Frank Rolfe and Dave Reynolds both authored Mobile Home University. They also co-authored RV Park University and are both majorly successful at purchasing RV parks. The address they have on file is 4833 Front St., Unit B-313, Castle Rock, CO. 80104.
Frank Rolfe
Frank has been investing in Mobile Home Parks for close to 20 years. He has owned and managed hundreds of mobile home parks within this same timeframe. He purchased his first mobile home for just $10,000 down south of downtown Dallas. Someone bought this same park for $1,525,000 10 years later, so he had a net gain of over $1,000,000. He and his partner Dave, are the fifth largest mobile home park owners in the U.S. They both own over 250 communities in 25 states. All this success started with a single Mobile Home Park called Glenhaven, out of Dallas, TX.
He needed to learn what he was doing when he purchased this property and how things worked. He would have passed on buying that park if he knew how bad it was. He got stuck with a master-metered gas and electric system, which is one of the worst things a Mobile Home Park owner could deal with. It also had a tenant base with a lot of shady characters.
Many dregs of society sought refuge there. In the back of the park, if you can believe this, was a wrestling ring. A few years down the road, he transformed this park into a friendly family community where parents weren’t afraid to have their children ride their bicycles up and down the streets. Five years after this, the park’s value increased by about $1,000,000. Because Glenhaven turned out to be so successful, he started purchasing other parks. The target parks he was going after were all in good locations but had many poor management issues.
Affordable housing and buying Mobile Home Parks are synonymous with each other. You can take any Mobile Home Park like Glenhaven, manage it correctly, and it will provide the residents with a better quality of life compared to an overpriced apartment. With a Mobile Home, you have space between you and the next family, so issues like kids running around and hearing it on your ceiling or banging on the walls, don’t happen. With a Mobile Home, you’ll also get a small yard and always have a place to park. With some apartments, you might have to walk a distance to get to your car.
He realized one day, he could get all the tenants he wanted if he could deliver affordable detached dwellings to tenants. This has been his model for managing mobile homes ever since, finding Mobile Home Parks that needed some TLC, providing quality living for tenants, and capitalizing on the increased value of the property. It’s a win/win, tenants get a nicer place to live, and he gets financially compensated in the process.
The boot camp-style course he has created on Mobile Home Park Investing is a leader in Commercial Real Estate. Life is too short not to learn from the best when you want to pursue a particular investment avenue. Frank and Dave have worked with hundreds of investors and shown them how to purchase a Mobile Home Park and how to operate it. You will learn from the same life experiences they encountered. In addition, you will gain lots of experience by performing due diligence on parks before you buy them. They have done due diligence on hundreds of parks.
After finishing Mobile Home University, many students went out and purchased a park. Then they go back and tell Frank and Dave about their experience and how great things are going. These are the types of things they love hearing about. Frank admits he wishes he had had this type of guidance when he started; it would have saved him a lot of headaches. Luckily, in the end, things worked out okay. Frank lives with his wife and daughter in a small town in Missouri. He is active in the community, is part of the Lions Club, participates on the school board, and is the Chairman of the Landmarks Commission.
He graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in Economics.
Dave Reynolds
Dave is very popular in the Mobile Home Park industry for a few different reasons. He is the fifth largest owner of Mobile Home Parks in the United States. He owns 25,000 mobile home lots within 25 states. He is also popular because of MobileHomeParkStore.com, an internet site in the Mobile Home niche he started. This site offers 750 to 1,000 Mobile Home Parks currently for sale. It also gets 20,000 page views each day. He also owns a website that sells manufactured homes, which is MHBay.com. This site receives over 70,000 page views every day. Dave is considered an expert in this space and an author who knows his stuff.
Dave has been investing in Mobile Homes for close to 20 years. When he entered this space, there was little competition. Therefore, it didn’t pique the interest of most investors. Because of this, getting a head start was simple. Most all Mobile Home Parks were owned by mom and pops, and they were very unprofessional and behind the times. He started Mobile Home Park Store because back then, no company offered anyone the ability to place their MHP for sale. In addition, the internet had just begun maturing, and he was in an excellent position to make things happen. Also, more investors started to show interest in buying Mobile Home Parks.
Dave owned the first park in Limon, CO. There were only about 50 lots in this park. He acquired the property using cash advances on his credit card. Back when he was doing this, he never dreamed some day he would own over 21,000 lots. Before he started investing in these, he already knew the economic benefits. He didn’t start big, but he was persistent. He kept buying and sometimes even sold parks that met specific parameters.
Investors constantly approach him and ask him if there’s more opportunity available. He always tells them yes, they have purchased over 15,000 mobile home spots over the last three years. If this isn’t an opportunity, I don’t know what is. While Dave was buying and selling parks and working on his internet site, he also authored books targeting the Mobile Home Investment niche. Part of why he wrote these books was to reflect on his mistakes. He also wanted to add more professionalism to the industry.
His earlier writings were the backbone of what Frank and himself offer, now a life-changing course and book camp that has become very popular. Appraisers, investors, bankers, and anyone who wants to learn how to purchase Mobile Home Parks is welcome to participate. Dave feels Frank and himself were the original pioneers when it came to writing about commercial real estate, and almost all the information that was currently out there was fluff with no facts. The few very successful investors wanted to keep their secrets private. As a result, the authors of some books needed to learn what they were talking about.
Their course and boot camp has achieved a significant level of success because real-life experience is the core of the entire package. These real-life experiences spring from 275 mobile home parks. Dave has a wife and three sons and lives in Colorado. He graduated from Mesa State University and holds a B.S. in Accounting.
Introduction to Mobile Home University
If you want to earn money with Commercial Real Estate, the affordable housing sector is where its at. Twenty percent of Americans make less than $20,000 yearly, and many live in Mobile Homes. The demand for these is at a record high right now. Some people work their entire lives and still can’t afford an up-scale retirement. This is because of family or other financial issues that have gotten in their way. Owning a mobile home is a way for someone to live and retire, retaining dignity and purpose.
