Own The Dirt

You can spend years chasing “the perfect deal,” or you can learn the few mental models that make mobile home park investing simple, repeatable, and profitable. We’re fresh off the final edits of my new book on how to get your first mobile home park, and I’m pulling back the curtain on the lessons that actually move the needle when you’re trying to buy your first park.

We start with the core idea that changes how you underwrite everything: you own the dirt, not the homes. When you focus on lot rent and land-based income, you can cut down on the constant maintenance headaches that come with owning houses or park-owned units. From there, I walk through how I build a deal finding machine, including my favorite strategy for sourcing opportunities fast: expired mobile home park listings. These are owners who already tried to sell, didn’t get the result they wanted, and may be far more realistic today.

Then we get into the practical stuff that saves you time and money: filtering sellers quickly, running simple back-of-the-napkin math, and valuing a park using the lot rent lens (income, expenses, NOI, cap rate) plus the as-is value of any park-owned homes. We also talk due diligence, why “the mess” is leverage, how reserves and outside capital fit into real deals, and why retrades are normal when inspections reveal what’s really going on.

If you’re serious about buying a mobile home park, listen, share this with someone who’s stuck overthinking, and hit subscribe. If you’ve got a question about sourcing, underwriting, or retrading, leave a comment or review and tell us what you want covered next.

Transcript

Book Preview And Big Lessons

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Alright, so I just finished writing how to get your first mobile home park, a book. It's like 150 pages, right? And I wanted to break down some important lessons. Like I was just looking over this doing my final edits, and there's a ton of just like invaluable lessons in this book. And I cannot wait to share this book with y'all. Like it's gonna be so bomb. You're gonna love it. But, anyways, all right.

Own The Dirt Not The Homes

SPEAKER_00 0:25

So the biggest lesson I start out with in this book is you own the dirt. All right, that's what it's called. You don't own the homes, you own the dirt underneath them. All right, and the lesson here is like you want lot rent. You want to get paid for dirt eventually if you own mobile home parks, right? That's the the also the grand finale, right? Because whenever you have houses, you're constantly doing maintenance, all the stuff, unless you like sell them on a rent to own or owner finance or something, you can do that. But with mobile home parts, you have all these lots, right? And and you can sell them on notes, like the homes, and you could just rent the lots, right? You don't have maintenance, anything, like it's freaking awesome. Yeah, you got to maintain the grounds and all that good stuff, but that that's like a super important lesson, right? At the beginning

Finding Parks With Expired Listings

SPEAKER_00 1:15

of this. And then I go on to like building a deal finding machine. And I'm gonna give you a few topics here because I hope it could help you. And it's kind of an intro to my book so that when it does come out, keep an eye out for it. And I think it'll really help you and lots of folks that want to get in the industry and maybe save some headaches and hurdles that maybe I had early on, and it'll give you, you know, years of experience from reading this and then applying it, you know, because I'm a big fan of applying knowledge, right? So, like building a deal machine. How do you find these parks? Like you can look up parks on Google Maps, right? Type in, you know, I'm just gonna say San Antonio, because that's one of them, right? Close to me. It's like mobile home parks in San Antonio, Texas. They all pop up, right? And and you could skip trace the owners and call them. But that that's pretty cold. But my first and uh my to my favorite way is expire mobile home parks. So if I were to just give you one, it would be uh Googling expired mobile park mobile home parks in San Antonio or in Texas or in New Hampshire or in Georgia or whatever, it doesn't matter, and click that link from mobile home parks store. Some of the listings expired a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. It doesn't matter. Those people raised their hands, they wanted to sell, they couldn't sell for any reason, reality set in, and they possibly lowered their expectations. I've done a lot of deals with with that, like that strategy. So that's like number one is if I wanted to go find a park right now. You said you have to find a park, I would go to expire mobile home parks first. And I would go through the mobile home park store. That's what I would do. If you were like, hey, I've got to find a deal, that's what I would do first. And you have you're like, you don't have any other resources, that's all you could do. That's what I would do. All right, and and filter

Filtering Sellers And Pricing Fast

SPEAKER_00 3:03

them. Okay. Now here's the biggest thing is like, and this is another chapter, it's chapter three of my book, right? Filter these these parks, all right? You talk to the owners. I just got off the phone with one, or they were texting. They wanted four million bucks, the math, math to three million bucks. So I automatically know that they're still up here, right? I need to know at that point, it's not like I just click the phone, you know, I don't stop talking to them, but it's like, okay, we're way off. But what do you actually need? Why are you selling? Is there motivation? Is there urgency? Like if there is motivation, there is urgency, but they're still up here. Tell them they're up there, but tell them you can solve their urgency and motivation, but they have to come down here. Then if they don't want to do anything, keep trying, right? You need the quick filter, you need to know what's good, what's not. The person I just talked to um is actually, you know, at a wholesale reach out, and and they were like, Well, what do you think about this? I'm like, it's a million dollars too high. It took me 30 seconds. That's like that's how good you gotta get, right? Not saying I'm good and all this stuff, it's just I have experience. I put in the reps, I know what I'm looking at. That's why I wrote this book. I want you to be in the same position, you know.

