“Accidental Landlord” of a 12 pad, 11 PO single-wide homes (built between ’79 and ’85) in NE GA. I am not local to the park. When we took over the park (12/’18) there were 5 homes occupied, 1 with free rent for mowing and 1 not paying for the past 6 mos. because they realized they could get away with it with the previous owner. Three of the tenants were paying over $250 less than market rent (per a realtor).

A slum lord owned this park for 30 yrs. The previous owner took over after that and then let things get even worse by ignoring roof leaks and tenants moving out.

City made the zoning “Commercial” since we are along a highway. They refuse to let us REPLACE a home - we can replace doors, windows, etc. but not the whole home! I have contacted those involved w/the decision to see any way to replace being a grandfathered MHP and they say no but this is all verbal and they ignored my “open records request” about this topic. I have since enlisted legal help to investigate this as it is just so costly to make a 40 year old home brand new and yet I would still have just a 40 year old title.

Meanwhile, we have done basic repairs (not in depth there’s still more issues we are finding out) on two of the vacant homes that were not as bad and rented those and done various big repairs on some of the occupied homes as well. We took the least bad of the “4 very bad homes” and basically made a brand new home keeping almost all the studs and subfloor, and all of the aluminum siding. The rest we had to replace and it looks great but we could have bought a new home for the cost. We did not renew the lease of the high maintenance tenant who degrades the condition of the home and we are now fixing that to rent again soon. When that is done we’ll have 8 renters and left with the 3 rotting homes.

Every dime of rent has gone back into repairs/improvements of the homes and property. In addition we’ve had to add a bunch more $ to do the repairs.
I do not see any way we could sell these homes to make it a TO MHP because if one were to take their house with them it would then make the park receive one less rent when the spot could not be re-rented to another home. So I don’t think this park could evolve in that direction.

At the time we took over the MHP we were told an estimate sale price. Too low for me. So I thought the best plan would be to get the park in decent shape and increase the income. My goal was to recoup the money we’ve been putting in for repair by receiving rents for X years and then recoup some of the money we initially invested through the previous (bad) landlord over the next Y years until the park’s selling price would cover the rest of the money we invested. But with so many problems in these homes the X and Y get longer and longer. If we sold now after putting so much $ into repairs we will have lost more than if we had sold when we first acquired the property.