The mission of MHU is to allow you to piggyback on the authors real-life experiences, and teach you how to evaluate, identify, perform due diligence, negotiate, finance, renegotiate, and effectively manage and improve Mobile Home Parks. Remember that Frank and Dave don’t sugarcoat anything; you will get the good, bad, and ugly. All these aspects are openly discussed.
The people who make big money are the ones that own the mobile home parks in which these residents reside. This trend will continue upward over the coming years. Even Warren Buffet is involved in the manufacturing of Mobile Homes. He takes part in financing them and is one of the most prominent players in the U.S. in this space. In the United States, there needs to be more affordable housing options. For every new development, there’s enough demand to occupy three or more developments. U.S. household formations are occurring faster than the available supply.
If you’ve tried renting an apartment recently, there is a waiting list in many cases, and the vetting process is pretty extreme. The average rent prices in most areas of the country are at least $1,000.00 per month. I live in San Diego County, and the average rent in San Diego is 2,989.00. Let’s face it, many would live in a Mobile Home any day rather than pay for this. If you could fractionalize the amount of monthly rent you pay by living in a Mobile Home for $500.00 per month, just imagine the demand for this. I live in Oceanside, CA., and the average space rent in this area for most MH parks is $500.00 per month. This doesn’t include paying a grip for the home itself. Home prices start at $200,000 in this CA. area.
The million-dollar question now is, how do you position yourself as an investor in the middle of this affordable housing trend? The simple answer to this question is by purchasing a Mobile Home park. Some parks are bound to succeed, and some won’t. You can purchase a winner, and you can buy a loser, and you need to know the ins and outs and what makes them different. Mobile Home University will teach you these differences. They have dozens of mobile home park investing articles you can start reading on their website. This is a free education they provide without you having to purchase anything.
They also offer a free ebook on Mobile Home Investing, available for instant download if you subscribe to their free newsletter.
They offer a landmark course which we will present shortly. This boot camp and system has been featured on hundreds of television outlets and newspapers, from Bloomberg to the New York Times. They have been offering MHU for over a decade. Frank and Dave combined have over $800 million in assets. Together you can benefit from their combined 50+ years of experience. They also collectively own over 27,000 lots spread out among almost 30 states.
Their meat and potatoes book is called The Mobile Home Park Investing Home Study Course. We will be diving into this in deep detail soon. This course is the best of what they offer. It offers one thousand pages of reading material and fifty hours of CDs.
They also offer a separate Mobile Home Park Investing Boot Camp. This three-day event will teach you what you need to know to make flourishing deals on Mobile Home Parks. One ticket is $1,749.00, and two tickets are $2,499.00.
Finally, they offer a Mobile Home Park Manager Training Course. This course will teach you how to get your team on the right track. In addition, you will learn how to become a certified community manager. This course is priced at $299 and comes with a money-back guarantee.
They even have a course you can invest in if you’re looking to invest in single Mobile Homes versus Mobile Home Parks. This course is distributed through online video training. It’s called the Mobile Home Investing & Repair Course and sells for $299.00. There is no information about money-back guarantees for this particular course.
Many large-scale investors use Mobile Home University to get the information they need before they enter this space.
They also offer a free monthly investment newsletter. All their back issues are posted online, starting from September 2011. They have 12 years of back issues you can read free if you want to add to your learning process. And finally, they have also archived years of podcasts you can listen to. These are free as well.
They offer two physical books you can purchase on the Apple iBook store or Amazon Kindle. They are Mobile Home Park Investing and An Insider’s Guide to Buying and Selling Used Mobile Homes. They are both considered eBooks since you can only download them.
They also have free investing audios, articles, and videos you can listen to. But, again, these are separate from the podcasts.
Regarding contacting the company, you can send them an email through a website form you fill out and submit. You can also call them directly during business hours. They also offer a live chat feature on their website. I just checked and it even came up at 3:03 am PST.
Mobile Home University Forum
They have an open discussion MHU Forum you can participate in on their website. If you need advice or have a question you need to be answered, you can post it here. Others use this to announce a Mobile Home Park for sale.
My Mobile Home Investment Story
Brian Garvin here. In 2005, I visited my uncle in Belle Fourche, SD. He lived in a small trailer about 1/4 mile from Montana, right off highway 85. He paid $12,000 for the double wide which included a small shed. It was a lovely little gated property, and he paid $135.00 per month for space rent back then. While visiting, the owner walked up to me and asked if I would purchase the park for $200,000. At the time it didn’t interest me, so I said no thanks.
But I thought about it, walked around the park, and counted 16 mobile homes of different shapes and sizes. It was one of the older types of parks: no fancy frills, just the mobile homes with a little yard and dirt roads. I was doing well at that time and had the capital to buy it or at least try to ask for a better deal. The grass was always greener somewhere else, or so I thought, and I spent the money on other investments and opportunities.
It’s a sore spot to say this, so I’ll keep it short and say things didn’t work out. If I had purchased that park in a tranquil location, I would have made $2,160 each month and lived in the “manager’s spot.” This would be in addition to my VA disability income, and financially speaking, I would have been snug. I know hindsight is always 20/20, and I’m living the dream now, but looking back, I always think I should have gone for that deal.
If we met at a restaurant, this is a story I would have told you over a cup of coffee, so I thought it might interest you. The one other short message I wanted to relay to you is I’ve lived in a mobile home for 11 years in Oceanside, CA. at Cavalier Mobile Estates. This was a family park, not a 55+ senior park. I know the type of people that live in these. Some collect EBT, some are hard workers who receive no benefits. Many live on their military pensions or social security retirement benefits.
