First Foray Into Mobile Home Park Investing Half Empty Disaster

[Tyler Casey]

I’ve been a single and small multi family real estate investor for over a decade, I started at 19. I also acquired a couple of commercial buildings along the way. In 2020 I got into self storage investing with my friend Zach Quick who is an expert in the industry. This experience along with watching some friends and clients of mine dive into apartments inspired me to fix my eyes on something larger. Something that would marry the power of scale and low expense ratios in storage with my well honed property management skills. One of the parts of my career that I truly enjoy is bringing something that is no longer useful back to life, so I wanted to continue doing that. I decided after a ton of research the best investment vehicle for me would be mobile home parks. It was housing so I would be right in my wheelhouse with property management and improving properties. I already understood the financial analysis of commercial real estate but was a bit unsure regarding the way utilities worked in mhp. So I sought out a man named Frank Rolfe. I’d like to thank Frank for all of the advice and the wonderful mobile home park investing class he has put together. Now today after nearly 6 months of working to learn how to invest in the mobile home park vertical, and working to find a deal I’m officially under contract on one that will be a really fun project. It’s a 38 space major value add park, in a great metro in my home state and has great economic upside. I believe in the end that I can invest a total of $750,000-800,000 and have a park worth $1,200,000-1,400,000 when all the work is done a couple of years from now. There should be some nice cash flow along the way too. Not to mention I will take it from a half empty dump to a clean, safe and affordable housing community! I wonder if the city will give me a metal?