MOBILE HOME PARK FOR SALE
In this episode, we interview Dr. Charles Becker, a Duke University professor of economics and leading expert on the national economics of mobile homes and the mobile home park industry.
As always, this episode is hosted by Maxwell Baker, co-founder of The Mobile Home Park Broker, and brought to you by our proprietary Community Price Maximizer. With our system, we at MHP Broker guarantee you a higher price when you later sell your mobile home or RV community.
Here Are The Show Highlights:
Want to know more about trends in the mobile home park industry? Just drop me a line at info@themhpbroker.com or give me a call at 678-932-0200.
Power Quotes From Max and Dr. Becker:
00:02
Hello and welcome to the mobile home park brokers tips and tricks. This is the podcast where we talk about mobile home park investing, because that’s what we’ve been involved in for the last decade. Let’s dive into today’s episode. Here’s your host, Maxwell Baker.
00:22 Maxwell Baker
Hey y’all welcome to another amazing episode of The MHP brokers ® tips and tricks. Today I am honored, pleased all the adjectives I can think of here with Dr. Charles Becker from Duke University, who is a teacher of economics there, professor and one of the few if not the only academic expert in the mobile home and mobile home park industry nationally. He has written articles that go over mobile home park evaluations, zoning, and what causes market lot rent to rise across the entire country. He’s a PhD graduate from Princeton University. I’m gonna try to sound very smart during this podcast, my best but he’s the man. He’s done a lot of stuff as far as research is concerned. So welcome, Dr. Becker. Thank you for joining us. Appreciate your time.
01:16 Dr. Charles Becker
Max. Thanks so much. It’s great being here.
01:18 Maxwell Baker
So we wanted to just kind of go over a little bit about some of the stuff that you’ve learned in the mobile home park research as far as valuations. Some of the articles that you have, we evaluate 1000s of mobile home parks every year, we look at it as facts, probabilities, and variables. Those are the three things that we are concerned about when it comes to evaluating risk on these mobile home communities. So, I just kind of wanted to get your feedback on how your research went about, what you did to uncover what you found and just kind of explore that.
01:54 Dr. Charles Becker
Okay, being the professor type, I can talk for hours about this. But I understand this is close to an elevator pitch and I have a bunch of papers online. Usually, if they’re in pre-publication form, you can download them for free if you want to see tons and tons of tables.
02:10 Dr. Charles Becker
Gosh, there’s a lot though the latest paper that I’m really taken by as is with Brenda Garcia and myself. And we looked at 10s of 1000s of sales and the site rents, you know, the lot rents that were associated with them across Texas, the Rocky Mountain region, the Great Plains states. And, you know, before we have other papers like North Carolina, but since we have from both North Carolina work and this sort of Great Plains Rocky Mountain work is that the market is fragmented. That’s like if there’s one takeaway, it’s there’s not a homogeneous market. So, we try all these different statistical ways of breaking it into various groups. It’s a real tight market, it’s very responsive in the areas around especially thriving cities, then you have, you know, on the other side, you have fairly remote small towns and rural areas, especially up north where the population is beginning to drain out. Except, of course, for in the Dakotas, and places where there’s a natural resource boom, you know, then you get parks that are situated outside of either medium-sized cities, some even some larger cities, which aren’t growing very rapidly, and those markets are a lot more stagnant. So you can’t talk about a single market. This is true for by the way for stick-built housing, too. There’s just been a whole lot more analysis of that. But it’s certainly true for manufactured housing, people running lots and manufactured housing parks. There’s a whole lot of different kinds.
03:38 Maxwell Baker
Yeah. So, as we’ve been doing deals across the country, I’ve noticed that up in the Midwest and up north, lot rents are higher up there organically, it seems. I was reading in your paper that it has to do with just the unavailability of land in causing rents to rise because of zoning and whatnot. But here in the south, there’s starting to creep up. And I know that Frank Roth has mentioned in the past that is because of the availability of land and the lack of zoning down here. We’ve noticed that the only new parks that are being built across the country are the ones that are in areas that have zero zoning.
