New to mobile home park investing

[Mike Szabo]

Hello all,

My wife and I have a mixture of long term and short term rentals. We recently came across an opportunity to buy a mobile home park but this is a totally new investment strategy for us. The numbers seem decent but ultimately we don't know what we don't know. I wanted to get some thoughts on whether this is a worthy venture. Deal is as follows:

13 unit mobile home park with all tenant owned trailers so It is essentially the land with utilities.

Each tenant pays there own water, electricity and trash.

It is on city water and has 6 separate septic tanks supporting the 13 units. 

The maintenance cost for us would be lawn care and septic pumping every 2-3 years.

The tenants are all on month to month basis.

Numbers:

$600,000 purchase price

seller financing with $120,000 down payment (20%)

4% interest on 20yr note

Current rents are $310 per space per month but market rent is more towards $400-450.

Expenses:

Taxes $1500 per year

Insurance -$1500 per year

Lawn care -$600 per month for approximately 8 months of the year. 

Septic $200 per tank every 2-3 years

All seems pretty good but I am trying to see if there's something I am missing?

[Mel Adams]

I'm more of a MHP newb, so take this with a grain of salt and maybe someone more experienced can check me on this, but I think it's overpriced. 

If you're just doing a quick valuation, 13 pads x $310 lot rent x 12 x .7 / 10 cap = ~$338k pp 

Even if you use the the high end proforma lot rent, 13 x $450 x 12 x .7 / 10 cap = ~$491k pp

If your NOI is about $34k (using the current lot rents and allocating 30% to expenses) once you factor in your mo payments back to the seller I don't think you'll be left with much, if anything. Obviously getting to market rents would help and looks like you could make about 11% on your initial down payment, but I think the pp is too high.