MOBILE HOME PARK FOR SALE
Here Are The Show Highlights:
Hello, and welcome to the “Mobile Home Park Broker’s 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.
Maxwell: Hey, everybody, welcome to the Mobile Home Park Broker’s Tips and Tricks episode. I’m actually a little lost for which episode this is. This is a brand new podcast that we are working on and going to be establishing here in the next actually 90 days, a lot of great interviews.
One of my favorite people I’ve met in the industry that I’ve known for a long time from coming to the SECO, this Southeastern Community Owners group that we get together once a year, I’ve met Ken there. Ken Corbin, to give you a little bit of his bio, has had a long and successful career in the manufactured housing industry. [01:02.8]
As the president of his own company, there were more homes sold at Ken’s address than any other address anywhere in the United States. That record still stands today. Today, Ken travels through North America and has spoken to over 1,500 organizations, including over 800 communities, retailers, manufacturers, associations in the manufactured housing industry. His community management and consulting firm focuses on helping owners sell more homes, fill more spaces, spend less time, and maintain bigger and better margins.
Ken is the author of eight books on sales growth, personal and business management. His news audiobooks, Growing Your Business and Selling The American Dream of Home Ownership are each 10 hours or so in length. Ken has an MBA from the University of Michigan and is an advisor-consultant to the American Graduate School of International Management. He is also on the board of trustees of Habitat for Humanity and is a certified management consultant. [02:07.8]
That is quite the bio, Ken. I’m very excited to have you here on the podcast. Welcome, man, welcome.
Ken: Max, I’ll tell you what, it is my pleasure. I always talk about reciprocity and I had an opportunity to have you on my program as a special guest, and I’m really excited to be able to talk to you and hear from and see your listeners.
Maxwell: Yes, you’re going to be quite exposed to a lot of people. I’m excited to see where it takes you. Obviously, I love your hat. It’s amazing.
Ken: This is my favorite hat.
Maxwell: “Make trailer parks great again.” I love it. That is amazing.
Ken: I received this as a gift out in Arizona. I was talking to the community group from Arizona this past year at a wonderful resort and casino just outside of Phoenix and got all done, and they came and they said, “We’ve got to give you this hat,” and this is one of my treasured caps. [03:02.8]
Maxwell: I love it, man. It’s great. It’s great. For you guys that don’t know, Ken and I visit the same area in Mexico as my mom lives in La Floresta. I think it’s La Floresta. I think I remember what the little neighborhood is.
Ken: La Floresta.
Maxwell: La Floresta. There we go. He lives in Ajijic, which is a very beautiful lake town, Lake Chapala of Guadalajara, Mexico. We were on the last podcast, bonding over all this stuff over there and just how much it has changed. I’ve been going there since I was five years old. I’m 38 now, so there you go. That’s how long I’ve been going to Ajijic to visit my family.
Ken: It’s beautiful. As you know, it’s rated by a national geographic has having the second best climate in the world, and so I spend a lot of my time there, as well as I’m talking today from my home in Northern Georgia, up in the mountains, but I love it down there. I love it I’m sure your mother is having a wonderful time living down there. [04:01.1]
Maxwell: She loves it, the views the pools, the jacuzzi, and there’s no place you can go in a world where you have a view, a jacuzzi and a pool for $1,500 a month.
Ken: Absolutely, and the mountains, and the mountains.
Maxwell: It’s true. It’s amazing. It’s an amazing thing. Let’s jump into these questions, Ken, if that’s cool with you.
Ken: Sure.
Maxwell: What or who inspired you to get in the manufactured housing industry business? I’d love to hear your story behind that.
Ken: I’ve been doing this for about 40 years and I talk about two parts of it. To get in just to the business end of it, it was from a retail end. I started in the banking industry when I got out of school and had a lot of clients that were in the retail end of the business, so I got involved with that. They used to publish by state, by sales representative, the number one salesperson in every state and all the way down to whatever number.