04:16 Dr. Charles Becker
Right. So what you expect in the south, of course, you have got a couple things that kind of cut both ways. As you head further south, the quality manufactured housing and all kinds of housing is going to be lower, because structures don’t have to be as well insulated and you have tons of snow falling on your roof, you got to make sure that that’s not going to cave in. Whereas we in the south, we don’t have that problem.
04:39 Maxwell Baker
Yeah.
04:40 Dr. Charles Becker
So the overall quality, which we can’t measure perfectly, you know, we have information, of course, about size and the date that the structure was built and so on. But you figure they’re the sort of unobservable factors that are better up north. So people are going to pay more and the parks themselves as to be somewhat better maintained in a cold environment. If you look around, there are places in North Carolina where essentially people just put housing in a field and some individual septic fields for them. And, and that’s about it.
5:09 Maxwell Baker
Yeah.
05:10 Dr. Charles Becker
Can’t get away with that in Minnesota and that leads to next thing and there’s restrictions there stricter zoning as you head north on average. That also means, though, that in southern states, because there’s less restrictions on entry, you know, supply, as we say, in economics, more elastic, there’s plenty of land. It’s so hard, if not impossible to open up a new manufacturer housing park in most of the country. And actually, that includes a lot of metro areas in the south, too.
5:37 Maxwell Baker
Yeah.
5:38 Maxwell Baker
These things all contribute to lower costs in the south, and a lot of small mom and pops as well.
05:43 Maxwell Baker
Yeah, we’ve found that just here in Georgia, 80% of the mobile home communities are going to be 30 units and below and it’s just the majority of them are mom and pops. It’s interesting, you were talking about the different added variables that park owners have to deal with, with the elements. You know, one thing that I’ve always been curious about, on the mobile home side, when you’re looking at brand new ones, they’ve got the different types of thermal zones and wind zones. I know on the coasts, obviously, they’re going to have higher wind zone mobile homes. They have one through three and then on the thermal zones, they have also one through three.
06:16 Maxwell Baker
I believe there’s one other type of classification that I’m not used to, but what’s the line in the sand that really causes the areas in these parts of the country like, alright, it’s got to be thermal zone three, if we’re going to put a mobile home over here? We can’t bring in a thermal zone, one type of mobile home into the areas. Have y’all ever done any kind of research on that?
06:40 Dr. Charles Becker
Embarrassed to say we haven’,t we should be looking at this. The data sets we played with this far, don’t tend to have that kind of information.
06:49 Maxwell Baker
Yeah.
06:50 Dr. Charles Becker
I’d love to be able to look at because you look across North Carolina, and the variation in quality of manufactured housing is just astonishing.
06:59 Maxwell Baker
Yes.
07:00 Dr. Charles Becker
And you get down to the some. Gosh, especially now some of the new units that are being put up, off and down and some of the coastal counties, and these new units are going in there really, really high. Then you go places, some of the big national firms, their standards are very different and you get these old ones, you know, things that are, you know, 60 years old, you know, they have nothing.
07:21 Maxwell Baker
Yeah, the inner city, mobile home parks have always got those little wonderbread cookie cutter mobile homes, which is interesting, I’ll bring up this point, we’ve just been noticing that a lot of these parks are being converted over to tiny home communities. That is a huge movement that we’ve been seeing across really the Southeast, and really the country is that a lot of these older communities that have the small lots, are now being converted over to tiny homes, and they’re able to get upwards towards 25, maybe even 50% more on lot rent, because it’s a different quality or a different type of demographic, however you want to describe it of tenant.
07:59 Maxwell Baker
It’s interesting that a lot of these is mobile home communities, I’ve just been noticing that they’ve just been changing how they operate. I don’t know if you’ve seen that much or whatnot and your research or whatnot.
08:12 Dr. Charles Becker
I haven’t seen it in the research. I’ve certainly read you know, read a fair amount about how these sort of things are happening. We stayed a couple years ago and we’re actually in a resort out west in what would be essentially a tiny home. I was underwhelmed.