A few are disabled, so most mobile homes, especially the newer ones, fully accommodate disabled people. An older friend of mine who lived in the same park said her food budget was $100.00 per month, and she could never go over this no matter what. Many mobile home residents are real, salt-of-the-earth people who want to get through life spending a little less than the economy in that area demands. There is a long line of these people in every neighborhood who want to buy a Mobile Home.
Mobile Home University Pros & Cons
Pros
- Frank & Dave are true teachers.
- Mobile Homes are notoriously easy to finance.
- Combined they have over 60 years of investing experience.
- They are pioneers of authoring in the MHP space.
- They are the 5th largest mobile home park owners in the U.S.
- Everything they teach is based on real-life experiences.
- They own over 25,000 mobile home lots.
- You will acquire a unique skillset when you learn this trade.
- Mobile Homes are a unique and limited asset.
- Owning a mobile home is $1,000 per month cheaper than paying rent.
- This is a landmark course announced on TV and published in papers.
- This course has been sold successfully for over 10 years.
- Authors collectively own over $800 million in RV parks and Mobile Home Parks.
- They collectively own over 27,000 mobile home lots.
- They offer in person training.
- They offer a convenient 3 payment plan on most of their courses.
- You can purchase through PayPal as well as with a major credit or debit card.
- They offer a course on how to buy, sell, and renovate single mobile homes.
- They have free audios, articles, videos, and a forum on their website.
- They offer a separate course on how to train mobile home park managers.
Cons
- They aren’t listed with the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Business Consumers Alliance (BCA), or Trustpilot.
Products and Services Frank & Dave Offer
From this point forward, we will review all the products and services Frank and Dave offer. This way you can decide which is the best fit for you. We will start with their most famous course, then move on to the rest.
Mobile Home Park Home Study Course
Bundle #1
- How to Purchase a MHP – Seven CD-ROMs
- How to Sell a MHP – Five CD-ROMs
- How to Manage a MHP – Six CD-ROMs
- How to Improve a MHP – Six CD-ROMs
Transcripts come with this in the form of a PDF file you can download. You can follow as you listen to these files. This PDF is 675 pages.
They also have a Mobile Home Park Investment Manual you will receive.
This is over 540 pages covering selling, buying, managing, operating, and fixing up mobile home parks and homes.
You will receive all the contracts and forms you will need to purchase and manage a MHP.
You will receive the 10/20 Method book as well. This discusses proven ways to cash in with Mobile Home Parks.
You will receive a collection of Hourly Long Weekly Mentoring Calls
These calls are considered a special bonus. You will not find them for free on their website; they are reserved for purchasers of this course. All the current events taking place in the Mobile Home Industry are what these calls are all about.
You will also have access to their weekly hour-long mentoring calls. When they have these calls, they are open to their students’ questions and commonly discuss specific deals. If you are serious about learning these methods, these calls will get you on point. Just have some questions ready before you jump on the call.
If you added up the value of all this information, it would cost more than $2,500.00 if purchased separately. However, Frank and Dave want to make this affordable to anyone serious about Mobile Home Investing. You can buy this course for the price of two monthly lot rents. This is the most complete course on mobile home park investing you can ever buy.
You can buy the physical edition for $597.00. The digital version will only cost $547.00. You will get the digital version automatically if you purchase the physical edition. You can pay for any of these in three payments. The physical edition would be three payments of $199.00. The digital edition would be three payments of $182.33.
Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discover are accepted.
The Mobile Home Park Home Study Course Bundle #1 comes with a 90-day, 100% money-back guarantee.
Bundle #2
Bundle #2 contains everything in Bundle #1, plus some juicy extras.
You will receive a copy of 30 Days of Successful Due Diligence. This book is more than 200 pages. It deep dives into the due diligence process. If you purchase this book separately, it would cost $199.00.
You will also receive Mobile Home Park Investing Summit Videos. These were from two days they spent in Anaheim, California. They include content from Frank, Dave, and several other industry experts. These videos have a $200.00 value.
They cover the following topics:
- 1031 Exchange Strategies
- Environmental Concerns
- Private Utilities
- Management
- Due Diligence
- Financing
- Software
- Sub-Metering
- Investing
- Insurance
The price for Bundle #2 is $997.00 for the physical version and the digital version. If you just want the digital version, you will pay $897.00. You can pay for both of these with three payments spread out over 90 days. They will be $332.33 for the physical plus the digital version. The three payments will be $299.00 each for the digital version.
Bundle #2 also includes a 90-day full money-back guarantee. They ask that you return the physical product in good condition, so they can resell the copy you returned to someone else. Remember Bundle #2 is the entire enchilada. It includes everything Bundle #1 has. You will receive over 1,000 pages to read and hundreds of hours of audio you can listen to. No theory, fluff, or glossing over subjects here. This course was made for professional mobile home park owners.
The Mobile Home Park Investment 10/20 Book
This is an introductory book; it’s different from the big meat and potatoes course they offer. There are two books you will receive when you buy this. You will get the book on the 10/20 System and the other 70 Deal Book. They will also show you why they canceled over 30 deals. Right now, they both own 17,000 mobile home parks across 22 states, and each day they acquire new parks. Trust me, Frank and Dave are the real deal when it comes to investing in RV parks and Mobile Home Parks.
The success they have now came with an upfront price. Throughout their careers, they made millions in costly mistakes. They will share their success stories and these mistakes in “Over 70 Mobile Home Park Deals and 30 Bad Deal Bonus Book.” Luckily, the profit numbers outweighed the mistakes in the long run. By learning all their mistakes before you get started, you could use their mistakes as a history lesson and avoid these mistakes during any future transactions you are involved with.
They discuss the lessons learned from the 70 deals they were involved with. Some of these lessons they will teach come up repeatedly, so they are good to know. The guide will teach you how to buy and operate a MHP. It’s the same model most successful mobile home park owners use as a guideline.
The Mobile Home Park 10/20 Investment Method can be purchased on the Apple eBookstore of the Amazon Kindle. You can also buy it directly from their website. If you want the eBook, it is $49.95. If you want the paperback and the eBook, it is $59.95.
