all liked this. And then it also negated the higher rents or bad concept.
17:54
Frank Rolfe: This is the one that becomes completely severed from the concept of value. So to believe the media regarding mobile home park lot rents, you have to assume that all Americans only shop based on price, that's it. So if they're gonna go on their anniversary dinner, well, you gotta go to Costco because the hot dog special Costco is only a $1.50. But wait a minute, I can get even cheaper. Let's go over to Taco Bell. I can get a taco for $99 cents. Heck, I could even go over to, Jack in the box and I can get a taco for $50 cents, that's not how Americans work whatsoever, we like value, you cannot make everything all about price. If we make every argument all about price, it defeats many of these woke narratives. For example, it's a lot cheaper going to community college and state college than Harvard, so therefore, Harvard is evil, Yale is evil, all colleges are evil.
18:54
Frank Rolfe: All more expensive public universities are evil. So how do you like it? The problem is that we don't do that in America. We pay our hard earned money based on we feel to be a good value comparison. That is the key component. As long as we're getting good value for our dollar, we're very, very happy. And if we don't get good value for our dollar, well then we're gonna do something different. We're gonna buy something different. Also, I think there was some degree of this feeling, which you get at many highbrow publications that mobile home park residents and Americans in general, are too stupid for their own good, that they need someone like the New York Times to tell them how to think. So when the people were happy it's kinda like the old quote, would you rather be Socrates dissatisfied or a pig satisfied? That was kind of how they felt about it. So they just thought, well, okay, Gary, yeah, they said they loved it, but they're too dumb to know what love even is. So this article has to be wrong. The problem is that the people are just aren't smart enough to realize as an evil landlord who was out there to destroy them. Let's go to the next slide, Brandon.
20:06
Frank Rolfe: But I have to say, and I have to give my hat off to the New York Times because they ran the story anyway. And that's what was really shocking when the story came out and it was positive many people who read the New York Times regularly were like wow, how did that happen? And again, I don't know, but I have to say the editors were honest and fair enough to run it. They could have just pulled the plug and dumped it, but they did not do that. Now, could you get positive articles again today from the New York Times? Well, no, you couldn't because the world is far too polarized. So there's no way that what would today be a blue media group such as The New York Times would ever have any pro-business article at all?
21:01
Frank Rolfe: Much less one that's as lengthy as this crazy thing. So no, you could never do it again today, our world has just changed too dramatically in the past decade. You have to remember that this article ran back when America was still somewhat utilizing common sense and some articles and media were blue in one article, pro Red in the other article you had like a fair and balanced bag of stuff. But today, no, there's no way you would never get the New York Times to do it. And also you have to remember, the truth is no longer the focus of the media today. That's not really what's going on at all. I mean, today what happens is people get their news for entertainment and you already are either in the red camp or the blue camp. So if you're in the Red camp, you watch Fox. If you're in the blue camp, you watch CNN and the newscasters today, they write books. They sell T-shirts.
21:52
Frank Rolfe: So they've become like the movie stars of the past and so has their payroll. So you don't have Walter Cronkite anymore. You don't have people that you can count on. You never know what side of the fence they'll fall on, or there'll be probe business, any business. Today, you know exactly what you get based on the channel that you choose, and therefore they have to hammer it up to their audience. So it's not really news anymore, it's really just entertainment. And it's kind of sad because when you want news today that's unbiased, it's really hard to know where you would go. You're not gonna find unbiased news. Maybe your best chance is to watch part of your day a blue network and part of your day a red network, and then kind of average them together. Maybe that's the only way you can work that.
22:37
Frank Rolfe: Let go to the next slide, Brandon. So let's drill down on the media's claims on why Mobile Home Park landlords in fact are evil. And see if we can get to the truth of this since we can't rely on blue channel or red channel. Let's create our own channel for a moment on this date on July 11th. Okay, let's just... What's it for all debatees scientifically number one, are out-of-state owners evil? This is a common narrative in the media right now, is it that evil outstate owners are ruining mobile home parks and somehow the media over and over emphasizes the words out-of-state. And this is the dumbest thing of all time, because throughout America, almost all of your larger businesses are out-of-state. So what do you define as the state the business is in? I assume that means where the management office is held.