I received a contact from a group out in Southern California and they were one of the original, big park owners, and they had parks in California, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, and then down in the Pinellas Park, Tampa, St. Pete area, Florida. [05:15.5]
They contacted me and they said, “We know you probably don’t know a lot about mobile home parks, but you obviously know about sales and what we’re wanting to do is we’re acquiring these communities. We’re wanting to fill them up because we don’t like empty spaces.” Of course, no one likes empty spaces.
I flew out to California, spent some time with them, fell in love with it, and it was like, Max, it was the perfect job for a single guy. Think about going from L.A. to Phoenix, to Dallas, to Atlanta, to Florida. I mean, it was just unbelievable and I spent some time working with them, setting up their systems, their processes. [06:02.6]
We ended up filling all the parks, sold everything and everybody left, everybody happy. From that point forward, I’ve been working with communities and with retailers across all of North America by helping them to sell more homes, fill more spaces.
Maxwell: You’ve really carved out a really good niche for park owners that have empty pads and that need to build a team around those empty pads to fill them up.
Ken: And not always a team. If they have, say, 20 spaces, 40 spaces, anything less than 50, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend hiring somebody or brokering that out to a local realtor, which, to me, they’re worthless. In many cases, you can use the existing team interests and just give them the insights, the wherewithal to sell homes, to fill those spaces up, be it new, be it pre-owned, and do the proper marketing and strategies to get the prospective buyers in. [07:02.1]
Maxwell: I’m going to piggyback on what you’re saying here if that’s okay. Can you go into a little bit more detail on kind of your strategy, because I’m sure that people would like to hear kind of just a little taste of what you do that’s going to help fill the lots as far as a program or as far as how you’re coaching the people on the team already. I’d love to really just explore that with you.
Ken: Sure. I’d like to talk about what I call the three Ps and those three Ps are people, process and promotion. If I sit down with a manager of a community or a salesperson who’s working for a community, and I say, Okay, we have three things that we talk about and I want you to tell me in order, what’s the most important? What’s the least? We have promotion, people, process. Nine times out of 10, they’ll say promotion because we don’t have enough traffic. [08:04.5]
Maxwell: Yeah.
Ken: When I sit down with the owner and I talk about it, they never mention people, by the way. They never mentioned process. The most important thing, by far, is process.
Maxwell: Interesting.
Ken: Because what we find is that people don’t run companies. They really don’t. The process that they put in place runs those companies.
Maxwell: Interesting.
Ken: If you think about it, Max, the majority of the owners of communities in our industry, they don’t live on site. They don’t live within that community. What they have to do is develop a specific process that they can take from Community A, take it over to B, to C and so forth, so when all is said and done, those processes are in place and they’re actually managing those communities. [09:03.1]
Maxwell: Wow.
Ken: Then people become [important]. Obviously they’re very important, but if you have the right processes, you can pretty well plug in people as long as they have the basic skills.
Maxwell: You’re compartmentalizing each job skill, it sounds like. Is that a fair assumption?
Ken: Yes. Yes, from a manager standpoint, we look at it from the perspective of “What are they?” They’re an attorney. They’re an accountant. They’re a police officer. They’re a marriage counselor. They’re an eviction agent. They’re a rent collector. They’re posting payments. They’re doing all of these crazy things. The majority of the things that they do are not fun things. That’s not an enjoyable part.
Who wants to go and bang on someone’s door and say, Listen, I’m tired of talking to you about the dog barking. It’s over 30 pounds, right? And about that couch or the love seat that’s on the front porch, the car that’s sitting on in your driveway with expired plates. [10:14.2]
Then they come back to their office and there’s someone there waiting to talk to them about the fact that there’s water running down the street and there’s another person in the office who wants to talk to them about moving into their community. By the time they get to that person, they’re burned out.
Maxwell: Yeah, it’s too much.
Ken: It’s too much. We have to be able to carp compartmentalize, like you mentioned, and to make it as easy a system and process as possible.