Finally, they offer a 90-day full money-back guarantee. They ask that you return the paperback version in resalable condition, and they will give you all your money back without asking any questions.
Mobile Home Park Investing Boot Camp
You will pick up on skills that took Frank and Dave 25 years each to learn. Leaving this event, you should be ready to make offers and purchase mobile home parks.
Also, you will receive support after you leave the event through Quick Deal Reviews. You show them the park you are looking to buy, and they will tell you that property’s potential.
You will also access hour long mentoring calls Frank and Dave host each week. When you have questions, they have answers. What’s remarkable is you will have their cell phone numbers. This way, if you are in the middle of a transaction and need emergency advice, you will get it. Think of this as a never-ending Boot Camp. Knowledge-wise, you will be in the top 1% of mobile home park investors after you leave Mobile Home Park Investing Boot Camp.
At BrianGarvin.com, I tell people, if you want to excel in a particular industry, the way to do this properly is to learn from the best. You will always excel when you learn from people more experienced in a specific skill set than yourself. Many students have purchased a Mobile Home Park within 90 days of attending this training. All the coaching they give you after book camp is free. Many other high-end real estate events charge upwards of $10,000, and once the event is over, you are on your own. This is not the case here.
Some of the attendees of this event are appraisers, new investors, stock analysts, bankers, and mobile home park owners who want to learn ways to expand their empires or improve upon what they already own. Even the kids of some of the largest MHP owners in the U.S. are part of this training. This is a well-respected event that is popular throughout the space.
The cost to attend is $1,749.00 for one person. You can make three payments of $583.00.
For two people, it will cost $2,499.00. You can also make three payments of $833.00.
You can pay through credit or debit card or PayPal.
The Mobile Home Community Manager Course
This program took Frank and Dave almost two years to create. They use this course within their own company. They have over 100 of their own employees that go through this course. This course was a better way to train them. This is an opportunity for you to piggyback off what they did and use this course to train your Mobile Home Park managers.
Here is how the course works.
They broke the daily MHP managerial tasks down into 17 modules. On the continuity side, they also have a managers-only forum and a managers-only question and answer hour every week. In addition, every month, they will have a managers-only special show. It will focus on and highlight one of these 17 modules in greater detail. It also provides some general motivation and empowers investors to do their best job. So how do you benefit from this course?
You no longer have to go out and train the manager face to face over those grueling, excruciatingly boring weekends like Frank and Dave used to do. Instead, you can make them take the course, like a defensive driving course. This will get them up to speed quickly on all the key facts and does it in a better manner than you can do. When you go out to train your manager, what are you doing? You’re going to rack up travel and hotel costs, and this entire time you want to be at home. You still need to find out if this manager will stick or not. You might train the manager and have to let them go after a week.
By doing this, you could be more focused. You are distracted, your cell phone is ringing, and your wife is calling. This course is concentrated, and there are no distractions. There is no fluff, and no time is wasted. Here’s what you need to do in this job, how it works, how to fill out every form and notice, and what you need to do every single day of the week. They can view all this material without any distractions and without having to interact with you, and everyone’s happy.
The managers are now better trained and are more effective at their job. You’re happy because you saved all the time and expense of preparing them. Now they are trained better than you can do it yourself. Then, with the continuity package, they keep them pumped up and continuing to learn. They get schooled on the theory that being a manager isn’t just a routine job; it’s more of a way to build a career and benefit the community. Not only you as the owner but all of your tenants as well will have the quality of their lives improved. They are very excited about this product.
They feel you should check it out and think it will revolutionize how managers are trained and how they are treated going forward. This is called The Certified Community Manager Program. Only Mobile Home University offers this course. This is the new way to train and empower your managers.
The cost for this course is $299.00. It comes with a 100% money-back guarantee. They didn’t specify a time limit for this guarantee, but most other products offer 90-day guarantees. There is no three-payment plan on this deal. You can pay via debit card, credit card, or PayPal.
The Ultimate Mobile Home Investing & Repair Course
The average income of a single person in the U.S. is $63,214.00. This sounds impressive. However, 20% of Americans scratch by on $20,000 per year or less. People are demanding Mobile Homes now more than ever. The rich always seem to get richer, and the poor stay poor. The number of ordinary people needing affordable housing will increase in the following years. You can be on the ground floor of this opportunity by investing in single mobile homes. This course offers videos that will teach you everything you need to know to become an expert mobile home investor.
You will learn how to renovate one properly, negotiate, and learn to make sales. While many will tell you that investing in mobile homes is common sense, there are technical and psychological aspects of the market you need to be aware of. If you have a good handle on these, you will be ahead of the game and have the edge you need to be successful.
It’s one thing to know a growing trend exists; it’s another to take action and earn money on these trends. There are legal aspects you need to concern yourself with, various business models you should be aware of, and the psychology of learning how your customers think. This is the most comprehensive and accessible mobile home investing course ever. It’s the only and last one you will need. It is comprised of 16 video modules. These will all arm you with actionable advice and are step-by-step know-how videos. You will become a master of mobile home investing in the United States after you finish this.
Attention to detail is the key, no matter what property market you are in. This course is clear and straightforward and will teach you all aspects of this industry. The weaker the economy becomes, the more opportunity you will have to buy mobile homes. You will learn about the laws, risks, history, how to locate mobile homes, price negotiation, determine the condition, talk with the park owner, renovation and repairs, advertising, selling or renting, collecting rent, title transfers, and more.
You will also receive 34 videos showing you the most common repairs. These are paint-by-the-numbers videos. You will learn how to find the best deals and avoid the risks of mobile home investing.
You can purchase The Ultimate Mobile Home Investing & Repair Course for $299.00. They accept all major credit and debit cards, as well as PayPal. No guarantee was mentioned for this course.