23:27
Frank Rolfe: So if someone buys a mobile home park and they're based out of Chicago, they're an out-of-state owner, and if they buy a mobile home park in Nebraska, I don't know how that makes them any more evil than a mobile home park owner who lives in Nebraska who buys that. I kind of to be honest with you, think this whole out state thing is nothing more than the media trying to find a quickie way to try and humiliate their nemesis, which are the private equity groups out of New York. So since there are no mobile home parks in Manhattan, and most of the private equity groups are based in Manhattan, it's a good bet that if anyone in Manhattan ever to buy a Mobile Home Park, they would always be out-of-state. So if we can build this narrative that out-of-state owners are evil, then it allows them to tool on private equity groups, which in fact are always out-of-state.
24:18
Frank Rolfe: But when you look at other products in America, nobody seems to care about out-of-state or in-state. Let's look at McDonald's for a minute. McDonald's, unless they've moved or based out of Illinois, I believe, so if I have a McDonald's in Missouri somehow I am managed and owned by an evil group because McDonald's out of Illinois owns it, but they're not in Illinois, I'm in Missouri. So therefore it's evil. Have you noticed nobody cares at all of these other industries where there's all versions of out-of-state ownership. We don't care for some reason. Not a deal at all. Nope, not a deal at all. My insurance comes from State Farm. They're in Bloomington, Illinois. Oh no, they're an out-of-state owner. How evil. No, that's not the case at all. This is just some convenient, goofy thing that some journalists have started attaching only to our industry trying to somehow go and humiliate private equity groups out of Manhattan who have been ever larger buyers of parks.
25:20
Frank Rolfe: But it's absolute hogwash. It doesn't make any sense. Show me one example of how an out-of-state owner is any different than an in-state owner. They use the same currency to my knowledge. They do the same stuff. Bring little parks back to life. Doesn't make any sense. The next one that the media will try and tell you over and over is raising rents is bad. It's just plain evil. And oh my gosh, anyone who dare even think about raising rents is a horrible American who should be immediately thrown out of the country. But I have a message for everyone who believes that if you don't read my weekly news review that I do every week, you will notice that the number one most common article today are parks being torn down every week. There's at least three or more parks that there are the announcements that they are being torn down.
26:10
Frank Rolfe: And the reason they're being torn down is the rents are too low. And if you can't make any money with your mobile home park, then you convert it to a different size. So this whole crazy concept that raising rents is evil. Raising rents is the only thing that keeps mobile home parks functioning as mobile home parks. Item one, item number two, you're not gonna go and put a bunch of money in fixing old infrastructure and bringing in professional management with super low rents not going to happen. So therefore, the concept is that raising rents is bad, is kind of like saying, making repairs are bad, fixing potholes are bad because they all tie together. You can't get one without the other. It's not going to happen. And then finally, we have this issue in America that no one understands 'cause no one's in our industry.
27:03
Frank Rolfe: And that is very simply that mobile home parks lot rents are ridiculously low. And I know no one likes me saying this. Everyone likes me pretending that, oh gosh our rents aren't that bad. But no they're absolutely absurd. Let me give you a few examples of why they're so nuts. There was a guy, and he's vanished now because in today's polarized world, you would never wanna do it. But there was a professor at Duke University named Charles Becker and Charles Becker started writing about the mobile home parks industry, I don't know, a decade ago. And one of the articles he wrote on at Duke was, why mobile home parks lot rents are so stupidly low. So here were his conclusions, not mine, but his conclusions. Number one.
27:49
Frank Rolfe: The average mobile home parks lot rent in America, if you inflation adjust it when they were built, and they were typically about $50 a month back when they were built, today's dollars would be $500 a month. Yet the average mobile home parks lot rent in America is around half that amount. One of the only industries you can ever find that to be true of. And the only one in the whole housing food chain. So the question is, how did mobile home parks lot rents fall by half since the parks were built when all other forms of housing skyrocketed in value? And it's simple because mom-and-pops built the parks and then they just let their foot off the accelerator and they never kept up with inflation. If inflation went up 5% that year, they raised it zero. If inflation went up 10%, they raised it 1% maybe.