Maxwell: I love that because a lot of that, in business, from the books that we’ve bonded over, the books we’ve read together, but they talk about that. They talk about, I don’t know if watering down is a good word for it, but each position should be very specific to like, look, you come in, you crank this type of widget. Once you get past that job role, you pass the buck down to another part of the [process], another personnel or another process person, and then they just pick it up from where it is. [11:11.8]
That way it’s just the salespeople are always fresh and they’re not always dealing with the drama of day-to-day operations, and the operations or people are just [burned out]. So, that’s pretty cool. I totally see there’s a lot of value in that. I appreciate you sharing that little nugget.
Ken: No problem.
Maxwell: The next thing is, what is your favorite part of the sales process when it comes to selling mobile homes and filling up lots?
Ken: You never are dealing with the same situation. I always tell people I’m in the business of doing two things, helping people sell homes and making friends, and when I talked to a community manager, I stress that. They have to think about it that they’re in the job and their job is filling spaces and making friends. That should be their whole focus, and they correlate so much together. Don’t focus on selling a home. Focus on selling a lifestyle. [12:14.0]
Maxwell: I like that.
Ken: When you go in to purchase a home from a community, you’re buying a completely different lifestyle. As a community owner or a manager, how many children do they have? What grade are they in in school? I want to be able to talk to them about the school systems in my area. I want to give them specifics on those school systems. I want to talk to them.
I think about our typical buyer and I tell people, If you want to see our buyer go and put a lawn chair in the back of the pickup truck, because they’re driving pickups, and then go down to the Walmart where they shop, put that pickup right by the front door, pull down the bed, put your chair in the bed, sit there and watch people coming in and out of Walmart. That is our residents. There’s just no question about it. [13:10.8]
You think about that buyer. She’s going to Walmart. He’s getting up in the morning. He’s going out and getting on his bass boat with the bass boat payment that’s generally higher than his house payment. Right? We know his pickup truck payment is higher than his house payment because he finances a $50,000 pickup for 60 months, and he might go seven years, 72 months or even eight, so on.
Maxwell: Whatever it is, yeah.
Ken: He’ll want to finance that single-wide mobile home for $50,000 for 30 years. We’ve got to correlate ourselves and talk to them on their level, think about their level. Then don’t sell a home. Sell a payment.
Maxwell: Yes.
Ken: What we do and, Max, you and I will go out and we’ll look for a car, right? My wife and I recently did this. We were looking for a new SUV for her. [14:05.4]
What we do is we pull in to the various dealerships. We walk into the door and the first thing my wife does like anybody else does, they go look at a vehicle and they go right to the sticker price, and they say, That’s too much money. How many of our customers are paying cash when they buy a pre-owned mobile home or a new manufactured home? A very, very small portion.
When I talk to people about it, it’s using ways to teach them and interact with your customer, and I use a payment system. There’s a program called FrogRate, FrogRate.com. I recommend everybody use it. You sit down with a customer, you turn around the computer—and I’ll use my phone, as an example—and I’ll have FrogRate on there and I’ll say, Okay, let’s figure it out, how much you can afford, and I’ll do a lender pre-approval formula. [15:01.4]
If anybody wants a copy of this, just drop me an email, Ken@CallKenCorbin.com, and I’ll send them a copy of the preapproval formula, but it really helps them to understand how much that potential homeowner can qualify for it. Once you get that dollar a month that they qualify for in payments, just stick that amount in. We know what our parameters are in terms and rate, and automatically it tells them how much home they can buy. So, we want to make doing business with you easy.
Maxwell: Amen to that.
Ken: Make doing business with you easy. Don’t complicate the system. I was talking to someone earlier today and they had just spent $47,000 for a 16-by-80 that was coming into their community for a new home. They had seen it at a home show at a manufacturer, and many manufacturers are doing that now because some of the shows, like the upcoming Louisville Show, are been canceled. [16:00.0]
I asked them. I said, “When you went into that home at this manufacturer, how did it look?”
He said, “Man, it was gorgeous. The lights were on. The living room, everything about it was great.”
I said, “Okay. Did you buy the furniture package with that home?”
“Uh…no. I’ll put some stuff in it.” He’s not going to decor it professionally. He’s not going to do it the way that they should do it. I recommend always [doing] what we call staging a home.