Mobile Home Park Investment Due Diligence Manual
First, you will get this manual free when you purchase the Mobile Home Park Home Study Course. Walking around with this guide is the same as a due diligence expert walking next to you. This could teach you how to find flaws in properties that open up the discussion for renegotiation, will make sure you don’t overpay, and will protect your down payment.
If you want the digital and physical versions, you will pay $199.00, and there will be no shipping costs. For the digital version, you will only pay $159.00. This course comes with a 90-day full money-back guarantee. If you want a refund during this period, return the physical version in a condition they can package and resell to someone else, and they will give you all your money back.
Mobile Home Park Quick Deal Review
This is a straight done-for-you service. Let’s say, for example, you found a Mobile Home Park you like and are considering investing in this property:
- You need to find out whether this is a good deal.
- Send them all the information you have on the property, and Frank and Dave will dissect all this and tell you if this property is a winner or a loser.
- You can ask all the questions you want on this property.
- In the last ten years, they have given their opinion on thousands of mobile home parks. Once you provide all the information they need, you will be contacted within 48 hours with their opinion.
After you use their Quick Deal Review service, please realize this is well-spent money. You can apply the money you spent utilizing this service as a down payment for the Mobile Home Park Home Study Course. This service is valuable because you want to avoid putting a loser park under a contract that would cost you thousands.
The price for this service is $399.00. They take all major credit cards and PayPal.
Taking Action
In the beginning, many people focus too much on what they earn and not enough on what they learn. Every single success Frank and Dave had was predicated on mistake after mistake. They also both took risks to get to where they are now. Most people call these failures, but they are not failures if you learn something from them. Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before he created the light bulb. Everyone looks up to the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ of the world, and look at how many times they failed. If you’re not taking action, being decisive and making things happen, and failing, then you’re not trying to be successful.
The key to becoming successful is to be committed to the process. Mobile Home Parks are the best investment because you can use these to make passive income. What’s perfect for you might make someone else’s mouth sour. It’s the best investment because it works. You can find a millionaire in everything. Remember, the “best” investment is the one you pick. Pick something, go with it, and stop jumping from thing to thing. The best CRM is the one that you use. It’s action and consistency that matters.
The Story of Frank Rolfe
He grew up in Dallas, went to Stanford University, and finished his degree in Economics within three years. Back then, if you wanted to go to a prestigious business school, it was recommended that you start a business and write about it as your application essay. He got out of college a year ahead of all his peers, so he had one year to start a business and then sell it or shut it down so it could be on his application. He needed to figure out where to start, and someone advised him to get into the Billboard industry, which he knew very little about. So he did a little research and found Billboards were a perfect choice.
There were no qualifications to get into this; it wasn’t capital-intensive and was easy to liquidate. So he jumped into this business and failed miserably. For 8-9 months, he didn’t have a single billboard lease, nothing to show for it. Then, as he was getting extremely depressed, he scored his first Billboard lease. Then in rapid succession, he scored two more. He started building these three but had another batch behind them. Now he realized he had started getting good at this.
This was when he decided to delay his application to business school for one more year. This way, he would get all 10 of his Billboards built and have a chance to sell them. After the end of this year, he had more pending, so he never went back to business school. He kept building Billboards at about two per month without help. Fourteen years later, he was the largest private owner of Billboards in Dallas and Fort Worth. He owned about 300 billboards and assumed he would do this for the rest of his life. As soon as he thought Billboards were the only thing he would do, he got a call from a company that just went public and bought him out at a price he couldn’t refuse.
In 1996 he was suddenly self-unemployed, having just sold his Billboards to a big public company. Now his problem is what was he supposed to do. He was 36 and not ready to retire and play golf with people. So he started asking people what’s a hot industry to get involved with. He started calling all his 300 Billboard landowners. He called everyone from topless bar owners to dairy queens. Finally, he called one Billboard owner who suggested he purchase a Mobile Home Park from him for $400,000. $10,000 down and carry $390,000 for thirty years. This put Frank in the Mobile Home Park business, which all materialized with that one conversation on the phone.
Starting with that one mobile home park, Frank and Dave have built up to the 5th largest owners of Mobile Home Parks in the U.S. This is a repeat of the Billboards story, but this time with Mobile Home Parks. Now they have about 300-400 employees. If you took a mobile home and put it on either side of the road, they would stretch out 100 miles. They maintain and monitor about 100 miles of roads, water pipes, sewer pipes, and electrical lines, and they are virtually a city. They own about 20,000 individual mobile home lots, which house about 60,000 people. They manage a city. He could be a public works administrator.
Frank thinks everyone has their ideas of risk and reward. The first Mobile Home Park deal he jumped into was relatively low risk. He refers to himself as a risk-averse person. What attracted him to the industry in the early days was that the sellers would finance, otherwise known as carry paper. His second deal was $65,000 with $5,000 down. His third deal was $250,000 with $50,000 down. After that, he just kept this progression moving forward. This entire time, he felt good about his life because he had a lot of debt, but it was non-recourse seller debt. Here’s what non-recourse seller debt is.
Let’s say you are a mom-and-pop, and you decide to sell your property. If they received all cash for the property, first you would have to pay the IRS, then state income tax. These two governmental entities would eat up one-third of the money. Then you take the other 70% net profit, go to a stock broker and ask them what you can get me. They will ask you if you are a risk taker or more conservative. Mom and pops are always nonrisky and end up in Treasury Bills or CDs, paying about 2%. Frank will pay them somewhere between 5-6% in seller financing land. This is 2-3 times what they can make with a “conservative” investment.
If they carry the financing, they will only pay income tax on the funds once they are received. There are two reasons why carrying paper is better for them. First, they earn interest on what they would have paid in income tax. They also get a much higher interest rate. There is so much seller financing in the industry for these two reasons. He spoke to someone who retired from the industry that said it was impossible to obtain debt for Mobile Home Parks back in the 1960s. Since almost all the parks were built in the 1950s and 1960s, nearly all the moms and pops assume there is no debt.