28:35
Frank Rolfe: So that was the first problem. And we call that mom-and-pop quantitative easing, which means that they deliberately did that. They deliberately let their rents fall below inflation. Why? I have no idea. That was just what they liked to do. The other problem you have is that in the apartment industry, rents go up typically because Class A apartments are built. And when those Class A apartments are built, what tends to happen is every other person with a Class B or a Class C, they jump in line behind that person and say, oh, well my apartment is Class B and if the new ones are costing $1800 a month, then I should charge $1600 a month. But since they haven't allowed any mobile home parks to be built since about 1970, there was never a reminder of what values are.
29:22
Frank Rolfe: Mom-and-pop never got that little nudge saying, okay, here's what values are now and here's what you gotta go to, never, never happened. The next thing the media will tell you is that billing back utilities is also wrong. It's illegal, it's inhumane. Well, I got news for everybody. Every form of housing that I know of today bills back utilities. I don't care if it's single family or apartments. Some buildings, some multifamilies are too old and antiquated to bill back utilities. But in general, everyone pays their own utilities. And that's considered to be the American way, right? Because that way you actually have accountability for your actions. You don't like your water bill, use less water. It's the only fair way to do it. When you group them together and you just include it in the rent, what happens? No one ever conserves.
30:11
Frank Rolfe: They all use even more water to stick it to the property owner. Many mobile home parks that we put meters into, guess what the actual amount the customers use drop by about a third when those meters get turned on. So the very people who say billing back utilities is wrong, are also the very people who are so pro-conservation of all of our natural resources. Well, you can't have both, so you gotta pick one. So I think factually you'd have to say that billing back utilities is in fact the correct thing to do. There's no question of that. That's the only way you get not only conservation, but personal accountability. Then you have this new wacky one that's come out. If you read my weekly news release reviews, you'll see that there's this new perpetual discussion that private equity groups do poor maintenance.
30:56
Frank Rolfe: Now, that is the craziest thing I've ever heard. It's easy to explain how they try and convince you of this. Sometimes they'll even include pictures. When you buy a mobile home park, what happens? Can you just go out and do it all in day one? No, Rome was not built in a day. It takes you a while to make a list of what needs to be done, find the contractors, bid it, sign the contracts has to fit in their schedule. And then we have other little problems like the weather. If you buy a mobile home park in the winter, you can't pave those streets, fix potholes or do anything. Can't put down concrete until it gets warmer out again. Can't even paint anything. So you'll see in some of those articles, a private equity group will buy a mobile home park.
31:38
Frank Rolfe: The rider will go there nine days later and say they have it in a darn thing with this. And the residents of course will jump on 'cause they're hoping to, some way to humiliate the owner and get the rents down. So they'll say, yes, he hasn't done anything. I've lived here for 19 years and he is done nothing. No, you lived there for 19 years. The park sold three days ago. And yeah, the new owner hasn't gotten anything done yet. May not get anything done for the first three months, six months. You have to remember that when you do a non-recourse loan, I don't care if it's Conduit, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or just regular bank, the lender is going to give you a list of items that you have to do under what's called the property condition report. It's absolutely mandatory. So if a private equity group buys a mobile home park, which they do, and they get a big time loan on it, which they do, and it has a property condition report, which it will, they will have to make all those repairs in an allotted time period, typically six months or a year.
32:33
Frank Rolfe: So this absurd notion somehow that private equity groups do no poor maintenance, that's where the dumbest woke narratives that exists. I would love to see the before and after pictures of any of these private equity purchase parks where the park now looks the same or worse than when Mom-and-pop had it. No private equity groups go in and they pour hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars doing all the things that mom-and-pop never did bringing the park completely back to life. And I dare anyone, anyone to show me one example in the United States of a mobile home park that looks worse after purchased by the private equity group than it did before. This next one's endlessly annoying, and that is mobile home parks are evil because you can't move the mobile homes. This doesn't even make any sense. Let's look at the historical perspective on moving mobile homes. When they brought out mobile homes originally, the original ones, which were known affectionately as trailers, which were like RVs 8 feet wide and typically 20 to 30 feet long, you could hook those up to your car and you can move those anywhere you want. In the modern world, a mobile home, which today is typically 14, 16, or 18 feet Wide.