Maxwell: Yes.
Ken: A manufacturer is going to spend on a single wide upwards of $10,000 to make that home look good to you, Max, to buy it, right? To put it into your community. Then when you get it there, it’s either naked, meaning, there’s nothing in there. You might put a few light bulbs in. You’ll forget to take the tape off the refrigerator, so they can’t open the door, or if they do open the door, all the package material is still inside, right? [17:05.7]
Make it ready. All the light bulbs are in. A little thing I talk about frequently is if you can’t put power to the home, definitely run a 50-amp breaker from the breaker box out to the front steps, and put a deck on a model and have a little switch on that, so when you start to walk up to the house, flip that little switch and then the lights come on inside the home.
Maxwell: Nice.
Ken: You walk in. You show the home. You walk out. You turn it off. The only lights that should not be on that home, if you’re ordering a home for display, on the front of every home, there’s a window. I’ve only seen one in the last 10 years that did not have a window in the front of it. It was God awful ugly. I thought the back end that was in it was actually the front end. But, anyway, there’s a window on the front. I recommend putting what they call a bow or bay, or a bay window in the front of every single wide that you put on display. [18:04.5]
Then on each side of that window, order what are called coach lights. It’s nothing more than little lights, like your front door lights, but that’s on each side of the home. Those should be left on on a timer or you put a little eye on there, so it goes on when it’s dark, and it just sets the home off. People are driving in, and today it’s the beginning of December when we’re taping this interview, and you, Max, know, like I know, that around 5:30 in the middle of the winter, it’s dark. Right?
Maxwell: Yes.
Ken: But people are still driving around, wanting to look at homes and they drive in the community, and here’s a beautiful home with a nice window on the front and the lights are on. How nice does that?
Maxwell: Oh, it’s beautiful.
Ken: It’s beautiful. Some people will take and put the lights on the front, and they’ll have a light facing up to the front of the home then there’s a little sign on that that talks about the home being for sale, and those are solar. [19:05.0]
Those are solar, so that they’re collecting the daylight, the sun, during the day it maybe only lasts for four or five hours, but that’s okay. It lasts from 5:30 to 9:30, but it’s just a little solar light that’s on there, and then it goes off around 9:30, 10 o’clock, and it goes back on tomorrow. It’s just the little things.
Go ahead.
Maxwell: I was going to say for the staging, that was one of my other questions I was going to ask you, kind of perfectly transitioned into the staging part. I loved hearing about it because people don’t really talk about that, at least in my world, and in the mobile home park, I’m always talking about cap rates and rent, what average rents are, but this kind of stuff is really going to help park owners sell a product. I’ll go into a park and, a lot of times, you’ll see an empty home in there and none of the stuff that you just talked about is being done.
Ken: Yeah, because you don’t have to do the whole house. You don’t have to do the whole house. [20:02.1]
Maxwell: But it’s like just doing a little bit would tremendously change really just the outlook of your community. First impressions are stuck in people’s heads. As soon as they get into a park and they see a mobile home or a manufactured home set up the way you just described, I mean, it gets me excited just talking about it.
Ken: You’re going to make between $5,000 and $10,000 more by staging a home than you would if it was, as I call it, naked.
Maxwell: Really?
Ken: Then once it’s sold and everything is in neutral tones, you take everything out and you go to the next model. You’re going to make between 5,000 and 10,000. It’s funny, the typical retailer, Max, in our business is going to make about 22 percent pretax on the sale of every home. That’s after everything. After everything. That’s after commissions and all that on a single-section home. [21:01.1]
On a $50,000 home, they’re making at least 10 grand, at least $10,000 to $12,000, where most community owners are thrilled just to sell the home for virtually no profit. They don’t put anything in it. Then it sits there for two, three, four months and they don’t understand. Hell, we’re the cheapest out there. They don’t realize that value is always more expensive than price and our customer, Max, they have no idea, absolutely no idea, value is always more expensive than price.
Maxwell: That’s a great quote.
