Hey y'all

since January, there has been a MOM, a MHM, and a kick butt Bootcamp and these were all filled events!!

Let me hear some success stories…things have been slow here in Florida…and my average work day entails being lied to, avoided,stolen from, and cheated and this from our employees and vendors…at 9 AM we open the doors,and the Customers start in and things start to get rough!! LOL

Seriously, give me some success stories!!! Any one buy a Park? A L/H, a trailer? Blogs are full of good things and I’m sure some great things are going on with the folks here. Make my day…

Regards,

Greg Meade

Greg,

And what about all those people who raised their hand at MHM

I have a 150 space turn around park in Burlington and there is rarely a week that passes where I dont make a deal. I am either buying repo homes from Vanderebilt or moving someone from another park into mine and of course creating notes along the way for that long term cash flow we all love. About the time I think this cant get any better a new deal pops up. One of my best tenants wanted to move out of my park and buy a land home property,but he couldnt get financing. Well you guessed it I had to run to the rescue and finance that deal, creating a nice $825/ month for many years to come. So thank you all for teaching me this great business. Rick Ewens

Well I haven’t been to any of those events but I am getting close to buying my first park. This forum has been a tremendous source of information and inspiration. Thanks for the encouragement.

Greg Little

Sounds like a great thing. something I am checking out is a lot of Parks I look at need 50-100 newer homes brought in to infill Park and turn it around.

In round numbers, 100 homes cost 1.2M dollars delivered and set (singles).

Scenario:I’ve just spent 1M for a 150 space park with 100 vacant. I’m broke and this thing is grossing about 10K per month…expenses 40% so i have 75 per year to expand (6 homes per year). UGH!!

borrow money from Clayton, hard momey at 15% from private investor, mortgage the Park, these are all options to infill…any others you can share?? This is a constant worry, hopefully the finished products can be sold to good people. The fear I have of placing NEW homes is the damage that can be done to them in such a short amount of time…

Anyone have any thoughts?

Greg

Greg, how about some particulars on the new homes for 12000 ready to sell.

My repoes 14x76 end up about 16000 ready to sell. I’am in central SC and I’ll take 4 of those S/W tomorrow. Thanks for starting this post.

Bill

I don’t know if this qualifies or not but I did just

close on a stick built I own. It’s the third time I’ve

sold this one. I hooked him for 1000.00 down and

494.03 a month for 20 years and he’s happy as a

pig in the mud. After depreciation and improvements

my MHP lost about 11k for 06. This helped offset my tax

liability on my other buisness (LLC pass through).

Can you say money from one pocket to the other?

LOL

Tom

Small deal.

Purchased a 91, 14X80 for $1,500 from my pet park. Based on past sales will be selling for $11,500 on payments with only fixing some exterior issues 1 to 1.5K rehab or $16,500 if I do the additional 1 to1.5K of interior repairs as well. This is a cookie cutter deal for me of in at around 5K max and selling in the mid teens for a 5-7 year note depending on down with my average $300 a month in payments. Yield…good nuff.

Looking forward to the June Mobile Home Boot Camp and using my Lonnie experience at helping me fill my own turn around park soon. Any park owners looking for a Lonnie Dealer in the Kansas City area? I am going part time at work and will be dedicating more time to investing so I am looking at branching out to new parks.

Ruben D. Flores

816 918-9041

We are working several small park leads and trying to figure out how to profitably fix infrastructure on an 85 pad MHP. (an intellectual exercise more than a deal) We are closing on a nice 28x70 3/3 LH deal tomorrow, purchase 28k, repairs 4.5-8k depending on if we vinyl side it… Finished the pack will retail around 70-80k with L/O payments around $625, or rent for $575.

After Anne’s presentation and visiting your piece of paradise I told you that ya’ll gave me the missing key to make DW’s work better in my playground… I thought of an undeserved niche and now thought is turning in to action, we’ll be trying to leapfrog this DW into other upgradeable properties in the nicer MH communities.

It’s been interesting since the MOM, I’ve gotten more bigger leads than I have since we’ve been in the MH business… Just having problems in DD or the numbers just not working. We are actively working on better systems to operate the business and finally have a decent handy man. =)

The Lonnie Deals haven’t slowed down and are business as normal.

Best wishes,

Ryan Needler

are all used homes, 14 X 70 for around 8-9K and 3K to deliver and set, another 1K in skirting and steps. 1996 -1999 are my targets.

Probably looking at 20K for Claytons or Libertys new in quantity.

Ryan and Ruben, you go guys. The 20K l/h I showed you Ryan with pos single is almost done. Stripped off the single and put a 1994 24 X 52 3/2 on for 9K del and set. needs roof and drywall and carpet and decks but will be way under the 40K for finish prod. will sell for 75K Cash or 88K on contract. Or rent for 850 per month

Regards,

Greg

We have had a great spring here at Arrow Woods Estates. We have sold ALL the available homes we had after an excruciating long wait! We accesed our Clayton line of credit and now have available cash to bring more newer homes into the park.

We have also rented our land/home in the condo park we own in Florida, which is part of our Roth IRA. That will provide very nice income to the IRA, plus we will eventually sell the property (when the Florida market improves) which will repay the money we paid to put it together last year.