33:46
Frank Rolfe: But even in years back when they became eight and 10 and 12 feet wide, you couldn't pull 'em with your car anymore. When you couldn't pull 'em with your car anymore. They were no longer really mobile, but yet they were mobile when they came out of the factory and were moved to your location. So people got the whole mobile thing screwed up here. It's not like they're mobile, like we can keep moving them over and over. No, but you can move it from the factory to your spot as opposed to being site-built where it's built on the spot. But the key question would be how does that harm anyone that you can't move your mobile home? More specifically, why would you wanna move a mobile home? Do you know how much it costs to move a mobile home, to move a mobile home in America today, if you add in the transportation and the setting and the skirting and the stairs and the deck, and I'm not even talking about lot preparation.
34:32
Frank Rolfe: You're probably talking anywhere five grand on the low side to more likely 10 grand. Why would anyone move a mobile home park and stick a five or $10,000 price tag on it? You must be better off selling your mobile home park where it sits in that park than buying another one over in this park that already is now going to be five or $10,000 cheaper then try to move it around. And all of the forms of housing, whether you're stick build or condominium I don't care what it is, you can't move any of those things. There's no form of American real estate that encompasses housing that can be moved, yet how do all those work and we can't? Somehow, they're not evil because they can't move, but we're evil and apparently we're evil because of the word mobile home.
35:16
Frank Rolfe: But the word mobile, that hasn't been part of the industry since 1976. In '76 it became manufactured home. So we didn't even use that. Don't say, oh, well, we lied in the marketing. No, that isn't even part of the marketing since 1976. It's almost 50 years ago since the word mobile home was even in an ad. You don't see them in ads today. It's all manufactured home. So we don't warrant to the consumer. Ah, yes, buy a mobile home and and see the world. Just move it around. No, we would never tell anyone to move a mobile home around. We would never tell anyone who asked. Oh yes. Well, by all means you can just hook that up to your car and pull away. No, no, you can't. So moving mobile homes, I don't even know why it's part of the conversation.
36:02
Frank Rolfe: Now, some people will then say, well, but then what do the people do if they wanna move, sell your mobile home, buy another mobile home in the other state or wherever in the world you're wanting to go, just like every other American does. Sometimes a media will interview these people and they'll say, well, I couldn't move my mobile home, that's why I lost it. No, that's not why you lost it, fella. You lost it because you didn't pay your rent and you got evicted and you should have seen it coming and you should have sold the mobile home months earlier when you first fell into financial trouble. Those people never attempt to sell your home.
36:39
Frank Rolfe: That makes no sense. How do you jump from, you can't move the mobile home, to you abandon it, which then parlays into the next one, which is that park owners force tenants to leave to take over their homes and sell them. The only one who would believe that quote is someone who has never owned a mobile home park or knows anything about the industry. Park owners never wanna lose a tenant. If you lose a tenant in a mobile home park, it's gonna cost you $10,000 to $20,000. Here's why the tenant runs off and abandons their home. I lose my lot rent. I have to hire a lawyer to try and take the home through abandonment. If I get abandonment and now it's my home, I'll either have to demolish it, that's several thousand dollars, or I'll have to remodel it. That's probably $5,000 plus. And then hopefully I can sell it, which I'll get next to nothing for. And when you add it all together and you look at the costs and what you get out of it, you're gonna see you lose about 10 grand. That's why park owners will do anything to keep people in their homes.
37:41
Frank Rolfe: We have no desire to take over homes at all. As a park owner, your dream is to be a parking lot owner. It's all we want. We just want parking lot tenants just like they have out at the airport, park and fly lot. We want nothing to do with taking ownership of the mobile homes, nothing to do with remodeling them and sell them. How do we benefit? We only get the lot rent. Every mobile home transaction in America, if you took them all and added them together, you'd be lucky if they were even break-even. In most cases, people lose money every time they sell a home. So it's not a profit center. So I have trouble visualizing how that really even impacts tenants at all. And then finally, and this has become probably one of the most common items you see in these articles, is that the residents should buy their own parks and never third parties. Okay, well, let's think about that for a moment.
38:32
Frank Rolfe: So what we're saying is the tenants of the mobile home park are so happy to come together and cough up the money to buy the mobile home park. That's never gonna happen. You're right. It's never going to happen. Never has happened in American history. But there are nonprofits that try and empower this concept. So what they do is, and we've sold three parks to residents. Here's how it works. The residents have to get together. They have to elect officers. They have to have a vote to start the process. Then the nonprofit chips in the money for them to get the third party reports. And then the nonprofit tries to find another nonprofit to do the down payment and another nonprofit or the same nonprofit to guarantee the loan. Tenants aren't buying these parks. They never have bought the parks.
