Make 20 tenants buy skirting or pay for it myself?

I’m trying to buy a park with @ 20 homes. All of the skirting is ripped off or cracked or destroyed.

The park owns half the homes.

On the park owned homes I would have to buy the skirting.

On the tenant owned homes do I have to buy their skirting or can I make them do it? No one has enforced any rules on skirting for at least a decade so I am not sure how the tenants will respond. Or should I treat it as a one time capital expense project to get the park going and provide all the skirting?

Provide all the skirting and then see if you can bill the tenants back on a monthly plan for 12 to 24 months. However, if they refuse, it will be hard to force in court. If your budget is not there to do them all in vinyl, consider using vinyl on only the most visible homes, and a cheaper substitute on the others. As long as the material is painted and level, nobody will care that much. I’ve used surplus store fiberglass roofing, metal sheeting, plywood – everything that’s cheap and solid and can block the view of the underbelly of the home.

Frank, why is billing them back for skirting hard to enforce in court if they refuse to pay up?

Because, unless you have them agree to it in writing, there’s no evidence they agreed to pay it, and most judges are not going to want to evict someone over such an item (although you might be able to get a small claims court judgement if you have the paper trail). You can give them a series of notices that skirting is required, then that they are not following that rule, then that they have to get skirting on or get evicted, etc. but each notice takes maybe a week to 10 days to seem reasonable, and you’ll have to wait forever. If you are trying to get the skirting on before winter hits, you’ll have to move fast and loose – not what judges normally like to see. But if the skirting looks good, your better tenants will feel some obligation to pay you for it, and will be willing to pay in monthly amounts they can afford.

We changed our park rules to require skirting and we have given everyone a few months to skirt themselves. If they do not, we will skirt and charge them $50 a month until it is paid for. No objections so far. Most of them want to skirt once they see home much better the skirted homes look.

I would not skirt any tenants home unless you first have a signed agreement that they will pay for it.

If they do not agree start the process of notification leading to eviction. Time wise if the park is as it sounds a few more months is not going to change the world.

Make the tenants pay.