Hey all, first time park owner here…we have a fixer upper home that got burned down. The tenant signed a home sales agreement and lot lease. The homes sales agreement was after they fix it up, we’d give them title. However, they did not fix it up and the home got burned down in a wildfire, complete loss. On our lease it says that if there’s a fire, tenant is responsible for removing the home.
Has anybody been thru something similar? If so, what did you guys do? Or recommend as the best course of action?
Good luck getting them to clean it up. If I were in your shoes I would throw it in a dumpster and be done with it. I bet the tenants will disappear before you even start demolishing it.
I had something similar happen (in my case the tenants committed arson). I sold them the home on payments (I think they made like 3 payments) and then burned the trailer down and tried to retroactively get an insurance policy. Lucky for me I had insurance on it since I still owned it. I collected the $5,000 and spent half of it to clean up the mess. Long story short the tenants very quickly moved on. The investigator never proved it was them but did say the fire was intentional.
If you still hold title it comes down to who was responsible for maintaining insurance on the property. Probably your responsibility. Insurance responsibility is the determining factor in who is responsible for the clean up. If the tenant was responsible for maintaining insurance they will likely try to collect and you will need to turn this over to your lawyer to work with their insurance company. If the tenant was responsible and did not have insurance coverage you are out of luck and will need to pay for the cleanup.
Community rules should require tenants to have insurance (property and liability) and that they provide proof annually.
Thanks for the suggestions all! I wanted to make sure we weren’t missing something. Under the lease, the tenant was supposed to get insurance - they did not. We’d prefer the tenant demo the home of course, but realistically, we know they’ll probably just abandon it.
We have had several fires including arsons. In 1 case the tenant rented a machine and removed the scrap home. In another case, a tenant started to seek contractors, but based on discussions her expectation was it would cost no more than $500 to remove the home. When she learned that it would be more like $3,000, she abandoned the home. In every other case, the home was abandoned without any attempt by the tenant, and we were stuck demolishing it. Good luck getting cash out of the former tenant. You cannot get blood from a stone.