39:18
Frank Rolfe: What you have is you have this loose affiliation of nonprofits. Are they in it just for the good of America? No. The lead nonprofit that puts these deals together, they get paid for it. I'm not sure why the other nonprofits participate in it, but that's part of the problem is they don't very frequently. So most of the residents buying the park deals that I have witnessed fail. They never get off the ground. They're unable to find a nonprofit to guarantee the debt. They're unable to find a nonprofit to do the down payment. And then there are some in which they do find both parties, but the residents themselves vote not to buy the park.
39:55
Frank Rolfe: Also, if you think it's a good idea, I urge you to look up a park called Sans Souci over in Colorado. That's one in which the residents bought the park and the articles are now endless. It was the worst thing they ever did. Now they're trying to figure out how to get out from under it. The problem is that when the residents are in the park, two bad things happen. One, they can't collect the rent from anybody because they're not gonna evict their own friends. And number two, they'll never vote to raise the rent again. So the park will fall in forever continual disrepair. You have a third problem, which is those loans are not forever loans. Those loans all have balloons on them three years, five years, 10 years.
40:31
Frank Rolfe: Look at the article on the park in Palo Alto, my old college hometown, Stanford University near Palo Alto. And yeah, there's a trailer park in Palo Alto. And I used to drive by it in college and think, "What a freaking dump. It's such a ritzy area. Why is it here?" And when it came time to tear it down and put in multimillion dollar houses, the city of Palo Alto became enraged. "Oh, we can't lose our only affordable housing because gosh, darn it. It's a great political message place." Stand in front of the trailer park and get on camera with the news. And they'll say, "Oh no, this person really stands up for the poor." When of course they could care less and are late for their dinner over at the country clubs. They don't care at all. So what happened is they went around to everyone trying to get people who would buy the mobile home park and then gift it to the residents.
41:18
Frank Rolfe: They went to Steve Job's wife and said, "Hey, can you buy this thing and give it to the residents?" And my understanding, she said, "No, I don't care. Not interested." So in the end, Palo Alto coughed up the money. So Palo Alto technically owns the mobile home park. And it was a great news story for years, but guess what Palo Alto is doing now? They're shutting it down, kicking everybody out. They're gonna completely redevelop it. Same thing that the guy originally that owned it that caused it all to begin with, he was gonna tear it down and redevelop it in nicer things. Exact same thing he wanted to do. The city rebuffed him.
41:51
Frank Rolfe: They even litigated him, held him up in court for years, forcing him to sell the residence. So the city of Palo Alto could appear the hero for a brief while to get on the news before they then shut it down and did effectively the same thing that he did. So that's the truth of these different headlines. Yes, we can all say, "Oh, well, that's a mobile home park owner's perspective."
42:12
Frank Rolfe: No that's a common sense perspective. If you have a problem with those, then tell me what it is. That's just the facts. Let's go the next slide there Brandon. The next slide. Okay, so when will the industry get back on a positive footing with the media? Can we ever do it? Can we turn this ship around? Can we ever get it back? Or things like The New York Times can actually happen when there can be a happy article saying, "Yes, park owners are great. Well, with woke media, the answer is certainly never because, again, the media is fully polarized at this point. So would a blue media group ever say a business is successful? No, absolutely not. It could never, ever, ever happen. But the media is not the mega player at this point. The new mega player, it's all about the politicians 'cause we've all given up on the media. Just as America is evenly sliced now blue and red, so is the media. If you're gonna get a break on one media, does it align with what you want? If you're a business person, red media, if you're a wokester, the blue media.
43:18
Frank Rolfe: But as America has basically fallen into total disarray, the only item that you have going on today is you've got this whole issue of politicians, because they can actually pass laws and they can get in positions where they can cause mobile home park owners problems, even though they're completely uneducated about what they're doing. You see that all the time with this whole residents should buy their community stuff. They have no idea how that system works. They have no idea how insanely small the footprint is of parks where residents have purchased them. I'm talking a few hundred in the entire United States out of 44,000 mobile home parks. But if the right person gets to the right politician, he doesn't know any better, they have good BS skills, next thing you know, he takes that position. Ah, yes, all residents must own their parks because he doesn't really know any better. So what we have to educate now going forward, give up on the media, you're never going to educate them at all, because they have no skin in the game. They make no money from trying to present impartial news. But you gotta get to your federal and state politicians. They must know the truth. That's who we have to educate today.