Lot Rent Lens Quick Valuation

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Um chapter four, lot rent lens. You know, I'm giving you just a quick peek inside this book. Like, you evaluate mobile home parks off a lot, right? Okay, the homes are separate, and this is how you which I've talked about in other episodes, but say the lot rent's $500 a month. You have 10 lots, right? That's $5,000 a month times 12, 12 months in a year. That's you know, $60,000 a year. Go ahead and assume 50% expenses, even though if it's just lot rent, it should be like lower. 30% is good, 40%, but just say $50,000. So $30,000 is in a Y, right? So divide that at $10 cap, you're $300,000. Well, if they want $600,000 and your quick math says $300,000, you know, there's a bell going off, but it's based off lot rent. But say it's $300,000, but they own five of the homes. Well, that you get the depreciated value and add that $300,000. All right. Depreciated value, all it is, is as is value. What are those five homes worth right now? If you were to go sell them right now, what would they sell for? $10,000? Okay, cool. $20,000? Okay, cool. If it's $20,000, it's five homes, add another $100,000. That park is, you know, $400,000 at a tin cap with appreciated value of the homes. Cool, right? Easy. But people don't know this, they don't practice this. So, like, I really want to bring this to light, right? So I'm I made a book that it pretty much does this. All right, let's go on to chapter five here. Oh man, chapter four is freaking long. Hang on. Give me a second. All right, oh no, I went through two chapters

Due Diligence And The Mess Leverage

SPEAKER_00 5:41

anyway. Uh the mess is the leverage. Here's chapter seven. You missed, you missed a few. We skipped through the skipped through some of it. But uh, due diligence, it says how due diligence untangles a real park and turns what you find into a better deal. All right, cool. So, like whenever you say that you try to buy a house and there's deferred maintenance, you get a good price because there's deferred maintenance, right? There's deferred maintenance, they haven't done stuff, like you get a good price because of that. Same thing on the home parks. Like the water lines suck, the sewer sucks, the collection sucked, the management sucked, the operations suck, whatever. It's like you get a better and better deal because the pain gets worse for the seller. The pain's worse, they're more willing to make a deal. All right, so you need to uncover all that stuff, especially like you need to ask about it, right? Like, hey, like, is there anything wrong with this park? You know, like have you done maintenance? Well, I haven't been there forever. It's like, okay, well, we're probably gonna have issues, right? If they don't know anything going on with the

Funding Reserves Other Peoples Money

SPEAKER_00 6:42

park. Um, I even talk about other people's money, right? Like borrowing money. You know, I'm there's there's a deal I'm helping somebody on right now. They got seller financing, but they need another quarter million dollars, right? Because they need some reserves. You always need reserves when you buy stuff. Uh it is, I know people say no money, all this stuff, but you need reserves. You need infill money. If it's an infill, depending on your strategy, you need money, it takes money, right? So Adam Adam raised another $250,000. He never raised money before. I was like, ask your friends and family, ask your CPA, ask all these people, right? Get the money, you know? And and it's kind of hard at first, but it's just part of being an investor, right? You gotta ask for the money. So, um, and and yeah, here's chapter nine.

Retrades Negotiation And Closing Ask

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Everybody retrades. All right, like I hate to say it, I don't hate to say it. I'm just being completely transparent and honest with you. Like, there are retrades, meaning like you're gonna renegotiate price after you due diligence and see this thing. Because like you're talking to these owners, they're telling you one thing, and then you open the the walls up, right? You open the business up, and there's a lot of other things. Well, everything's changed, right? So you need to set the stage up front. Meaning, hey, seller, whenever you're talking to them, before you get these things under contract, hey seller, if it's not exactly what we talked about, right? When things pop up, we're we're probably gonna be like different on our numbers, right? You could say that how you want, but things could change. I just want you to know that. Oh, okay, okay, but everything's great. Okay, great. You get there and there's a big issue, or there's issues, it's like you need to retrade. This particular deal I was helping somebody out and we retraded $60,000. We got it approved because I had facts to back it, right? They did inspections, they did all the stuff, stuff popped up, it's got to be cured, right? You don't want to buy an underperforming park and then operate it as an underperforming park. You want to buy an underperforming park and get it performing, right? And then cash flow it and that'd be a great landlord and park owner and all that stuff. That's all the insight I'm gonna give you on my book right now. It is actually 16 chapters. I go through buying your first park, I go through wholesaling mobile homes, it's gonna be freaking phenomenal. We are wrapping it up right now. I don't know when it's gonna be out, hopefully soon, right? But we're wrapping it up. So thank you so much for hopping on. My name's Travis Wells, it's the Property Profits Podcast. Appreciate the hell out of every single one of you. Our viewership is going up slowly but surely, and it is consistent, like I am being consistent, dropping these bombs for you every day. So please refer this to a friend, a family member, share it. When I share the clips on social media, share it. Let me know what you think. If you hate it, let me know you hate it. If you love it, let me know you love it. Hit subscribe on whatever you're watching or listening to, it means the world. I promise it'll help the algorithm. Thank you so much. Until next time, see ya.