08:31 Maxwell Baker
I mean, it’s a you know, my millennial, younger type minimalistic type of living. I’ve tried to show it to a couple family members and they’re like, “No, I’m not into it”. But for some people that are just starting out in their career and are like, look, this is great. Like my partner that’s with usedmobilehome.com that we’re working with he loves to go and just go stay and he’s 25. So, he loves these minimalistic type of living and he’ll stay on the beach in a tiny home. I mean, you can’t beat $200 a night or sometimes it’s less than 100 bucks to go stay with a view that is like a million dollar view in these little tiny homes. So it’s interesting.
09:11 Dr. Charles Becker
We just stay, we were down at Emerald Isle, we’re still receiving a double-wide.
09:15 Maxwell Baker
Nice. I mean, I know in raw, we’ve done some business out there. A lot of mobile home parks out there, and a lot of people have been in for a long time. What is it you’re working on right now, Dr. Becker that you’re most excited about? You don’t have to be mobile home park stuff, but I’m just kind of curious what you’re most excited about right now. With your research.
09:34 Dr. Charles Becker
Well, I’ve got a huge range of things. I’m working on projects, not necessarily in the United States, but ultimately be useful here. Using satellite night light data to fill in information where economic data is lacking. Actually, it could be really useful for the United States in sort of the areas around like this, the sandhills and parts of like the Carolina border, areas that are basically rural and declining. Being able to track that much more effectively than you can purely with economic data.
10:05 Maxwell Baker
Interesting.
10:06 Dr. Charles Becker
So it turns out, I thought this would be like low hanging fruit, it turns out that they keep switching out different satellites and they take it a different times a day, rather different times at night. Making them comparable, turns out to be a ton of work. But I think it’s something that would be, especially in for remote areas, getting a sense of what’s really going on, because a lot of people will will still be registered to live at a place. But if they’re all moving away in areas that are in decline, you’ll be picked up in the nightlights whereas it won’t be picked up in economic data.
10:38 Maxwell Baker
Wow, that’s a that’s pretty deep details. Love it man. That kind of went over my head. But I’m grateful that you shared it with me because I really wanted the audience to know that Dr. Becker does a lot of stuff. He’s done some research in Kazakhstan and some of the places across the world. He’s not just doing mobile homes and mobile home communities, he does a lot of different research.
11:00 Maxwell Baker
I think you have one article that was talking about the real estate bubble in Kazakhstan, you know, stuff like that. So it’s very cool, just to kind of hear he’s a very well globally rounded researcher. But to jump back into the mobile home stuff, we’re seeing a lot of the used home market double and even triple in the amount of what people are getting these days. We think, obviously, it’s the reason of COVID. But also the issues with the supplies and whatnot to build brand new manufactured homes. I just kind of want to get your feedback on some of the causes you’re seeing on these used mobile homes and the economics behind it to see if you’ve had any thoughts about it.
11:39 Dr. Charles Becker
Well, certainly there’s been. So we’re picking up. I’m gonna go back in history. First of all, I’ll say one thing because it’s a really cool, wonderful country and it has a ‘zillow imitator’. So you can go back and get all this detail information on individual home sales, and all this stuff, for back for about eight years now. So it’s actually it’s not a random choice.
12:04 Dr. Charles Becker
So back to America, ever since the great recession. You know, my quick and dirty history, what’s happened is mobile home sales peaked in the mid 90s, early mid 90s. Then for variety of reasons under the Clinton administration, there was a well, significant decline. And then after 911, occurred under the Bush administration, they made credit super easy to get, crash interest rates that may start as typical housing far more affordable, and competitive with respect relative to manufactured housing, crushed the industry. It picked up a little bit with the great recession or after the great recession ended. It’s been struggling since then.
