This might be kind of obvious answer, but if you were on the lookout right now,
if you're just going to pick a random market and say, “I want to find a poorly run mobile home park.”
What's the most efficient way to find those?
Is there something you're looking for,
certain zoning or just signs from the road that's like,
“Wow, that place looks terrible.”
How do you know where those are and how to find them?
You think I would tell you my good secrets like that?
If anyone has any good secrets, let me know.
I guess the advice I have and I only have three parks myself that I currently own,
but looking for more every day.
Once you know the few locations that you want to be in,
then personally, I would take a shotgun approach to targeting parks.
You're going to take a shotgun to a park? That's horrible. That's terrible advice.
I'm ready to negotiate.
When it comes to buying parks, you can buy them for the quick flip and turnaround.
You can buy them if you want to hold them forever and maybe refinance them.
But going back to your park question, how do you know a park
will be motivated or not, or whatever,
you can take some guesses that it's poorly run,
or a lot of the homes are missing,
a lot of the homes are empty, or there's no online footprint.
Mom-and-pop owners. We're usually after the mom-and-pop people.
I don't want to buy my mobile home parks typically from a second or third investor.
I don't want to buy from someone like me.
I want to buy from mom-and-pop.
Well, those mom-and-pops don't have an online presence a lot.
So, if you find a park that doesn't have an online presence,
that might be kind of a mom-and-pop type of park.
But I want us to take a shotgun approach and market to everybody.
I've helped just over a dozen people, and that's not a lot,
but a dozen people that are mobile home investors buy their first parks.
And the reason I'm telling you this is because all but two of those people we've found our parks
by doing the normal stuff we do as investors.
As a mobile home investor, we're going to every park around us.
Like 20, 30, 40, 50-mile radius. Every single park.
If you're a mobile home investor, you should go to that park to do a number of things. One of those things,
talk to the manager, find the owner and ask them questions.
One of the questions could be,
“Hey, would you ever consider selling all this?”
And so, the people I've helped now, that's just one way.
I mean, it's pretty basic, is talking to people, rubbing shoulders.
The other way that's pretty basic but it's effective, postcards.
There's a lot of other ways like ringless voicemails.
But I hate when people call me up and ask me those questions.
Anyway, knocking on doors, postcards, boots on the ground
and take a shotgun approach, and market to every park.
Because you don't know, with these parks, it takes time.
It's not like a mobile home deal where we find it, we close on it.
With a park deal, it seems to be,
and again, I'm on the newer side of parks, but from what I've learned and what I've been taught,
it takes months or even years to develop a relationship that these park owners like you,
they want to deal with you. Not this flashy person from another state.
They like you, they know about you, especially if you're already investing in this park.
I spent, I don't know, maybe it was six or seven years after I got started Mobile Home Investing.
Two different park owners came to me. This was in Florida.
And they came to me and they said,
it was a husband and wife
“I know that you're investing in our parks.
You're paying us thousands of dollars a month in lot rent
because you have a few homes here.
We're getting older in age. We want to sell our park to you with owner financing.”
I had two parks that I could have bought back
before 2010 and I waited.
My first park I got was in 2013 because I had my blinders on.
I was just too stupid or not stupid, but I was like,
“I'm making money. I'm doing fine. I've got no management. I'm loving life. Woo.
I don't want to park, that seems like too much of a headache.”
In hindsight, having boots on the ground, being in parks, it sort of opens you up
to these opportunities that you might not have found otherwise,
but you got to have your eyes open.