44:29
Frank Rolfe: So just as I did with Gary Rivlin and said, "Hey, Gary, sure, you can come out and live in my park." We have to get politicians to understand what our business is, because the other side of the equation, they're much better at it than our industry is. They have grouped together, a wide assortment of groups that just all jump on each other, they constantly reinforce the same message in our industry doesn't do any of that. So since we can't get it together, seemingly on our public relations, the only thing we can do now is simply try and bring common sense to the electorate and say, "This is what really goes on." That's why I started doing my weekly news review is because there was nobody else out there saying, "No, that's a lie. No, that's true. No, that's stupid." So I thought, well, I better start hoping that others would would follow suit, because that's the only way we're gonna get out of this mess as an industry is to start telling people what's going on. Brandon slides are going crazy. I'm not sure what's happening here. Hold on, Brandon. What do you what are you doing there? Okay, there we there we go.
45:35
Frank Rolfe: And remember the old quote of Edmund Burke, the 18th century Irish statesman, he said evil triumphs when good people do nothing. It's not good enough when people try and contact you and say, "Well, I need to fight something that I shouldn't because I don't want to get involved." That's the same as not fighting it. So that's why every time the media has ever called me, I have been more than happy to talk to them. I have debated people. I have been on some horrifically woke podcasts and debated the person for the podcast, simply because I can't not do anything. Because if I do nothing, that's almost like admitting defeat or guilt. So it's not a very good way to operate. Let's go to the next slide there. So what may save the industry, despite the media, which is always going to attack it, what could save the industry going forward? Well, number one, the fact that the stigma against trailer parks is gradually wearing off.
46:46
Frank Rolfe: If you talk to millennials, surely, you know some, your kids, others, people in their 20s, 30s, and you say, "Okay, so what do you think about trailer parks?" They're not that negative on 'em. They don't say, "Oh, gross. Oh, my God." No, they actually are like, "Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of seems like kind of cool, like living small." And where is that coming from? It's coming from all those shows on HGTV on tiny homes, there's a bunch of them. And millennials really like those shows. They like this concept, this challenge of living in a small footprint. And that's great for our industry. Because even though we can't seem to get our PR going, the tiny home movement sure has. And we kind of follow in their coattails. We're tiny, we look kind of like a tiny home. So that's a great thing. So the negativity is wearing off. If you look back on who was really the most vocally anti mobile home park, trailer park humor, people like Jeff Foxworthy, for example, they run out of gas, is Jeff Foxworthy even still alive? I don't know.
47:53
Frank Rolfe: I haven't seen him around for the longest time. So that was all part of the baby boomer generation. My generation, many of you watching this your generation, back when we used to think, "Oh, trailer parks are horrible. People who live in them must be, sad drug addicts." Millennials don't share that viewpoint. And that's gonna help a whole lot. Also, the fact that tenant owned parks are not working out like promised, again, I encourage you to look at the articles on Sans Souci. It's S-A-N-S S-O-U-C-I in Colorado, read how well that's going. Not good at all. There are even some other articles on other ones where people are starting to say, "Wait a minute, I don't think we can really run this thing effectively." And as that word gets out to politicians, you say, "Wait a minute now, you're telling me how great this is. But I just read an article saying people hated it." That that could be a problem. Also, as these parks continue to get torn down, and I mean, every week, there's more being torn down, the media may start to realize that, "Oh oh, we're really not helping here by trying to empower residents to find higher rents. We're really just fighting them to be empowering them to be homeless."
49:01
Frank Rolfe: And one big problem you have as a resident in a mobile home park, it's not making any money 'cause the rents are too low is a mobile home parks are easily the most ripe for development in any market that they're in. Why? They typically have great street frontage. Because remember, they were all built back in the '50s, '60s, '70s. So that's the first time we've had great street frontage. Also, they're exactly the right size for all pad users, exactly the right number of acres for apartments, Home Depot and all that kind of stuff. They always have typically water and sewer at the property. Oh, that's perfect for apartments. And then finally, cities will give developers any zoning they want to tear the trailer park down. So when you add it together, the second mobile home park doesn't make any money. There's 50 more things you can do with it.