12:44 Dr. Charles Becker
But at the same time, across the United States, I think what’s happening is that it’s not picked up in these aggregate data don’t show it. But there’s been this surge in metropolitan areas, they’re taking off, they’re thriving. You’re in Atlanta, I’m in the triangle in North Carolina, these areas are experiencing economic growth that we could not have imagined until fairly recently. But it’s sucking the life out of some of the rural counties that are surrounding it. So what you’re seeing is, is massive movement toward either the metro areas or housing along the interstates that connect them. And some of those, the average values, because there’s a lot of housing that’s being effectively abandoned or hardly used to those averages. It’s like they’re still on the books. They’re not being sold there half abandoned in some cases. But because of these movements, you’re seeing this surge in demand for used housing across the board, including manufactured housing.
13:47 Dr. Charles Becker
Then with COVID, there’s the supply chain issues these getting housing moved is now super expensive. If you look up and down I-40, I-85 in North Carolina, it’s dotted all the way basically from Johnson County 30-40 miles east to where it meets up with I-95 to Charlotte and beyond. You have small mom and pop manufactured home parks all over and demand for those has to be rising because normal just folks can’t afford the central city rents that have taken off as these areas have experienced booms. You see these other areas getting additional demand. And honestly you see housing, you see stick built housing in these areas, also taking off.
14:35 Maxwell Baker
Yeah, it’s real crazy because we’ve been monitoring and some of these secondary tertiary markets are seeing over the last five years. Lot rents are at $195, $175 or closer to $300, which is crazy. The way we go into a market, Warner Robins is a great example or Warner Robins, Georgia excuse me. The occupancy across the entire city is close to 100% and we’ll take whatever the cheapest two bedroom we find. So in that market, it’s $650, $675 will be $700 and we’ll divide that by two. That’s typically where we have seen lot rents that can be sustained, like at the market level is dividing by two, whatever the cheapest two bedroom is.
15:20 Maxwell Baker
They’re all 100% full, because when we were doing our rental analysis, all the offerings were like to $225-$250. And anytime we look at a community, and it’s 100%, full, we automatically say, lot rents can be pushed. From what I’ve seen, and what I’ve been taught from CCIM and all these other licensing, commercial real estate underwriting companies and designations is that 90% is typically what they say is where you’re at market. If you’re at a 90% occupancy, you have met market, but if you’re at 100%, that means you’re too cheap.
15:54 Maxwell Baker
So now we’re seeing across the board, all these towns like, even like Tifton, Georgia, which has historically been very lower income kind of area, are now 100% full and I’m just shocked. Some of these towns like in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, these manufacturers are willing to pay lot rent in these mobile home communities, just to reserve a spot to put a brand new mobile home, because the demand for housing is so great and there’s just a waiting list of people trying to get a home into or even rent a home.
16:31 Maxwell Baker
10 years ago, when I started, nobody was calling park owners to move in and use their new mobile home, it just didn’t exist it but now some of these parks like even like in the market Tifton like but I get a lot but like one to two calls a month people trying to move a mobile home into a park. It’s not as uncommon as it used to be. And it’s very interesting just to see what’s been developing, it’s exactly what you’re talking about. It’s just the affordability in these urban areas and people are just like, “Forget it. I’m not paying $2,500 a month for a one bedroom”.
17:01 Dr. Charles Becker
Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. Man, if you think of like Central City, apartment rents, or like, even in you know, in small urban areas is crazy, but it’s the one the ones that are thriving. But then you have these small towns, small cities where the industry is dried up, and no one’s running there. So there’s no transaction taking place. The average gets bid up with the churning, is my quick bottom line here and I’d like to document that. I haven’t seen in the academic literature, which kind of surprises me that you just look around you know, that somewhere is it’s you know, lot rents and home rents are not are not going through the roof in Danville or Roanoke rapids the way they are in Orange, Durham, Wake County’s, Mecklenburg or Charlotte is.