Ken: The customers have no idea how much a home should be sold for. They have no idea whatsoever. If you and I went to a Buick dealership and I haven’t been in a Buick dealership in a long time, but if you and I went into a Buick dealership and they had five vehicles sitting in the showroom and they took out the sticker price of every one of those vehicles, you and I, I can virtually guarantee you, could not tell the price, the sticker price of those vehicles within $5,000. [22:17.7]
Maxwell: How would we ever know?
Ken: There’s no way. How in the heck can a customer tell you what a home should be sold for? They have no conception.
Maxwell: About the paintings.
Ken: Spend $5,000–6,000, taking one home and making it look really good. Sell it, make that up to $10,000 easily because value is always more expensive than price. Sell the lifestyle. Take everything out, put it in the next home and continue your little trek down the road.
Maxwell: That’s really good advice because I’ve never heard it being said that way before. You really hit something in my core when you said that, so I appreciate you sharing that the value is more expensive than price. [23:05.1]
Ken: No problem.
Maxwell: Y’all are here at the MHP Broker Tips and Tricks. This is a hell of a tip from Ken Corbin here. I’m really excited about that. My next question I’ve got for you is how does technology play a major role in the management and operations of communities and also retail sales centers?
Ken: It’s the most important thing we can do today. It’s absolutely the most important thing that we can do, starting with a CRM program, customer relationship management. There are countless programs out there. You can go with a very, very inexpensive program called Keap that you can spend about $50 a month on.
The best one out there for our industry right now is called MhCRM. I have no affiliation with them whatsoever, but I can tell you just do a search for MhCRM and I can guarantee you, it is absolutely the finest prospect management system that’s out there for our business. [24:09.7]
From an accounting perspective, there are countless programs, countless programs that you can use, but software today, technology today, social media today, the platforms and they change so rapidly. I mean, Max, a couple of years ago, nobody had ever heard of Reddit and today it has become very, very popular. YouTube, obviously, is really popular, but how many people have an actual YouTube channel? How many people have a YouTube channel where people can actually go in and see all the homes that you have available without having to go through countless sets of posts? You don’t have to spend a lot of money on social media today. [25:01.3]
If you think about what we used to spend on advertising, think of what it would cost you today, Max, to take out an ad in the USA Today, right? USA Today, it would cost you a lot of money and there are 1.3 million people that pick up the USA Today every day. Think about how there are three billion people every day that go to Facebook, three billion. The second-largest social media platform today is YouTube and people aren’t using that for our business. They really aren’t using it.
The third biggest for our industry and virtually nobody uses it is Pinterest. Who goes to Pinterest? Women, right? Women love Pinterest. Max, if a husband and wife or a couple are going out and looking for a home, who do you think makes the ultimate housing decision?
Maxwell: Of course, the wife.
Ken: So, the wife or the partner. [26:02.4]
Maxwell: Yeah.
Ken: And what do they love? They love Pinterest.
Maxwell: That’s right.
Ken: How many of the people listening or watching this program today are spending nothing to go on Pinterest and promote their homes, to promote their community.
Maxwell: There’s none. I follow. I’m on Pinterest and there are a couple of hashtags or a couple of people that… There are just way more now, actually now that I think about it. I’ve seen a lot more people who are owners, mobile home rehab and mobile home remakes. There are a lot of great ideas that you can get out of Pinterest. I was actually talking to a park manager earlier today about that she was like, Yeah, that’s where I’ve got all my designs from. I’m like, Case in point, you just said it. That’s hilarious.
Ken: Exactly. Yeah, anything that we can do in a technological perspective, from an accounting perspective, from a CRM perspective, from marketing and so forth, we absolutely have to stay on top of it. There’s too much competition out there and it’s growing. [27:01.6]
When we look at what the cap rates are doing, when we look at how many people are coming into our space, you’re going to see an explosion of communities over the next few years and I’m seeing it now in various parts of the country, and it exponentially just continues to grow. We need to be ready and being ready means that we have to be on top of the latest technological, social media and accounting platforms that we can utilize to run and help grow our business.
