Attention MHP Operators: Mobile Home Park Rent Collections

[Paul Stout]

I know this question will bring a vast array of ideas and supporting stories but I want to know what you park owners and operators out there do for collections.  If you own or manage a mobile home park and collect rent I would like to hear about it.  Do you pay a manager to collect the rent?  Do you collect yourself?  Do you accept cash?  Do you invoice your tenants or do you tell them upfront what to pay and when then wait for the money?  Do you have your tenants send the money to a PO Box?  Do you have your tenants deposit the money into a local bank?  Do you have an on-site drop box?  There are a lot of different ways and ideas and I would like to hear yours.  I would like to keep this discussion to actual owners or managers that are doing this now or have done it in the past.  I would also like to keep it to mobile home parks.  Please explain how you invoice and collect and why you think it is the best way for you.  Please feel free to share systems that you have used in the past that have not worked and why they did not work.  I look forward to all of your input! 

[Account Closed]

Will depend on property size specifics etc. I don't think a one size fits all solution is here.  One example I like is monthly invoicing when you charge back the water.  This way the amount typically changes so the invoice is what makes sense on mailing it out.  There is a tear off sheet that you mail in with the payment ( to identify who its from) .  

I like mail because it come to you, you have to be strict on the front end that if you don't collect it you get a 3 day notice.  Goes to a PO Box.  The big downside to this is that you are at the mercy of the mail.  We have had payments lost that show up a year later, shredded in half, delayed a month  ( can be verified with post mark date) whole slew of issues...... 

I think if you have a larger park , it makes sense to do collection on site as you probably have a full time person sitting in an office etc. But say you are at 40  spaces, its a hit or miss.  You are also at the mercy of collecting at that level.  If you have multiple properties , you have multiple people handling the money. 

If you go centralized with payments mailed in , then everything funnels back to one spot.  ( still can be risk ) but you have one funnel instead of say 20.  

Thats what I mean by its hard to take a one size fits all approach as I think that does not make sense.  It will vary on location, number of spaces, properties, mgmt structure etc. 

In a perfect world you get online payments. We dislike the mail so much that we tried a pay online for 6 months and get $100 back promo to incentive that but think we only had a few people try that.  On the plus side, after the promo ended, they still were using it, which was the goal.  You have to try and accommodate what you can and not get stuck on sticking a square peg in a round hole.  

I have seen several different things that work so think about your future goes and figure out what system best correlates with that path. 

I will end on this note , never take cash.