Dean,
If you are seriously wanting to buy mobile home parks, I would learn everything you can about them before I would buy one. Just the same as you would if you were wanting to learn how to fly an airplane – you wouldn’t just casually read a few items and then jump in one and try and take off. Just like flying a plane, there are a lot of simple things that you would have no problem with, if you knew what they were. But without knowing all the details you could easily crash.
Since there was no information on the business when I got into it, I deliberately bought my first park with $10,000 down, and was willing to give it back if things went bad. The entire time I was trying to learn from immersion. I made some unbelievably stupid errors in those days, and I still regret that I can’t go back in time and fix them. But that’s how it was back then – you just made your way like some kind of idiot pioneer.
Dave and I have tried to fix that by writing and taping a million and one items to watch out for, and to focus on, to maximize profitability. We think they are very complete – we’ve gone through them a thousand times to see if anything was missing. I would read all the books and listen to all the CDs. If you are still wanting to go forward, I would definitely go to one of our Boot Camps. We hold them several times a year. You come away from the Boot Camp with an entirely different viewpoint on what kind of park you want to buy – it is never what you thought going in.
The Anaheim convention is a themed event on how to harness the negative energy of the recession and put it to positive uses in mobile home parks. If you can make it, you should learn a lot of timely information and have access to a lot of speakers from all different facets of the industry.
I hope to meet you soon.