They almost always offer carry because they assume that any buyer would carry because they couldn’t get a bank loan. The buyer benefits when you have the seller accept debt; there’s no banking stress. You don’t have to go through a committee and do some of these same third-party reports. The other benefit is that they are non-recourse. If the deal goes sour, the most you can lose is your down payment. In his first deal, the most he could have lost was his $10,000 down. This will give the buyer a much larger comfort level.
Another reason it’s essential to obtain seller financing is that a bank doesn’t want to take your property back because they don’t know what to do with it. Banks aren’t in the business of managing property. One thing people should consider when refinancing or taking out financing are closing costs. Closing costs can be massive, especially when you get into higher price ranges. Seller financing deals should be treated as if you were getting traditional bank financing.
You run these through a title company; the seller conveys the title to the buyer and carries back the paper on it. Regarding third-party reports, there is no appraisal or property condition report involved. They do Phase I and a survey, but it is a much lower quality survey than a bank would do. They do a boundary survey when the bank requires an Alta. There are substantial cost savings there. Closing costs themselves are always negotiable. Some moms and pops will want to split these costs. Others will pay all the closing costs, and some won’t pay any. This is calculated into the deal on the front end.
When you work with moms and pops, there’s not necessarily a playbook of how it works because they only did this when they purchased the property back in 1960. Most of these owners could be more sophisticated. As a Mobile Home Park buyer, the rule you should follow is to be easy to sell to, which means you work with the seller. You never want to make them unhappy. If you make things fun and easy, people will want to sell to you.
A Phase I Environmental is a report where you get a licensed and insured environmental engineer, and they look at the property. They report whether it is clean with no environmental contamination or dirty, which means you will have to do a Phase II report to determine how harmful the pollution is. Phase III is your plan to clean things up. In this industry, surviving a lousy Phase I is tough because Mobile Home Parks are far from the top of the pyramid. For a big office building or hospital, if they encounter environmental pollution, they can remediate it. They can throw this into the loan even when it costs millions of dollars. So if a mobile home park Phase I report comes dirty, you almost always have to walk on that deal.
Benefits of Owning a Mobile Home Park
The most important and unusual factor of a Mobile Home Park is that they don’t allow them to be built anymore, so the supply is effectively capped. There are about 44,000 mobile home parks in the United States. This number diminishes a little each year. There are about ten new ones built, and 100 are torn down each year. Something is exciting and rewarding about owning an asset that’s limited and precious. Mobile Home Parks are considered the precious Gems of Real Estate because of the limited supply. This is a huge attraction for most investors, including Frank.
Every mobile home park is one of a kind, it’s rare, and you don’t have to worry about a competitor building one down the street or across the street.
Another thing about Mobile Home Parks that makes them unique is that their customers are stakeholders in the business because they rent the land and own the homes, but Frank owns the land. So the customer and the owner are stuck together in this enterprise. In apartments, the owner owns everything, and the tenant owns nothing, so there is no pride in ownership.
Another benefit is you are just renting out land. Most parks have little or no improvements except a clubhouse, pool, laundry room, and common areas. In a perfectly run Mobile Home Park, the perfect position is where the tenants all own their own homes, and the investor owns the land. In this case, there is minimal repair or maintenance. They don’t have to fix toilets, doors, or anything; they just rent land.
Another reason to be excited about this industry, and this might not sound politically correct, but the lot rents in America are insanely low. No form of math cannot support this. An economist named Charles Becker from Duke University studied them a year ago and determined that, based on economics, mobile home lot rents need to be up at least 50% and even as high as 100%. What happened here was mom and pops never kept up with inflation. If you took the standard mobile home lot rent in 1960, it was about $60.00 per month. That would be equivalent to $500.00 per month in today’s dollars. The average lot rent in the U.S. is only $280.00 per month. So there is massive room to increase the rents, which is a considerable profitability driver.
You’re not trying to take advantage of people. You are trying to bring the parks back up where they need to be based on inflation. And doing this will allow you to reposition the park. With higher rents, you can invest in new capital features and reinvest some of this increased rent money back into the park. It’s a win/win for everyone, but it’s an attraction for people because tenants can come in for a certain amount of rent and know this rent can be raised over time, but they know with increased rent comes a better lifestyle.
Another reason people love this industry is that you’re almost always buying directly from mom-and-pop. Of the 44,000 mobile home parks, only 4,000 are institutionally owned. This makes seller financing very easy in nearly all cases.
The last positive aspect of this industry we will discuss is that the demand for affordable housing is off the charts.
All the above reasons are the key drivers, and investors love it.
Raising Mobile Home Rents
There are two ways you can look at this topic. The first way you can look at this is that people are entitled to low market rents just because and look at the owner as the wrong person for raising the rent.
The other way to look at this is for 10-15 years; they have been getting rent for half of what they should have been paying this entire time. They should be grateful that they had 15 years of meager rent, and you’re just resetting things to where the market is supposed to be. Even though their rent hasn’t been raised, inflation has been increasing. This means the park owner is receiving money now that is worth less and less because of dollar devaluation.
The spin they try to give people is that the parks will all be gone without higher rents. In most markets, apartment rentals are $1,000 more per month than mobile home park rents. If they don’t raise the rent, it will make sense to tear down the park and build an apartment complex. No matter what you say or do, certain people will constantly be agitated about higher rents. But yet, at the same time, some like paying higher rents when the park is managed well, so they will see more services with the rent increases. As a general rule, mobile homes don’t appreciate.
The average lot rent in Denver is now $750.00 per month. A few years ago, it was about $350.00 per month. The prices of many mobile home lots across the U.S. will likely increase in the coming years. Denver is one of the most consolidated markets in the industry. It’s the second-largest mobile home park headquarters located in Denver. Like any innovative business, they ignored what mom-and-pop did and asked themselves what these rents should be. Even after these rent increases, the parks are still full.