49:51
Frank Rolfe: And if you do not have higher rents, as I constantly write in my articles, low rents equals redevelopment. It's not rocket science. There's too many other options with mobile home parks. Also in the big list of America's problems, mobile home parks are so far at the bottom. I don't know how there are still articles on it. You look at America right now, many of you probably were watching the Biden press conference earlier, we are the most screwed up nation of all time. I've been through it all. I was there for Jimmy Carter. I've never seen things so messed up. And all the world issues, the war in Ukraine, the war in Israel, massive inflation, everything wrong known to man, we've got 'em all. Our list is endless.
50:34
Frank Rolfe: Why would a reader even care about a mobile home park lot rent that went up 50 bucks? Why would the media even want to run an article on how private equity groups are evil because they're out of state? And why would anyone even read those articles? Have you ever noticed on the mobile home park articles, there's never any social media rebuttals, comments, commentary, 'cause nobody cares. Nobody cares. My mother subscribes to The New Yorker. She's 88 years old. She's been a subscriber to The New Yorker since she was about 25. She's been reading the thing for over 60 years. There was an article on mobile home parks recently. I don't know if people remember that here. I don't know a year or something ago. I asked her about the article. She didn't even read it. Told me it didn't matter. It's stupid.
51:18
Frank Rolfe: She's moving on the next article. So why are they even writing these things? Who cares? I would imagine all articles today would be on real newsworthy items. Back when things were good, not that long ago in America, there wasn't much to write about. So sure, let's write about mobile home parks. That seems to be a no-brainer. Many people probably remember the John Oliver segment, the big negative segment on mobile home parks. That was back when America was doing great. We had almost no inflation, cheap oil and gas, booming economy. Everyone was doing fantastic. So yeah, sure, people will watch a few minutes of you trying to make fun of large mobile home park owners, yeah. But that was back there in what, 2018, roughly, somewhere along that. We're so screwed up now, I do not understand how anyone would spend the airtime or the print time to put any article in our industry.
52:15
Frank Rolfe: You have to be out of your mind. The final item is that all those supposedly evil new park owners are raising the level of play in mobile home parks across America so fast there's not becoming much left to criticize. You ever notice in the articles today where they bash park owners, they have to dig deep to find a park that to the average consumer looks bad. So they'll try and find the old classic mobile home park, under the bridge, down by the river, where the water system isn't working and it's a total mess. Those are becoming harder and harder to find. I drive parks all the time across America. Our level of play in this industry is up 200%, 300%, 400%. Old parks that were just like that one under the bridge down by the river, now the roads are all repaved, they have new professional management, and everybody's happy. So as all those parks go away, and those parks that the media always features, those were not made bad by modern owners.
53:09
Frank Rolfe: That's the problem. Those are all made bad by mom-and-pop owners who neglected them, did not manage them properly, did not put the capital in. But private equity buyers and all modern professional buyers, we didn't create the problem, we're the only ones who have been solving it. And eventually people will start to connect the dots. Hopefully, eventually, legislators will say, "Now wait a minute, Mr. Wokester, I hear you tell me the park owners are evil, but I've been in some of the parks and they look great and people love 'em, so get out of my office." So eventually I think just the truth about the industry was so apparent that that will probably be the best armor we can probably wear.
53:46
Frank Rolfe: Let's go to the next slide, Brandon. So if you found anything in this lecture interesting to you, if you like the discussion regarding mobile home park owners and how evil they are or not evil or whatever, and you wanna learn the correct way to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform due diligence on, renegotiate, finance, turnaround and operate mobile home parks, I suggest you come to our next Mobile Home Park Investors Bootcamp, July 19th through 21st, three-day immersion weekend. You'll learn everything about the industry.
54:15
Frank Rolfe: You'll come away with some amazing things like the list of all the parks in the United States, the list of all the brokers in the United States, our park evaluation software, access to our reference library, every form and contract you would ever need. Everything you need to be successful is all there. About a third, in fact, of the top 100 largest owners in America started at the boot camp. So it's clearly the gold standard. Now we're gonna move on to Q&A. So we're now open for any questions. All you have to do is post them over here on the side and I will just jump right into the questions. So here we go.