I own 2 parks with a 1/4 mile of each other and about 200 lots and need a nee manager. The area is a low income hispanic area and the current residents do not have the sophistication level we are looking for as a manager/supervisor. We are looking for someone who is stabilized and can eventually fullfill the role of supervisor for these and other parks we own in the area. I live out of state, own other properties in this paticular area and want someone who has the common sense and wit to run these properties. We have always had uneducated on site managers but this has never been a good long term solution for us.
I have GPS tracking on the office phones, interent based cameras so we can have oversight on the properties. We do plan on reimbursing the manager quite well. The properties are stabilized with 98% occupancy but need a bit cleaning up with new rules and enforcement. You can buy a nice house for 100k in the area and cant imagine a person who is smart living on any of these properties for the long term from my experience.
Don’t do it. The success rate of off-site managers is near 0%. Get a decent quality on-site manager (if that meets your budget) and move them into a home in the park (if there’s nobody who fits the profile that already lives there). Make sure that they are 100% bilingual, not just having had a few years of Spanish in high school. Have them office out of their house, so that you don’t incur any office expense. But don’t go with a 9 to 5 office format with an off-site manager, it will be a disaster. I’ve done it and it has a 100% failure rate. What will happen next is that you will get a call at 10 PM on a Friday night while you are at dinner with your wife for her birthday, from a tenant who says that there is sewage running down the street (at least you’ll think that’s what they are saying because you don’t speak Spanish) and then you’ll try to call your 9 to 5 manager and get voicemail. Then you’ll have a vervous breakdown as the calls keep coming in. Worse yet, the tenants will have no way to reach you, so you don’t even know the situation and when the manager comes in Monday at 9AM, he finds the city inspector there with a giant letter that the park has polluted the creek and demanding a Phase I Environmental and suggests you check out the Channel 4 News over the weekend, because the park was on it for raw sewage everywhere. This can all be avoided with an on-site fluent manager.
I would NEVER use a 9 to 5 manager who does not live in the park, given the facts you have presented.
That being said, if you are looking for a manager’s manager (we call them District Managers), then that’s great idea. However, you don’t have nearly enough lots to do that at 200. To keep a District Manager occupied, you need more like 700 to 1,000 lots. There’s just not enough that happens in a park to make a full time job out of 200 lots.
Thanks for the insight Frank. We do have an onsite maintenance guy who pretty much has his eye on the parks and I have an option to purchase 2 other parks within the next 2 years , so it will bring it up to 400 lots soon. I generally have my # posted everywhere on the property (as a supervisor) so tenants can always call me if things hit the fan or if they want to complain about management, they rarely call. I would like to have one supervisor run it all but will play that card when the times come. It turns out a resident turned in an application today and she seems to be a pretty good match.