17:44 Maxwell Baker
Yeah, it’s interesting, because one of my mentors who is not in the mobile home or mobile home park business. He does a lot of marketing and small business stuff and he always says, ‘Movement breeds wealth’. When it comes to owning a mobile home park or an apartment building, if you have a constant flux of new people coming in, and you’re seeing your competitors getting, you know, $10 or more $20, or more organically, you’re going to look at and be like, “Look, I can increase my rents because my competitors are doing it”. So it’s just looking at it on that side of the landlord side, there’s a lot of positivity, but at the same time, looking at the tenant side, there’s a lot of like you said, a lot of push to move out outside the city just because affordability.
18:27 Dr. Charles Becker
I’m going to mention one more thing though I haven’t done work on this yet. But I’m sure this is a nationwide issue, urban crime has started to explode again. We had like, for from 1990 to 2015, we had a generation of collapse in urban crime, and especially violent crime. And now it’s in the past few years is taken off again, my hunch, again, haven’t shown it but because people have incentive to look after their own properties that they own, if they own their own home and they’re renting the lot. My hunch is that crime is lower, you know, controlling for socioeconomic status in parks than in nearby apartments or in high density, rental stick built housing. That’s something I’d love to be able to show off. I’ve talked with some people, Chris Parish, in particular who runs Parish Manor, and garner and never got around to do anything with it. But now it’s time. I think it’s given this surge of crime. I think it’s an important advantage for those who have mobile home parks.
19:27 Maxwell Baker
Yeah. It’s interesting because like, you know, the ones that are absentee management, typically, in my humble experience are the ones that have the greatest crime. Yeah, you know, I’ve just noticed that they don’t live nearby then typically they’re not there all the time. Like one of the park owners. I have a great relationship down in South Georgia. He bought a dilapidated mobile home community, and they had all the drug dealers and he lived across the street, and every night he would get a baseball bat and walk around the park. He would just walk around but it was incredible Dr. Becker, what I was blown away, as it was 200 units is that as soon as he cleaned up the park, organically all the real estate around his community increased in value. I was shocked as like a 200 space community could effectively change the market value.
20:20 Maxwell Baker
I mean it was within a mile of the park. That side of town just started evolving into becoming more of a lower income but safer area. and it was because of this one guy that just went in there and just changed stuff. I was blown away by just seeing that and seeing like, now that thing is flourishing, and everybody’s home values over there, obviously, with inflation and the value of real estate going up organically. But before all that stuff started, steamrolling downhill, his community was like, within the last 10 years, probably like eight years ago started changing. So I agree like the crime aspect in mobile home communities, I think is probably a lot less because I feel like there is more homeownership in these lot rent only communities. I will say on the other side, that these mobile home communities where you’re renting the mobile homes, there is a lot more crime. Now that you’ve mentioned that I’m thinking about. I’m just all the deals that we’ve looked at, there’s more risk involved, because there’s more variables.
21:15 Dr. Charles Becker
Sure, sure, sure. So documenting some of this would be people should be doing that, gosh, the local government should be interested in this and nothing else.
21:24 Maxwell Baker
Yeah, just to wrap up our talk, where do you see the industry going? You know, my guts, like shutting down people or shutting parks down. But I don’t think it’s gonna really disappear in our lifetime. I think it’s always going to be a variable. So I just kind of want to hear your expertise on where your guts telling you where the industry is gonna go?
21:42 Dr. Charles Becker
Well, as you know, by now, I’m not a big fan of tiny homes. But what I see is, when you look at the websites of manufacturers, you see the quality’s continuing to rise, my expectation is it will rise further. And, you know, they’re becoming much more sophisticated marketing than they have been. I think at some point, there will be acceptance, there’s going to be some kind of breakthrough, where people say, ‘Oh, this is the stigma is unreasonable’. The difference between them is a difference in quality between low end stick Bill and I manufactured housing, there’s a quality difference, but it’s in favor of manufactured housing. I think as that ends, and is economic activity in the United States becomes more concentrated in a limited number of metro areas, and in the highways that connect them. I think you’re going to see rising demand, and that will hopefully lead to supply now that I can’t promise that, of course, because there’s this huge NIMBY. Everyone wants to zone out poor people, or moderate income people and I’m not a politician, I can’t tell you how that’s gonna play out.
