“Trailer Parks” are making the news – not because of something the residents are doing, but because of who is buying them…
Bloomberg recently ran a story titled “Trailer Parks Lure Wall Street Investors Looking for Double-Wide Returns” about the influx of investors looking to increase their yield by getting into the mobile home park business.
A wave of new investors are following in the path of Warren Buffet, Sam Zell and the Carlyle Group LP as they turn to the mobile home park industry.
Apparently, the word is getting out about the profitability of mobile home parks and the upside potential of parks that are in need of repairs.
While it’s easy to vilify Wall Street investors, hedge fund managers and tech superstars for seeking a better return, the reality is most end up adding much needed improvements in the form of better management, infrastructure and regular maintenance.
Investing In “Trailer Parks” Can Yield Significant Returns Relative to Other Options
In many cases, you’ll find parks without individual water meters for each pad (a pad is the concrete pad normally found in each mobile home lot) with the seller paying large water bills which can be transferred to tenants (who often reduce usage once they are paying their own bills directly). In other cases, you may find deferred maintenance problems, potholes, or infrastructure problems which can quickly improve the marketability of the park once rectified.
While deferred maintenance is often easy to fix if you have the funds (or access to credit lines), a far larger challenge is to find and train a park manager you can trust to run your park, which most likely will not be in the same location where you live.
An Easy Solution to Train Your Mobile Home Park Manager
One of the reasons we created Mobile Home Park Classroom was to create an end-to-end training program for mobile home park managers (or trailer park managers if you prefer the term used by Bloomberg). But perhaps the biggest reason we created the course (based on over 3 generations of experience running some of the nicest parks in our city), was to create a solid, repeatable training program that a new manager could complete on his or her own time, with little to no additional training from ownership.
Whether you are just getting into the business or if you are an established owner, you have probably realized that training new or existing park managers is a time consuming process and the reality is that you’ll probably have more than one park manager during the time you own your mobile home park.
What’s more, if you didn’t grow up in the business like I did, taking over a park, hiring a manager (often an existing resident in the park), and then training that manager can be a daunting task unless you have a background in multi-family housing or property management.
How to Automate The Process of Training Your Current and Future Park Managers
Many of our existing Mobile Home Park Classroom owners purchased the course specifically to train their current and future park managers. Others purchase the course to take advantage of the forms included inside the course, which we use to run our own parks.
If you’re like Dan Weissman, one of the park investors who graduated from working at Goldman Sachs and then a hedge fund to his new role as a mobile home park owner, having a training program you can immediately plug a manager into represents a huge time savings while also lowering the learning curve for both you and the manager.
How to Find a Mobile Home Park Manager & Manage Them Remotely
If you’re a new investor, you might be happy when you find out that an entire module inside the course shows you how to find a superstar manager. Another module teaches you how to manage your park’s manager from anywhere – something you’ll need to know how to do since most of the mobile home parks for sale are scattered across the country.
If you are looking for a plug-and-play solution to training your manager(s) for years to come, we invite you to learn more about the Mobile Home Park Classroom course today.
