In analyzing some of the parks owned by Dave and Frank that are listed in the class book, I noticed that some of them are located in places that aren’t part of any MSA and some of the rent and home prices are pretty weak. Everything I have read and learned in boot camp advises against purchasing a park with small populations and low home rentals, even when the park is at an attractive price. Clearly, there is something they know that I don’t. Can anybody shed some light?
Some of that material may be dated. But if you database enough of Frank and Dave parks, you can learn some stuff. What they teach is a great benchmark. Once you start going outside of some of those rules you just have to have a really good understanding of the market, the upside, the risk etc. These guys are pros. Im not speaking for them either but i think its fair to change that their criteria changes over time as a good chunk of people who are building portfolios.
As an example, on one of our assignments to Frank and Dave a few years ago was in a market where average house price was 80k . All other metros were strong. It was in the DFW metro I believe… I just checked the city today and its 100k . Thats been a good market and had a lot of other compelling things about it.
My guess is that maybe it was a great deal in a lot of respects if they were willing to say go out of metro etc.
I think when you start “bending” any rules you really have to have a good understanding. The rules that they teach are really wonderful benchmarks. But say you want to look at a smaller park, or average house price 90k , 70k . You really have to take the whole overall picture and blend it together .
Again, I’m not speaking on their behalf , just some of my theories and observations. I remember on one of the calls that Frank called Dave as good a park picker as Lebron James is a player. Im not a Lebron James myself but to love to know what they are up to as I think it makes me a better investor 
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Hi,
I think that Marvel_Equity brought up some good points.
It is also possible that some of the markets simply changed from when they originally bought the parks. For us, for example, we were researching a park in Ohio with a High School rating of 9. I checked back on it a few weeks later and it was suddenly a 5…
We are newbies, but these are just some thoughts to consider…
Heather
@HGreig Heather, very interesting you say this. We have been looking to buy a home and have had this come up on two school districts and couldn’t piece it together. Was it by chance great schools.org? The schools were all rated well, it was either the weight on improvement YoY or something like that.
Then came across another resource called niche.com It validated that everything was all great in these school district.
So just one thing to consider as I had heard of other people having this issue and couldn’t piece it all together so that may or may not be the case in your situation.
Hey @Deleted_User_ME,
Yes, we were using greatschools.org when we noticed that behavior. We noticed it first with the park in Ohio. Then, a few months later my hometown high school rating dropped from a solid 8 to a 6 the week before my mom’s house sold.
When I researched the greatschools.org website, they mentioned that they were changing how they evaluated schools.
For both of the above locations, I just remember noticing it appeared that perhaps some the lower income students had lower-than-state-average test scores, and it pulled the total rating down. It also looked like a lot of data needed for the new rating was missing.
Interestingly, the greatschools.org score change did not impact the sale of my mom’s house at all. It was bought by a local flipper who loved the town and its school system. They may not have been aware of the change though. The flipper mentioned that his son was in high school, and they stopped using textbooks. Yep! His only textbook is for calculus. For all other classes, he has a Chrome book and they do a ton of worksheets. Just interesting to see how much education has changed.
We ended up using StartClass.com. It’s a vertical search engine. Just another option we found. But, we will try niche.com, and see if that works better.
Thanks for the tip!
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Our Park is in a town of 1,000 without a major metro according to Bestplaces. I’m not really sure how the metro areas are defined on the site, but our park is 20 minutes from a town of 40,000, but resides in a different county.
All the other factors we were concerned about checked out as far as demand, rent rates, etc are concerned so proceeded without batting an eye.
I will say that finding good contractors is a PITA in small towns.
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Thanks. I was hoping for some secret formulas. 
Experience is an excellent tutor, but I prefer learning without pissing away a load of cash.
@jhutson Makes a great point and have also had the reverse. A park is classified in a metro but really its far out , not really getting the benefits of that metro and a small town with not so great prospects. So really having an understanding if you are getting the benefits of the metro.
I think the vendor thing is a great point. Finding good vendors with insurance is fun enough of a task. In small towns good luck, def something to consider if you are running remotely.