Hello! Currently my residents pay $22/month on average for garbage collection. They have three providers from which to choose.
My local garbage entrepreneur (one of those three providers) has come to me with the following proposal:
He’ll charge me a volume discounted rate of $18.50/month per occupied lot for garbage pick-up.
I switch all my residents to his service. (He currently serves roughly 12 of my 60 residents.)
I mark-up his charges to $22/month or so and raise rents accordingly.
In addition to the regular weekly pickups at each home, he’ll set on-site a roll-away dumpster for free (this will be a big help as I’m renovating roughly four homes/month and there is a lot of junk left over which my laborers can never quite seem to haul away with themselves).
He’ll also make two free pick-ups per year of bags of leaves (our park has sycamore trees that produce a TON of leaves. Some of the other providers have refused to pick-up all the bags in a single week).
His trucks do not speed through my community the way Waste Management’s do, and he has a very good reputation for picking up ‘everything’ left out front with the trash, whereas Waste Management and the other providers are somewhat picky about what they pick up.
So to me, this seems like a no-brainer to do. But am I missing something here? Will my residents be angry that they don’t have freedom of choice? Or is there some other liability or billing issue I’m not seeing?
It would seem that raising lot rent by $22 is your prerogative.
It is also your prerogative to include trash service in your lot rent fee.
If you include the service, you choose the provider.
I have worked in about 12 different MHPs owned by 5 different companies. Of these, all of them have trash service chosen by the park.
The cleanest parks have identical rolling cans with lids (no more issues from health dept due to no-lid on cans ). No more empty cans and lids blowing around the park after trash pick up.
The service also picks up EVERYTHING except refrigerated units and tires. Thus, your park stays cleaner because the residents can throw out that junk from behind their home and shed. PLUS, no excuses as to why their place is a mess!
As a rehabber, I love that they get it all. I do help when I’m there.
Make sure you understand the fees charged (if any) for broken cans or extra cans.
I do this at my park. One day I just notified everyone that they were all to use one service and I would add the actual cost to their bill each month. No mark-up. Now collection is done on one day instead of spread out over 3 and the truck has a single back axle instead of 2. Nicer on my roads. The hauler also did a park clean up and just charged me for dump fees.
I add the cost to the monthly bill and not paying it is grounds for eviction. If the cans are on the street the night before or the day after collection, they get charged a $5 fee. Park looks much nicer now.
I bought another park last summer. The tenants pay their own water and electricity directly to providers. The first thing I did was discontinue the park’s involvement with anything to do with trash service… The more services the tenant pays directly the more attractive the park to prospective buyers and the simpler life is.
Sounds like a winner of an idea to me, Jefferson. I still don’t own a park yet but I like the proposal the local “garbage entrepreneur” (I like that term!) made to you.
As a lonnie dealer who does a lot of rehabs I can empathize with you when the trash service will actually rip open my bags of trash to inspect what’s in them . . . AND THEN LEAVE THEM SCATTERED ON THE CURB!!