All Forum Posts by: John Jacobus

@Lane Kawaoka MHU (Frank Rolfe’s course) and the MH Academy mentioned above provide enough detail to become an educated passive investor.  In addition, or as a bare bones replacement, the following podcasts are highly educational on the niche.  Feel free to contact me any time regarding MHP’s.  We own and operate MHP’s and while we don’t accept passive capital at this time, we intend to change that in 2019.

• Mobile Home Park Investors Poscast with Jefferson Lily
• The Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast with Frank Rolfe
• The Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast with Kevin Bupp and Charles Dehart 

You can also read through the resources on MHU’s website.  They have various webcasts and articles highlighting the nuances of the industry and the appeal of the asset class.

@Gulliver R., My first recommendation is to speak with the owner or manager of the park and understand who they use for septic pumping and plumbing maintenance.  If you can get those contacts, those are the best because they're familiar with the actual infrastructure in the park.   If those contacts aren't available, I would explore the following alternatives:  a) reach out to other park owners on BP or the MHU forum and understand who they use for septic maintenance/pumping and plumbing in the area where your prospective park is located; b) perform a Google search for "septic operator" or "septic pumping" in the area.  Hope this helps.

Talk to a plumber and the firm that pumps the septic tanks.  You’ll pay a fee to pump the tanks (roughly monthly but it depends) and you will pay for various repairs to piping (highly variable based on age of the system).  You also want to get the leech field checked out to ensure you don’t get stuck with needing to build a new one.  Septic systems are proven and widely utilized so they aren’t inherently bad.  You just need to ensure that you involve professional operators to check out the condition of the tanks, piping and leech field.  I would direct your energy in this direction before exploring a hookup to the private sewer system being installed in the area.

+1 for Joe Fairless’ Best Ever Conference in Denver Feb 22-23.  It’s high quality.

I also recommend Think Multifamily events (cc: @Tamiel Kenney).  There is one planned for March 30-31 in Dallas and it’s also high quality.  I attend 1-2 Think Multifamily events each year and benefit from the high quality networking and educational content.  I also think Mark & Tami Kenney are great people to do business with. 

@Jan Wanot - We should connect.  We spent most of 2018 building our database of MHP owners across ~30 states and need help cultivating leads from this data set.  We started our database with the list of 45,000 MHP addresses provided in the reference library materials for MHU Bootcamp.   From there, we eliminated most of the coastal states and less affordable areas of the country and focused our research on the larger metros with favorable demographics in the remaining ~30 states in the southwest, midwest and southeast.  

I've included my answers to your questions below but we should definitely discuss how we can combine efforts to save time/money and generate more leads.  I've talked to dozens of MHP investors who are in various stages of doing the same thing with respect to MHP database development.  It's a massive undertaking in terms of time, money, and energy.  It's curious that we aren't exploring ways to collaborate so that we can all save time and money while ultimately producing what we all seek:  quality off market leads

1. What software do you use to build your Database?  JJ:  We use Google Sheets as the primary data storage mechanism for our MHP data and enter qualified leads in Podio.
2. What automations have you created for building your database?  JJ:  We created a web scraper to gather data from states that publish their MHP owner data set publicly (i.e., Indiana) but everything else involves manual county/secretary of state look-ups for all of the other states.  We explored tapping one of the proprietary property API's (ReportALL, Zillow, several others) but the manual work associated with formatting the data set in the API response negated any efficiencies gained during the automated lookup via API calls.  In addition, we found the proprietary data sets to be limited with respect to MHP's.
3. What automations do you have for maintaining/updating data in your database?  JJ:  We tried various automation methods, including API calls to proprietary property data sets, but couldn't get the result set returned from API calls to be consistent.  In addition, we haven't found a very robust data set from which to make API calls.
4. What marketing methods are working best for you?Email, direct mail letters, direct mail flyers, cold calling, brokers calling on your behalf, something else?  JJ:  We utilize all methods and all of them are pretty low yeild.  Recently, I have focused more energy on working with brokers to work the list of owners.

We just bought a park in San Antonio, TX and will be bringing in ~40 new homes over the next 1-2 years. We are not certain about the Texas MHA membership requirements and/or Texas DHCA licensing requirements and are hoping to connect with park owners in TX who have navigated this path before.

Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA):

We seek insight into the TDHCA licensing types. We want to own and operate parks in Texas while also filling in vacant lots with new and used homes. It’s unclear to us which type(s) of licenses we need in order to execute this plan:

1. Retailer - we will be moving in new / used homes.  Does this qualify as selling new homes if we rely on the CASH program?
2. Broker
3. Installer - we don't plan to do the installation ourselves but we do plan to have new homes moved in.  
4. All of the above
5. Some combination of 1-3

Texas MHA:

It seems that a TDHCA license is needed in order to join the Texas MHA as a community owner. Is this true?  Are there ways around this?

It’s a stable business and necessary service, for sure, but doesn’t have much pricing power or growth opportunities.  It’s also highly regulated and subject to liability as you’re effectively a utility company.  If buying it cheap, it may be worth pursuing.  Otherwise, it may not be worth the hassle.

We’re in the same situation for a park we’re buying in San Antonio.  I recommend obtaining a sample lease agreement from the state MHA and then working with your attorney to make it fit your needs.  You will definitely want to get residents on the new lease agreements so that you can manage the park in a professional manner and enforce rules.

@Gulliver R., we are buying a park now in NC that has a contaminated water well.  We have been through the process Frank describes above.  Feel free to reach out to me if you want to discuss this in detail.  We were alarmed by this issue at first but began to get comfortable as we spoke with others such as Mike Renz (Renz & Associates), Phillip Merrill (Merrill Water Systems), the well operator, and the local water officials.  This is an issue that usually can be solved.  However, it is critical to involve professionals,  budget for the cost of repairs & maintenance, and define the cost and timeline for several backup options.  Thousands of rural homes are serviced by water wells, so while it’s popular to pursue parks on city services, wells are quite common and worth considering.

All valid points above.  While we shy away from POH’s, we understand that they are part of the nature of the business and have run into several operator who are able to make them work well in the right markets.  I recently enjoyed this podcast episode from Ryan Narus’ Mobile Home Parks In Real Life:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mobile-home-parks-in-real-life-mhp-irl/id1365784637?mt=2&i=1000422975178