Business license in Tennessee for MHP? Yes or no?

[Jonathan Cooksey]

Bought a 15 unit MHP fixer upper,was wondering since I will be buying a lot of supplies in the near future. would a business license help me or hurt me starting out?

[Frank Rolfe]

Purchasing Platform sells over 1 million products at a discount rate that averages around 30% -- stuff is way cheaper than at Home Depot or Lowes. Plus they ship directly to you.

But the big attraction is that they keep track of how much you've spent on each house or park, so that you have control over those costs and can use that data to make sure you make a profit on each home sold (or at least know where you stand before you price it).

Here's an article I wrote about them for my newsletter recently:

Why Most Smart Park Owner Are Changing Over To Purchasing Platform To Buy Virtually Everything For Their Property

In 2018 we became huge customers of Purchasing Platform – one of their largest. And we suggest any park owner to look at what this new buying service can do in regards to positively impact your community. It’s literally a game-changer.

What is “Purchasing Platform”?

Purchasing Platform is an online GPO (group purchasing organization) and eMarketplace that has been created specifically for the mobile home and mobile home park industries. More than 1,800 MH communities access Purchasing Platform every month to take advantage of their pre-negotiated pricing, single checkout from 40+ vendors, auto expense mapping to their chart of accounts, multi-level workflow approval to provide accountability across their portfolios, etc. They offer 20-30% savings on more than 10 million products and an integrated "Buying Desk" service that acts as a purchasing agent for your community to make sure they always deliver aggregate savings on every order.

How big do you have to be to use Purchasing Platform? Can you use it with only one property?

The answer is yes – there’s no minimum limit of properties or dollars spent. Some of the largest industry portfolios use them but the majority of their clients own and operate between 1 and 30 mobile home parks. This is not a service that is only available to the largest owners – it’s one that every park owner in the U.S. can utilize.

Why use Purchasing Platform?

In addition to the obvious cost savings on products and services, use of Purchasing Platform drastically reduces the number of trips your manager has to make to retail stores (time spent not managing your property), eliminates the need for expense classification and receipt transcription while also providing valuable oversight to the owner with workflow approval. They also allow members to load their own catalogs to make sure that managers only can order what they want them to.

Summary of benefits

Here are the main reasons that we have become huge users of the Purchasing Platform:

• Easy to use interface. Not hard at all for any manager to master.
• Single checkout from more than 40 of the industry’s largest vendors.
• Huge savings on more than 10 million products.
• Price Match Guarantee: if you can find it lower somewhere else, they’ll match it.
• Create your own custom catalog.
• On-Demand Buying Desk feature gets you immediate support for volume quotes.
• Comprehensive Workflow Approval functionality to keep you in control of all buying.
• Maps out all expenses to your Chart of Accounts.
• Integrates everything seamlessly into your property management software.

BiggerPockets frowns on putting any links in a post, but if you Google up "purchasing platform mobile home parts" you'll find them.