The MHP Brokers Tips and Tricks Podcast Interview with Ed Bridgman of EOB Consulting, Part 2

In this episode of The MHP Broker’s Tips and Tricks podcast, Maxwell Baker, president of The Mobile Home Park Broker, interviewed Ed Bridgman, president of EOB Consulting. They discussed the services his team delivers to mobile home and RV community owners.  

This and every Tips and Tricks podcast episode is brought to you by The MHP Broker’s’  proprietary Community Price Maximizer. Use this four-step system to get the highest price possible for your mobile home park or RV community when you sell it through The MHP Broker. Guaranteed. Ask Max for details.   

Here Are the Show Highlights: 

• This is a return visit to the podcast for Ed, who addressed several additional topics of interest for mobile home park and RV community owners and investors. Max and Ed started the conversation with the challenges related to monitoring (and getting paid for the electricity used by RV community guests. (Max, 00:59) 
• RV destination owners are starting to understand the importance of metering guests’ electricity consumption. But most don’t have the infrastructure in place to do it effectively. (Ed, 1:21) 
• Those owners are starting to understand the importance of individually charging guests for their electricity use. Ed used as an example a guest to his own state-of-the-art Homestead RV Community. The guest arrived in a 32-foot RV decked out with an extensive solar panel array and about 800 pounds of batteries, so Ed didn’t expect this guest to use much, if any, community power. (Ed, 2:03) 
• What Ed didn’t expect was for the guest to boondock under tree cover. As a result, he wasn’t able to recharge his solar batteries, and the guest ended up using $45 worth of community electricity in just a few days. (Ed, 3:35) 
• As another example, Ed had several RVs arriving together over the Christmas holiday. Several had heated floors, and each consumed 125 to 150 kw of community electricity. In other cases, guests might have electric cars or golf carts being recharged through the park electrical, or have freezers, space heaters, air conditioners or other big appliances tapping in. The point is, park owners must charge individually for consumption or go broke. (Ed, 3:47) 
• Besides encouraging RV park owners to monitor electrical use, Ed also consults on helping new owners of parks turn a profit on a previously unprofitable property. (Max, 5:09) 
• Ed gets called by both sellers and buyers. He helps sellers appraise their property for sale value, and will walk a property with the prospective buyer to suggest actions to increase park value and satisfy lender concerns. When investors are building parks, he’ll consult during the layout design stage to find potential problems and opportunities. (Ed, 5:46) 
• Ed’s review can be so comprehensive as to include interviewing city officials and local businesses to see about the regulatory and employment environment. For instance, he might call Walmart to see if rumors are true about the company building a new distribution center just miles from the park. He also researches local affordable housing demand and the market competition, and looks for other advantages or obstacles to profitability. (Ed, 7:01) 
• With all that he learns, he creates a CAD site layout for new builds or existing structures, emphasizing strategies that might be used to maximize park value. With that, they arrive at a preliminary ten-year budget that goes into a spreadsheet to give a good idea of expected capital expenditures and when the company can expect to earn a return on initial investment. (Ed, 8:02) 
• For  this consulting service, Ed charges a flat rate of $20,000 plus lodging and travel expenses. (Ed, 9:35)
• Through this service, Ed and his team design and maximize the profitability of an average of about three client properties a month. And through his own Homestead RV Community, they have over 240 guest reviews, for a Google review rating of 4.9.. (Ed, 10:44) 
• The company website, at EOB_Consulting.com, includes a section called Step by Step. This is a free and informative tutorial that lists actions you should take in developing your own RV park, whether from new construction or purchase. It includes a thorough explanation of the five different destination RV communities. (Ed, 12:19) 
• Ed can be reached either through his website, EOB.Consulting.com, or by calling him at (512) 785-1379. You can also learn more about Ed’s own property, Homestead RV Community, billed as “the most technologically advanced RV destination in the world.” Just visit HomeRVC.com and take a virtual tour. (Ed, 13:30) 

When thinking about buying or selling an RV community, it pays to start with a consultation with Ed Bridgman of EOB Consulting. When the for-sale sign goes up on your mobile home park or RV community, trust The Mobile Home Park Broker and our innovative Community Price Maximizer platform to optimize your park value and sale price. Drop Max Baker a line at info@themhpbroker.com or give him a call at (678) 932-0200.   