22:48 Dr. Charles Becker
If at some point affordable housing, and you’re seeing this, like in Orange County, North Carolina, you already see no awareness that that affordable housing includes manufacture housing, and it has to have a voice. You’re seeing communities across certainly across the triangle, you’re now very reluctant to allow parks to close. And it really is sub size people. They haven’t gotten to the point of saying. Well, gosh, maybe we should encourage construction of new ones, which was like the next logical thing. But I hope it’s just a matter of time, if it isn’t, is a whole lot of parks, they’re destined to retire, because they kind of aged out and they will either be completely, you know, renovated, or they’ll retire, especially as Mom and Pop retire, and the infrastructure deteriorates. If that happens, we could have up to a ballpark figure a million moderate to low income people losing their homes, in a country that already has an affordable housing crisis.
23:49 Maxwell Baker
Yeah, that’s interesting. You say that, one of the things that we’ve noticed is that the new manufacturers are always trying to make bigger, better, more expensive homes. And I think there are a lot of people missing the buck when it comes to the demographic that is looking for homes that are $25,000 and less. I don’t understand why there’s a huge market segment that’s not being served that I think in our lifetime, you’re going to see a disruption there or somebody realizes like, oh, wow, we can serve them and make boatload of money, like, ‘let’s do that’. You’re absolutely right. I think that the continuation of just bigger, better, more expensive. I mean, it’s formal housing. I mean, we’re talking about, you know, stuff that’s less than 25 grand, at least in the south, I know you go out in California is a lot different. But you know, if you’re looking apples to apples, it’s still like you’re spending 100 grand on a mobile home versus less than 25 grand is still affordable housing out there. So it’s interesting that you say that.
24:48 Dr. Charles Becker
Your other thing is then, these demographic shifts to you get a lot more, especially with COVID. There’s been, I think, over the past 15 years, the number of people per household has been declining gradually in the United States means the average household size getting smaller. And that pushes people into smaller units. People are actually moving less than they used to in terms of across metropolitan areas, but within them as new smaller households form, people getting married later having kids later, then that’s going to push demand for affordable housing of all kinds. And a lot of people, especially a lot of guys, your age, aren’t married yet. Don’t want to be pouring in 2000 bucks a month for basically inexpensive homes. So you actually we’re going to see people who want less housing, nicer, cars, vacations, computers. Shift demand. I can’t tell you how much right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s happening.
25:49 Maxwell Baker
Yeah. Dr. Becker, I love talking to you about this. This is all nerd out all day on data man. But again, very grateful for you joining us. Thank you and look forward to talking to you more and doing some more of these research projects that we were talking about before the podcast. So as always, this episode is brought to you by the Community Price Maximizer. It is a four step program that will guarantee you a higher price when you sell your Mobile Home Park or RV Park with us here at the MHP broker ®, give us a call at 678-932-0200or shoot us an email at info@themhpbroker.com and Dr. Becker if anybody wants to get a hold of you, would you be open to talking via email or?
26:37 Dr. Charles Becker
Yeah, sure. It’s easy to find me at cbecker@duke.edu If you forget me just go and look at Duke economics and you’ll find my address there. It’s been great talking with you. This is a lot of fun.
26:50 Maxwell Baker
Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. Get a ride in there for me. We’ll look forward to speaking to you soon.
26:55 Dr. Charles Becker
Okay, you take care now.
Dr Charles Becker
Charles Becker (BA, Grinnell; PhD Princeton) joined the Duke faculty in 2003, where he directed the American Economic Association’s Summer Program and Minority Scholarship Program (2003-2007). He currently directs the MS program in Economics and Computation run jointly by the Departments of Computer Science and Economics. Becker previously taught at CU-Denver, Vanderbilt, and CU-Boulder. In 2007, he was recognized as a lifetime member of the American Economic Association (AEA) for service to the profession; in 2019 he received the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession’s mentorship award. He received Duke’s equity, inclusion and diversity award in 2008 and graduate faculty mentoring award in 2014.
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