Trailer parks could be very profitable business, but only if they are kept up.
According to the Guardian, “It is a market that has not been lost on some of the country’s richest and most high-profile investors. Sam Zell’s Equity LifeStyle Properties (ELS) is the largest mobile home park owner in America, with controlling interests in nearly 140,000 parks. In 2014, ELS made $777m in revenue, helping boost Zell’s near-$5bn fortune.”
Warren Buffett, the nation’s second-richest man with a $72 billion fortune, owns the biggest mobile home manufacturer in the US, Clayton Homes, and the two biggest mobile home lenders, 21st Mortgage Corporation and Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance Company. Buffett’s trailer park investments will feature heavily at his annual meeting this weekend, which will be attended by more than 40,000 shareholders in Omaha.
In the early days, towns were grateful to accept trailer home projects as a way to earn somewhat extra tax dollars, and as a venue to service both families on tight incomes and the elderly wishing to get away with a smaller, simpler lifestyle.
Roughly 20 million Americans live in mobile homes, once billed as low-cost living. It was an ideal fit. People either bought manufactured homes for what they considered ideal locations and situations, or in many cases only rented the actual structure. The land the mobile home sat on was rented and the park owner supplied water, road services, sewer hook ups, paid the taxes and accepted overall care of the property.
There were, and are, downsides to mobile home living. The name mobile home soon became replaced with the term manufactured home. One peculiar thing about mobile homes is that most are not really mobile. Once it has been lowered onto a pad, a manufactured home can be expensive or even impossible to relocate intact. That reality can make the residents of mobile homes particularly vulnerable to rent hikes and abuses. State and federal laws often prohibited the actual relocation of the mobile homes due to updated standards in building over the years.
That put many of mobile home users at the mercy of the property owners. Over the years, it was necessary to raise rents for updates, or as new corporations replaced the former ‘Mom and Pop’ operations.
Too often mobile park owners looked at their bottom line as profits dwindled and costs to maintain the status quo rose.
Updated electrical services, old sewer lines, property conditions and decaying, abandoned mobile homes became a nightmare.
This left many mobile home parks and the industry in a downward spiral and with unscrupulous bargain hunters, willing to walk away once the park became a money burden.
In turn, mobile/manufactured home owners and renters became unwitting victims. Most could not afford to walk away from either past investments, or lacked the income for any alternative.
Municipalities where trailer parks were once readily accepted, now found that the properties became a burden.
Attempts to bring unwilling property owners into conformity and abiding by regulations was the headache of code enforcement, state health code enforcers and eventually the town boards.
Trailer park problems filled the news, as sewers overflowed, electrical services stopped working and property values plummeted.
For decades, trailer park homes in Wayne County followed the trend. Recently the Canal Side Mobile Park in the Town of Lyons made headlines as residents lacked adequate electrical service. Months went by as the resident owners/renters became pawns in the ensuing battle. As electrical services were slowly brought into focus, more, long-term problems surfaced.
Earlier this year, many county and community agencies in Wayne County found themselves in unfamiliar territory – a community was in trouble, and it was not the kind of trouble for which municipal plans and guidelines were prepared. Canal Side Mobile Home Park, with the prolonged power outage during one of the hottest parts of the year, put residents through physical, emotional and financial stress; and their hardship was made worse by the fact that the local health and human services sector was largely unprepared to respond to their specific circumstances.
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