All Forum Posts by: Samuel Coronado

I'm running into this problem as well. I had someone put in a bid for $15k labor only on a mobile home rehab. Absolute madness. The next one was $4,500 labor only. 

It's wild out here in the tertiary markets. I started doing some of the things myself. Some of the stuff they quoted four hours for took less than 1, including watching the YouTube tutorial. 

I'm not sure what changed, but last year I was literally paying a framing crew to pick up trash in my personal home because the owner needed to make payroll. This year, I guess there was no slow season for the contractors. Everyone is trying to make a month's salary in one to two weeks. lol. My properties will literally sit there and rot before that happens. I bought right and have very little carrying costs. It doesn't faze me. :) We're still expanding though as we find the right people. 

I prefer month to month. Way easier to evict. lol

For sure not for the retail investor at all. I never made a large effort into it and saw it more as gambling, but did love the game. I was smart enough to know my limits and that a hot streak was more due to luck and market circumstances out of my control than it was my own intelligence. Today, I still play a little with them in my Roth IRA and like to sell cash-secured puts on stocks I wouldn't mind owning long term, but my focus is more on acquiring and developing multifamily right now.

I had to laugh at the very first sentence. You messed up by getting a turnkey rental at market price. That is not investing. That is storing your money in a place where someone has already baked in all the costs plus a healthy mark up. I've spent time in all the asset classes and granted I can't make 20k in one hour through RE like I can in stock options, there is a lot less headache in the bustle of it all  with well-managed real estate. Buying it without leverage makes it even worse. 

 The best time to buy is when rates are high and people are scared. 

@Adrian Smude wrote the best books on mobile homes since Lonnie Scruggs. 

I once had a conversation with a seller I cold called while trying to buy mobile home parks around Ft Bragg (now Ft Liberty), NC. There was an older gentleman who had bought a lot of land back in the 70s when inflation was double digits and no one wanted to buy anything. He said he was holding on to the land until Ft Bragg expanded to his doorstep and he could sell for millions. Ft Bragg is top 3 of the DOD in terms of just raw personnel and unfortunately BiggerPockets has a hand in making the rents go up artificially there, but the strategy is still sane. I have a plan to buy my entire block in the country. I have 20 acres now. I will be setting some stakes for the driveway of a 5 unit MHP soon and plan to use that to expand out to some other places thereafter on my own land. The cashflow from these units combined with the main house will more than be enough to cover all expenses in perpetuity for that land that's on a 3.4% interest rate over 30 years. Best of all, we get to provide actual affordable housing in a rural area where you can't find much below $1,000 right now.