Maxwell: I’m assuming, kind of leading into the next question here, what is it about your company that sets apart from the other consultants out there in the realm? Are you helping them set up with a YouTube and all this stuff you describe? What is it that you’re doing for park owners and retailers?
Ken: We’re the only company out there that solely specializes. We’re the largest. There might be other people out there I’m not aware of. We solely specialize in helping communities that want to maybe acquire a community and say, Okay, we’ve got this at a great cap rate. We’ve got a lot of spaces we need to fill or we have a lot of pre-owned homes in here. [28:12.7]
We have to decide what are the good ones? What are the bad ones? If these ones that are fairly good are remarketable, how much should we spend? What should we sell them for and what are the processes we should put in place? People that contact my firm are looking to sell homes, be it new or pre-owned, fill the spaces and then hopefully go on to more communities.
I do not specialize in the day-to-day managerial operations. I can help, obviously, because I’ve been involved in over 800 communities and companies across all of North America, but our specialty is helping them to make more money by filling more spaces and getting rid of all those ugly places that don’t have a homebuyer. [29:01.1]
Maxwell: Gotcha. Gotcha.
Ken: And developing, obviously, expanding and development.
Maxwell: Yes. One last thing, it kind of piggybacks on what we were talking about, training programs. What type of training programs do you offer for associates and their employees?
Ken: It depends on where you’re at. If you’re in, as an example, the state of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, ironically, I do all of the continuing education for all three of those states.
Maxwell: Okay, nice.
Ken: Yes, as a matter of fact, I’m leaving in the morning. I’ll be gone to three different states, two with clients and one with actually the state of Alabama. Next week, I’ll be in Montgomery doing a three-hour class. But the majority of the work that I do is private with companies that are wanting me to help them with their training. This is not expensive in the respect that I do not have to go back and forth, and back and forth. [30:02.0]
Typically, what I’ll do, Max, is a client will call me. I’ll spend a month with them, up to a month, talking about their company, looking at their operations. How many homes have they sold? Realistically, how many homes would they like to sell over the next 12 to 24 to 36 months?
Then I go out and visit with them. We develop a strategy, help put together the various manufacturers that they should be handling, the various specific product that they should be carrying, where that product should go on specific lots, what financing programs they should be incorporating based on their market, the demographics. We look at the ages. We look at income.
We develop a customized program, and then, from that point forward, I work with that client no longer than six months. The longest I’ve ever had to work with a client to six months. [31:02.8]
Maxwell: I really want to say something, coming back to what you just said, because I have seen tons of park owners do this and fall flat on their face. I feel if they hire you to come and consult them on what demographic they have in the area, what price range they need to be in, because case in point, we had a park—I won’t mention any names or locations—there was a park that we knew of and a buyer came in and filled it up with brand new homes from Clayton, and they were beautiful homes, but the market couldn’t sustain it.
If he was trying to get $800 or $900 a month, all-in lot rent in mobile home, whereas the market topped out at 650. He struggled all the way up until he finally sold it and he couldn’t even sell a lot of the homes in there because they were just way out of price for the local economy. [32:02.4]
I think it’s extremely valuable for somebody to come in, do a global survey of what the area is like, what other communities are charging, and get a very high-level picture of what you can sell versus just coming in there thinking you can just buy a bunch of brand new homes and everybody would just show up with money in their hands. That doesn’t happen out there all the time, y’all.
Ken, I want you to and I really want to emphasize that that is extremely needed in our industry because there are a lot of park owners that feel they can just buy a bunch of brand new homes and thinking, Hey, we just got some new product in here and people are going to pay whatever, but if your market taps out at 650 and you’re trying to get 900, there’s a reason. I mean, you probably whipped on that purchase. I just wanted to really emphasize that, Ken.
Ken: Piggybacking on what you just said, I cannot tell you how many times I have gone into a market and I see where a park owner has bought 30, 40, 50 homes and brought them all in at one point in time to sell, not knowing the market. [33:16.0]
Even if they knew the market or if they thought they knew the market, we’re not perfect. We’re going to study. We’re going to analyze and we’re going to give our best solid recommendations of not only product, but pricing, location and finance, all those four pieces put together. We’re not going to order a bunch of houses. We’re going to do sampling and tests to make sure that they’re working. I will be there.
