Buying and Selling Mobile Homes: An Introduction

If you have vacant lots in your mobile home park as most owners do today, you have two options.  One is to do nothing and hope that mobile home dealers, or mobile home owners, will bring in a home to fill that lot in the normal course of business.  The other is to proactively purchase mobile homes and bring them in yourself, with the intention of selling them or renting them.  

With the first option, you don’t have a lot of control, except to do the best job you can in advertising the lots as available.  In the second option, you will, in many ways, control your destiny.   In a slow market, such as we are in right now, you need to be extra aggressive in filling up your lots if that is the goal.  One way to accomplish this is to buy new and used homes to set the process in motion. You might be able to fill 2-3 lots per year waiting on dealers, or you could fill 12-24 a year buying them yourself. Of course, there is a greater risk, time and effort in filling the lots yourself.  Not only will your capital investment be huge, as there are virtually no lenders who will allow you to leverage your capital when buying mobile homes, but you will have an enormous time investment in procuring homes, moving and setup, remodeling homes, selling or renting homes, and the regular upkeep of same.  It is a path that if you decide you want to go down, takes supreme dedication and steel nerve – once you begin, it is hard to turn back.  You will have to morph your entire management structure to accommodate the additional duties of remodeling and servicing these rental or homes sold on notes. 

Before you begin such an undertaking, it is essential that you fully understand all of the issues related to this concept, as well as to understand the nuts and bolts of how to buy and evaluate homes, as well as how to advertise and sell or rent them.  That is the purpose of this section of the book – to explain all of the issues so you can make an educated decision to go forward or not, and then, if you decide to go forward, show you exactly how to do it the right way. As an aside, there are many books that will tell you the wrong way to proceed.  They leave out many important, and expensive, steps to convince you that this is a “get rich quick scheme”.  We have not left anything out.  You will find that our advice is significantly different from everyone else’s, and is based on our collective experience of owning and operating over $100,000,000 of mobile home parks and homes. We don’t believe that our competitors can make that claim.  And we don’t think you will profit from their materials.  You might even lose all of your investments. If you ever have any questions on any of this material, we welcome you to contact us at the site www.mobilehomeparkstore.com and www.mhbay.com, the nation’s leading sources of information on the mobile home and park industry. 

By Frank Rolfe Frank Rolfe is a mobile home park investor and owns over 100 parks with his partner Dave Reynolds. Frank also leads regular Mobile Home Park Investing Bootcamps through the MobileHomeUniversity.com.