I know the advice of Frank and others is to contract out to pros - which is what I have done so far on my first park - purchased just before winter. However, I’m sitting here looking at over $2,000 in bills for plowing and salt since Dec 1st - and a weather forecast showing more snow this week. I also have a large shop building inherited from the prior owner with a huge roll-up garage door. I have no use for much the space in the shop because most of the homes are resident owned.
Are you SURE I shouldn’t go spend $3-5K on my own used plow truck, stick it in the shop, and then pay one of the residents to plow? We don’t do driveways - so that liability is out. The park takes roughly 2 hours to plow from my observation - and I’m getting charged $225 per plow with no salt. We have wide, flat roads so the job is pretty simple as plowing goes. It’s just every time I get another $200-$500 bill I start muttering to myself about how I should own my own truck. Maintenance costs? Sure - but the truck will be used for nothing but plowing on occasion and sitting in the garage on a trickle charger the rest of the time. I can put a mileage tracker on it and a webcam in the garage to ensure no joy rides or “borrowing” by anyone.
I have a workers comp policy covering up to $20K / yr salary and no current employees to begin with (self managing the first few months) that I’m paying for anyway.
If I designated the truck non-op I would think I could avoid yearly DMV fees.
Park is 95 lots with 68 lots currently occupied. Roughly 12 acres.
Honestly I don’t see why this duty couldn’t be built into the future manager’s job description. All rent is going to be collected electronically and offsite at Walmart. Phones are answered by a central call center. Applicants submit their own apps online and they’re processed offsite. The onsite manager is going to have unusually light duties as managers go.
You can try this and see how this goes and update us.
Having said this, I am with Frank on this. We inherited a snow plow with our purchase in one of the parks and were happy about this. Here is what happened after that in Chronological order
Outsourced the snow plow to one of the residents. He crashed into another car and the park paid for the bumper. A bill of $350. Couldn’t use this resident again.
The battery and the starter stopped working. $750 repair. Paid another $100 to have this tested and a new oil change
The snow plow hydraulic system stopped working. Repair estimate of $900
Insurance is around $800, even if we don’t take this truck outside the park and use it a few times a year.
So, just to keep this truck operating we were spending upwards of $2000/year and the worry of accidents and upkeep.
This season we gladly outsourced the snow job paying $100/hr and it takes 5 hours to snow plow our park. Which is 4 times/year and no worries.
We will probably sell this truck to anyone who wants to take care of it.
Again, if you are happy with the headaches and can find a good resident who can take care of this truck like his/her own, that will be great.
I’ve been through this every which way over the years. Being in Maine I’ve had to deal with loads of snow over the years. Much much cheaper and less headaches to just hire it out
I can speak from the plow operator postition as I use to have a company that did this work. Your expenses are way off. If you find a truck for 3-5k it WILL be rusted out. It will break down much more often that you expect especially if you have buy a truck that was previously used to plow. Plowing if very hard on vehicles. Transmissions and differentials will go out if you aren’t careful and don’t know what you are doing. You will also bend the frame hitting snow piles to hard. If you go this route I would only buy manual transmissions as automatics will be rebuild every 1-3 years depending on the driver and use. Fuel use is very high again you are working the truck hard. On the plow itself the hydraulics/motors/truck connections all break and get expensive to replace. If you do go this route I would recommend 2500 or 3500 truck with a commercial grade plow. (The homeowner stuff will break on you) On the salt spreader make sure the material stays dry. (If it doesn’t it becomes concrete in the spreader) I just don’t see how working 2 hrs a storm for 5-10 storms you would ever come out ahead. We charged by the hour and the ton for salt. We actually used a product called slicer that is mined in utah. Salt melts down to 20ish degrees while slicer would melt the ice at -25 and it is a little less corrosive than salt. I would say when it was all said and done we spent roughly 16-18k per truck per year on ins, labor, repairs per truck. This was of course much more plowing but insurance was about 2k for the liability ins alone.