Also, someone approached me with a possible park deal, which we have been playing around with. The funny thing about that is we looked for a good park for a couple of years before we found this one, and were not currently looking! Another funny thing is it has a connection to the part of Florida that we are from! You never know where the next lead will come from.

We are looking forward to showing off Arrow Woods at the next MOM! We are hoping to have it 1/2 full by then!

it will be more than 1/2 full. Between you, Jim, and Steve there is a plethora ( I love to use this word in a sentence…darn that Scrabble) of useful knowledge.

curious, where will you get the homes? how much?

Love the blogs…keep 'em coming. I live my life vicariously (I know …scrap the Scrabble) through all the bloggers…some day I will own a Park.

greg

from scrabble, but people at the dealership where I am currently consulting have decided they need to teach me to speak Southern! I am somewhat of an enigma to them - a mountain girl who is a Yankee to boot, but coming here from Florida…

Jim has already bought one home to move in. It is a repo from a bank in Oklahoma, 16 x 80. It needs work, but we are not afraid to tackle that. He bought it for $7,500 because it does not have an air conditioner - which we just happen to have for it. Our mover has a home to look at for us as well - we brought two doubles in last fall that he found. Jim is also looking at Greentree repos and we are watching the papers. Real Estate agents up here are listing them as well, so we may pick up some that way. For some reason we have found the repo homes in the southwest part of the state to be in REALLY bad condition. (Jim looked at lots of them last month from the Greentree list.)

It looks like we will end up paying about $12,000 for Greentree homes. They only put out an Alabama list once a month, so the new list comes out next week. We have still been unable to find a handyman, even with several weeks of advertising for one, so Jim is now teaching a young guy who recently bought a home in the park. So far he has basically been doing all the rehab work himself. This works better with me here than when I was in Florida, because he just could not do it all. (Rehab, manage, pay bills, etc.)

We skirt the homes ourselves. It costs us about $400 for the skirting from a local mobile home sales company. We were actually blown away by the posts on CRE that said people were paying around $900 to skirt homes! We can do it, working together, in about a half day. $500 is a pretty nice amount to earn for a day’s work! Going rate in this area is about $150.

Sometimes the blogs are a little hard to write - you are just living, and it just seems day-to-day. It is hard to believe that what has become the norm to us is good reading to someone else! With that said, I will get a new blog for this weekend - promise!

Hi Greg,

I’ve got one Lonnie deal under contract and have closed on 10 MH notes since MOM.

I’ve also lined up investors for a MH subdivision that I have been gnawing on for about 5 months. If (when) this deal goes through it will be like doing 17 land/homes deals at once.

I’m still working the vacant lot/wholesaling thang in downtown Atlanta. I do love this city.

take care, Anne

It sounds like the South is user friendly for your business model(s). I wish you well on the subdivision. It took me 4 years to add 18 L/H’s to my portfolio and 17 to my partners; only 16 of mine are still cranking out monthly payments and we had to do 71 total to get 35 of them free and clear. How cool to add 17 in one fell swoop… or put another way, you just saved three years of aggravation LOL. Are you still working with a Broker(Steve) looking for a MHP?

Hope to see ya in August Anne!

Greg

Greg,

I seem to be in the same boat as you. Things haven’t been slow in the rest of my life but on the business end they have. And with the baby due any day I doubt the business picks up for at least a few more weeks. I did sell my albatross (like your use of big words so copying) of a lonnie deal that had been hanging around my neck for 6 months. Since then have been given 4 more freebies but turned down 3 of them (at least for now) as they are major rehabs. The other one is a home run if I can solve the title issue and stop drowning in red tape. Other than that it is a transisition time for me as my best PM quit her job. This is just the catalyst (another one for ya Greg) that I needed to pull up stakes and start working the parks closer to home. My current playground parks are an hours drive away so looking to start working in some closer and have just been putting it off. Time to get out there and start talking with some new PMs…

Hi Greg,

Yes, David found the subdivision.

I don’t know about saving aggravation, (we’re talking MHs here, after all, LOL), but it would be cool to get into something like this so fast.

I’m impressed you have 35 free and clear- that’s really something. Can’t wait to have a few things free and clear myself.

take care, Greg

Anne

Greg, You mentioned 20K for Claytons and Libertys in quantity can you go a little more in detail. Thanks

Sam

When we toured Fred Balke’s Park a year and a half ago in GA, Steve and Fred were able to find decent 14X70’s for 16-20K new from factory…I do forget whether they were Nobilitys or Fleetys or manufacturer, but this was about the ( chime in here Fred) cost I believe.

Steve Waite from Clayton also has a program for new homes factory direct (no dealers).

Cavalier or commodore also have homes in the 17-22K I heard about at MHM in Atlanta a few years ago…there was a person there I talked to who had purchased over 200 in the past 12 months. WOW

Fleetwood has a program also for quantities over 45 homes at their Spring Hill and Plant City plants in florida.

Florida has a unique situation right now. Singles are fairly cheap. Folks can not finance them, insure them or place them in a bunch of counties…we get offered 1986-1992 homes for free every day…we charge to remove.

The cost of transport (4-5 per mile) prohibits transport to other states.

Greg

Greg, you are correct during the MOM meeting here in Albany, GA I mentioned that we were buying brand new 14X 70 3/2 single wides from Horton homes here in Eatonton, GA for $18,500 delivered during the time frame of hurricane katrina. This was a program designed for park owners buying in volume not one or two at a time.