There’s no question the rents are going to go up. However, the portrayal of Frank as someone who raises rents haphazardly and opportunistically is incorrect. He recommends at all his seminars and teachings that you don’t abruptly raise rents. Instead, if you need to, do this in slow, manageable increments.
One investor mentioned that he would never invest in Mobile Home Parks. He said his reason is that they keep people in poverty, and the owners take advantage of the poor. This is the craziest comment because mobile home parks solve poverty. Without mobile home parks, you will have many generational renters who are excessively cash-strapped. Frank said he has even had death threats from people in Brazil and other countries, saying he would be damned to hell for taking advantage of the poor.
The typical income of someone living in a Mobile Home Park is about $30,000 to $50,000 yearly. These people are not considered poor. That income doesn’t meet the U.S. definition of poor. A New York Times writer found out when he lived in a 200 space park that all residents were happy. America is stuck in this cage fight between capitalism and socialism. We try to put everything in one of these boxes, but that’s different from where mobile home parks need to be.
When Frank and Dave buy mobile home parks in terrible condition, bring them back to life, pave the streets, fix the water and sewer, and bring in a professional manager, rents go up. People in these parks just marginally live there; they cannot afford to live in the park. Frank feels Section 8 needs more funding, but people that can’t afford to live in a mobile home aren’t the problem of the park owner. For people who manage their money wisely, a mobile home park is an excellent solution because it allows you to save money that you would typically pay for rent.
In case you weren’t aware, there are no mobile home parks in Hawaii. You can’t be in this business and be afraid of the homes. At some point in any investor’s career, you will own a home because someone dies, and the heirs give it to the park. The other thing that can occur is if someone doesn’t pay their rent and runs off, you can acquire the home through abandonment. Then you have to go in, renovate it and sell it. You have to be at least a little adept at the home game, but the ultimate goal is to avoid owning any.
If the home is older, you can gift it to the tenant. Each state except Hawaii has a mobile home association. You can call them and ask them where they post their regulations. If a home is in the 1960s or 1970s, you usually gift the house to whoever is living there. On your 1980s and 1990s homes, based on their condition, 21st mortgage, which is the largest lender of mobile homes in the U.S., have programs to finance these used homes as long as the mortgage is $10,000 or more. So the 1990s homes have value. The 1980s houses may or may not have value based on their state or location. In the 1960s and 1970s homes, you just wanted to give them away to whoever lived in them.
For both, insurance and property tax on a mobile home run about $50.00 each month. Many mobile homes, especially the older ones, need to be built more durably. You can immediately spot the issues if you go down to the factories and see how they’re made. In many cases, when they are building them, they install the carpet and pad and then put the interior walls on top of them. In a mobile home, none of the interior walls are load-bearing. Also, many parts of a mobile home are made of plastic versus metal they use in a traditional home. You have to treat these homes very gingerly. Some residents are perfect for mobile homes.
You can have a retired couple in a mobile home that has been there since the 1960s, they move away, and the house is immaculate on the inside. This is because they were in tune with the lifestyle that home required. You could also have a family in one of these, and they could beat it to death. An older mobile home is like fine china; they are not built as sturdy as many other housing types by design under the supervision of HUD so that they can remain inexpensive.
This industry is not about poor people, misfits, and all those stereotypes you see on television, although there are some parks like that. Instead, this industry is based on high-density sub-divisions shared by people with the same aspirations, goals, and pride of ownership as everybody else.
There are Two Policies With any Mobile Home Park.
No pay, no stay. If you don’t pay your rent, you will be evicted in the same month you didn’t pay. They add a late fee if you don’t pay your rent by the 5th. Then, they send you a demand letter based on the state’s requirements. Then they file an eviction notice. It’s unfair to those who pay rent to live among those who don’t pay rent.
No play no stay. If you can’t follow some fundamental rules and live in a neighborly fashion with your neighbor, you have to go because it’s unfair to others.
When you stick people into the no pay, no stay, or no play, no stay paradigm, some people will make it, and others won’t. The owner needs to determine who will succeed and who won’t live in a structured environment. What mobile home park owners look for is the Fightco score. This means how much fight you have to always make sure you pay your rent. They don’t care as much about terrible credit scores. They are looking for people who have yet to get evicted. There are a lot of parks out there that could be managed better.
Some moms and pops haven’t raised the rent or enforced the rules for a long time. Success is more likely if you can learn to be a good manager to the tenants. Some parks are in excellent locations close to mansions with private schools behind them. Frank bought a property that wasn’t mowed in three years. The owners lost the energy years ago to keep up with the property. In one instance, the leaves hadn’t been raked in so long that they couldn’t open some doors because the leaves were higher than the doors. Some responsibility for this should rest with the city governments for allowing this to occur.
In many of these mobile home parks, there’s no excuse for their condition. Frank wonders why these mom and pops didn’t sell these about a decade ago. They should have sold when they started to lose interest in the business model. People that only look at a FICO score is the lazy man’s way of choosing a tenant. The way credit scores are calculated is different from a government standard. They are just three companies that come up with their own algorithms. You can be good at paying all your bills, but if you’re an unorganized person and made late payments because you forgot to write a check, travel a lot, or whatever, your credit score could get trashed because you didn’t realize you weren’t paying these bills.
The minute you find out it is due, you send in the money. You might manage your money fine, but you must manage your books better. There are lots of people with really bad credit scores that would make a really great tenant. Many consumers need to realize how whacked the credit system is for different people’s scores. You need to look for evictions because this will tell you if the person will pay their rent. Focus on rental history.
Where to Find Mobile Home Park Deals
Find Them Online
This tip is for a potential new Mobile Home Investor. Some mom and pops should be selling, but they’re not. They are just letting their park get run to the ground. These types of people are a good opportunity for a deal. The first place Frank and Dave find their deals is online. If you visit Mobile Home Park Store, you’ll find about 800 to 2,000 mobile home parks for sale right there.
