Land over Mobile Home Parks

It seems like the debate between single-family residential and multi-family residential has existed for a long time over which niche is more profitable.

Today, I would like to address this debate from the mobile home side and show why these small mobile home and land properties are a superior investment to mobile home parks in my area.

1. Infrastructure

As the mobile home park owner, you are responsible for providing the water, sanitation, and gas/electric services (up to a certain point) to your tenants. If you have a park on city water and sewer, then the issues tend to be much smaller as the city does most of the work. Wells and septic systems are common in the parks we encounter but the park that we had under contract a year ago (fell through due to financing) had well water and a LAGOON for sewer services (picture a large rectangular hole in ground that is fenced off but very close to many of the tenants – it’s disgusting!)

We would have to perform monthly tests on the well water (the current owners were paying about $10,000 to test the water – definitely could have been lowered) and deal with the lagoon if any problems popped up. Connecting to city services for water and sewer for this park would have been over $250,000 (100+ unit park). I’m glad things worked out the way they did as we never felt comfortable buying a park with these utilities the more research we did.

If one of the wells on one of our single unit properties goes bad, then we are at most a few thousand dollars in the hole for a new well.

2. Liability/Disasters

This is a …read more