I have a park here in Minnesota that I purchased earlier this year. I finally got a dealers license and will be bringing new homes into the park this summer. Question… when do you reach out to the city to get their blessing? I assume I will new a certificate of occupancy before anyone can move in. But in general curious what your process is for new homes (e.g. give them notice new homes are coming in, get certain permits, ensure they are okay with size/setbacks, etc)? Not sure what or if really needs to occur. During diligence I got the okay for new homes but just not sure how to engage the city from here to ensure we don’t hit any snags. If you have a typical process for working with the city during infill I’d love to hear it. Thanks.
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I call the building department before doing anything. Always better to be up front than to drop money on a new home and set up only to hit a snag. In most of our jurisdictions it’s a permit fee, sometimes an inspection if it’s a new pad and home, and then a final inspection for COO at the end.
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I will always remember when my family forced a commercial development on our village and virtually everyone opposed us, we fought them and got it done the hard way. Many resent my family to this day.
Then I saw someone else approach the village with an idea asking for ways the village could help. The village rolled out the red carpet and helped them in many ways and everyone loved the developers and glorified them.
I’ve seen others since create a desire within the public to the point of getting donations from local people with wealth who like their dream. But I don’t know if selling the idea of manufactured housing being affordable and desirable can be done. But it is so much easier with help in the municipality rather than resistance.
Check with building department on what their code says. A park owner in SD brought in some new homes and sold them off only to learn later that the code had changed that requires that new home need to be anchored to frost piers, which his lots had none. He had to move the homes (which had people living in them) and install frost piers and move them back and reset them. Ouch!