Here are a couple of words of caution. First, regarding the parks they list, about half of them you wouldn’t want if they gave them to you because they’re defective on water or sewer delivery or some other terrible issue. Or, they need the proper permits, or the market is awful. The other half is massively overpriced. Most prices are listed at double what they will sell for. Owners get very bold online.
Pocket Listings
The other place to look are brokers. Frank and Dave get over half of their deals from brokers. The typical deals they buy are not the ones they advertise; they buy “pocket listings.” This industry is unique; no other industry offers so many pocket listings. Here’s what happens. Mom and pop want to sell. Mom and pop are big buddies with the manager and residents. But they don’t dare tell anyone they will sell because everyone will hate them. So, they call a prominent broker and say I want to sell my mobile home park in Des Moines. Here’s the deal, I’ll sell it for $700,000, but I need to keep my listing a secret. You can’t put it on the MLS; you can’t put a sign in front of it; you can’t put it on Mobile Home Park Store.
Just store it in your brain, and one day when you meet someone with $700,000 who wants a park in Des Moines, call them. All significant brokers carry 5-10 pocket listings. One person Frank knows had 50. So there are a tremendous number of pocket listings. This is their number one source of deals.
Direct Mail
Another way they get deals is through direct mail. First, you can obtain the owner’s name through the property records. Then, you can ship them a postcard or letter. They prefer a postcard. You say hey, I buy mobile home parks, give me a call. You’ll typically get a 1-5% response rate when you send out direct mail. If you send out a good postcard and get lucky, you can get a ten percent response rate.
Cold Calling
Another method is cold calling. This is a little harder because you must stick your neck out, dial a phone, and talk to a stranger. Many people hate doing this and prefer direct mail. The beauty of cold calling is that if you are willing to do this, you typically score very high because only a few people want to get involved with this method.
Visit the Owner at Their Home
This is typically an odd method; you swing by their home and let them know you’re interested in purchasing the park they own. It’s also called drive and talk. This is a terrible concept unless it’s a mobile home park that you want. The odds are very low, and often even though the person will invite you in, they don’t want to sell, and you waste the entire day talking to them.
The majority of their deals over the last 25 years came from brokers through pocket listings. The balance of deals they get is an even breakdown between cold calling, direct mail, and online. They have scored a couple of drive-and-talk deals, but they are rare.
Funding Mobile Home Deals
Frank feels funding mobile home park deals is very easy. When he got into the mobile home park business, he was convinced that bank financing did not exist, and maybe it didn’t back in the mid-1990s, but today financing for mobile home parks is probably the easiest part of the process. There are two reasons for this.
The first reason is that almost every major bank in America likes parks. They also have the lowest default rate in all of real estate. This gives banks and conduit lenders a lot of comfort. When they sell these conduit pools on wall street, it’s also based on risk. They will slam enough mobile home park loans on the pile to offset riskier loans like hotels and other assets.
The final thing that is brand new and interesting about the industry is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got in trouble because they were violating the duty to serve law. Duty to serve means you have to treat all Americans respectfully regardless of income, and they were not helping mobile home mortgages. They haven’t supported this industry in decades. Some congressmen finally realized this, and they had different trials on C-Span, and in the end, they announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had to start aggressively making mobile home park loans. This was the first of a two-pronged attack under the duty to serve.
Today, starting almost at ground zero five years ago, agency debt is more than 50% of all mobile home debt by dollar volume. It is the only form of real estate within Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae with no boundaries; it is limitless, and there’s no cap. The mobile home industry has a massive advantage over everyone, apartments, office buildings, etc., because of the duty to serve law.
Brian Garvin’s Final Opinion of Mobile Home University
If you’ve read this far, you know by now that Frank and Dave are the true industry leaders in Mobile Home Park Investing. They offer every type of service surrounding this discipline, starting with their meat and potatoes course which is the Mobile Home Park Home Study Course. They also offer webinars, videos, and a Virtual Mobile Home Park Investor’s Boot Camp and will even give you their opinion on a property you were planning on purchasing.
We feel for the value you receive, the money they charge for all their products and services are reasonably priced. They also offer a 90-day guarantee on most of their products, assuming you ship the product back to them in good condition so they can resell it to another mobile home investor. This course is far from a scam. Frank and Dave are the real deal in the mobile home industry. They know all the ins and outs and take pride in teaching people how to be successful investors. Many of their students brag about purchasing a MHP within 90 days after attending one of their live events or taking their course.
You should be locked on by now if you read this entire review page. The only “cons” I could think of is they aren’t mentioned on the Better Business Bureau (BBB) website. But this type of business rarely is. They specialize in doing big private deals and have proven themselves in many other ways, primarily through all the free and paid educational material they present to their students. If you have a decent chunk of cash lying around to use as a down payment, and this lifestyle interests you, then by all means, get in the game. You will save yourself tons of headaches by purchasing their Mobile Home Park Home Study Course if you are about to make a move.
Alternatives to Mobile Home University
If you are looking for another Real Estate Investment opportunity and need more to get into the Mobile Home Park Investing business, a company called Roofstock might be up your alley. They specialize in selling Single Family Rental (SFR) properties. This is a 4 trillion dollar industry. You can purchase a property through the Roofstock marketplace and add one of these to your investment portfolio. Again, these are passive investments because they are a full-service company that will help you find a tenant and manage the property. We wrote a long review on them, just like we did here. You can signup with them for free and start browsing their marketplace.
If you are a budget investor and want to get into fractional real estate while you build up your funds to get involved with more significant deals, please check out Arrived Homes. Anyone can start investing here with a minimum of $100.00 per share. The returns so far have been very good. Sometimes it’s better to start slow and work your way up the food chain, and this is the company, to start stacking with, if you are financially strapped or trying to work your way up.