As an example, we did an open-house event for a client in the southeast. In fact, we did it earlier this year. We did it in February before the COVID had hit yet. We spent total, I think, it was $7,300 for this community and for this company. [34:04.8]
We did a four-day promotion and, during those four days, we took 53 applications for new homes, in four days, because we knew the market strategy that we needed to have.
Maxwell: That’s a lot.
Ken: Yeah. Most communities would be thrilled if they can sell a one net new home per month. In other words, if they lost two or lost one resident, but sold two, that would be a net one in a month. We did 53 applications and deposits in four days. Because we knew the market, we knew what needed to be done.
Now, did all 53 end up buying a home? Absolutely not. I think there were 22 or 23 that ended up actually buying.
Maxwell: Wow.
Ken: But for most companies, that’s a whole year.
Maxwell: That’s a lot. That’s a lot of movement. [35:01.0]
Ken: That’s a lot of movement. That’s a lot of movement, and you can do that if you have the plan in place, if you have the processes. You’re just not going to do that overnight. When that retailer finally, that I’m working with, and I don’t expect them to do that kind of promotion. This was a fairly good-sized company and we had the financial resources for one thing, but we had the people in place and we had the processes in place. They had other locations. We brought them all in. We spent a week training everybody. So, we knew it had to be done. But if someone can go in and sell five, six, seven homes in a weekend, I mean, for a community, that’s incredible.
Maxwell: Yeah, that’s amazing.
Ken: And that can be done. It’s just putting the pieces in place.
Maxwell: That’s where Ken Corbin here is going to specialize in helping you guys, park owners and retailers obviously, get this set up and eliminate the amount of growing pains that a lot of people have going into a brand new market they don’t know much. [36:06.2]
With a little mix of his sauce of setting up the process and the little a sauce from the MHP Broker doing some rental analysis, and a combination of everything, I think you’re going to have a higher probability of success when it comes to filling your park up very, very quickly and appropriately to what the market can sustain.
Ken, if they want to get ahold of you, give us contact info about how to get ahold of you, email and phone number or smoke signals should we prefer.
Ken: Let’s start with the website. It’s CallKenCorbin.com. For everybody out there, Max was a recent guest on the program. Once you go to the website, if you go to the top right-hand corner, you’ll see a little tab that says “Manufactured home show.” Click on that and you’ll see all the interviews that I’ve done with people across our industries. But on the website, you’ll see information about me, our training programs and so forth. [37:03.1]
Feel free to call me. My toll free number is (888) 823-4945. If I’m not available, I’ll get back to you as quickly as possible. I return all calls within seven hours. That’s my guarantee. You can also email me, Ken@CallKenCorbin.com, and I’d be happy to answer. There’s no obligation. I’ll be happy to spend a couple hours with you analyzing what you’re trying to accomplish. We can talk about some basic strategies and we’ll go from there.
Maxwell: Awesome. Ken, I’m very grateful to have you on the show. Here at the MHP Broker, it’s always great to be with one of the masters that has been in the industry for a long time. It’s quite the experience doing well over 800 communities. I mean, that’s big time, Ken, so I’m excited to see what you can do for some of our park owners.
As always, this show is always brought to you by the Community Price Maximizing System. It is our proprietary MHP Broker system that will help you in four steps to get you the guaranteed highest price possible when you sell your mobile home park. [38:13.5]
Obviously, if you team up with Ken prior to that, he’s going to show you how to fill up your empty lots and how to find out what the best style type is, however you want to look at it, mobile home or manufactured home will fit in your community for the local economy.
Again, Ken, thank you so much for jumping on with us. Should anybody have any questions about this interview or even want to try and reach out to me because you couldn’t get ahold of Ken, his messaging here, you can call us at (678) 932-0200 today and we’ll be happy to help you out as much as we can.
Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.
Ken: Thanks.
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