Investing in a Tiny Home Community/ Park

[Frank Boet]

Does anyone have experience investing in or managing a tiny home community? I want to build a 5-10 tiny home park/ community/ village to rent out, preferably in rural Texas, Tennessee or Central Florida. 

[Russell Holmes]

@Frank Boet I don't personally know anything about it, but have seen this local one in Winter Park FL in the news several times and I've read into it quite a bit, Orlando Lake Front Tiny Homes:

http://www.orlandolakefrontth.com/

It is a 1950's RV park that by road is in  fairly undesirable industrial type location.  However, it is also directly on  lake. I'm sure in the 50s and 60s, it was a much nicer looking location and attracted travelers with their RVs.  However, before its revival for Tiny Houses, it had basically become an RV graveyard of RVs that couldn't make it a few miles down the road and were sort of a long term rental a few notches below a true mobile home.   They've been transitioning to Tiny Houses over the past few years and it is now actually a quite hip location.  Somewhere young professionals or older retirees could actually take pride in (from the rocking chair on their tiny front porch overlooking a lake!).  From what I understand, the owners build them or have them built, and then offer them for AirBnB, Monthly/Annual rental, Lease to own, or for sale.  If residents choose to buy them before completion, which many have, they can customize them to their liking or have one built off site and bring it in.  The upside for the owner is likely the ability to charge a higher lot rent than they would on crummy RVs.

I have heard that it is hard to get counties to ever approve a NEW RV park or mobile home park.  However, if you model what the above mentioned park did, you could likely buy an RV or Mobile Home park that was already zoned as such.  Looking at it for Tiny Houses, you may find one that would be perfect for that but otherwise wouldn't have been a solid deal with regular mobile homes.  I don't know the owners of Orlando Lakefront, but you could even reach out to them and see if they'd be open to discussing some of their properties etc.  It's a really cool idea overall.