Power Quotes in This Episode: 

“…we come out, we walk the property with the owner, and we develop an understanding of what their vision is for this property. That’s one of the ways that we are unique from our peers, we don’t try to do it from the basement of our house back in Texas. We actually travel to the property, we find every property is unique. Every property has some nuances that need to be brought out during the layout design.” (Ed, 5:46) 

“…we know what the market wants, we know what the vision of the owner (is), we know the correct RV destination type, we know what the revenue generation is going to be. Now we put together a CAD design site, a complete site layout of how to maximize that value of that property.” (Ed, 8:02) 

0:02 

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. 

0:22 Maxwell Baker 

Hey y’all welcome to another beautiful episode of the mobile home park brokers tips and tricks, podcast. As always, this episode is brought to you by the Community Price Maximiser. It is our proprietary system that will guarantee you a higher price when you exclusively list with us four step process. And today we are doing a part two version because he’s got so much good information to talk to all you RV owners out there. And he is with EOB Consulting, Ed Bridgman. Welcome to the show once again. 

0:56 Ed Bridgman 

Thank you for having me. exciting to be here.  

0:59   Maxwell Baker 

Yeah so, Ed, like we’re gonna go over a few points here, about five minutes a piece, and talk a little bit about what EOB is doing for clients. One of them is monitoring electricity and kind of setting up that system for RV community owners, and kind of want to dissect that with you. If you want to go ahead and get started.

1:21 Ed Bridgman 

There is no option in the future, you will have no choice. I can’t emphasize this enough. We must monitor electricity for all guests. Right now, people are understanding RV destination owners are understanding that they must meter electricity. But most people do not have the infrastructure in place to be able to do it efficiently. So, what they’re doing is they’re saying okay, here’s my long-term guest over here. They have meters on their pedestals, I don’t have meters on these pedestals. 

02:02 Maxwell Baker  

Yeah. 

02:03 Ed Bridgman 

So, these are short term guests, or they’ll prorate the when the guest comes in to the first and they read all the meters at the same time. But even those RV destination owners are soon going to discover that they must charge electricity for every guest. I am presenting at the Texas Association community owners in Taco in April. I’m actually presenting in three different state conferences in April, specifically speaking on the future guests. And while I was putting my presentation together yesterday, here at Homestead RV community, we received a guest who has very expensive solar panels on top of his RV, 32-foot RV. The entire roof is solar panels. He’s got 800 pounds of batteries inside his RV. You would think that he would not use very much of my electricity, right? 

03:03 Maxwell Baker 

Yeah. 

03:05 Ed Bridgman 

Wrong! He was here for two days he had been boondocking underneath trees wasn’t able to charge his batteries. He showed up with empty batteries. We have had cloud cover for the last two days. And he used 212 kilowatt hours of electricity in two days with a 32-foot travel trailer that had one air conditioner on top that he did not use. 

03:33 Maxwell Baker 

Wow! 

03:35 Ed Bridgman 

And he still used 212.4 kilowatt hours of electricity. He used $45 worth of electricity, and a 32-foot RV. 

03:45 Maxwell Baker  

Wow. 

03:47 Ed Bridgman 

Okay, so you’ve got to monitor it. During Christmas time. We had class A motor coaches here at Homestead RV community. We had several of them we had a whole group and many of them had heated floors. During Christmas time we for four days we got down into the night. And each of those RV’s were pulling down 125 to 150 kilowatt hours per day. Now they were only here for three days. If you’re not going to charge for electricity, you’re going to pay those people to be at your place. We have electric cars, electric golf carts, we have people using electricity and their outdoor freezers outside in the summertime. So short term guests can use a lot of electricity and you can’t necessarily look at an RV and decide that it’s not going to use very much electricity put them over on the pad that doesn’t have a meter because they might be a smaller one. But they might be using space heaters.  

04:57 Maxwell Baker 

Yeah. 

04:59 Ed Bridgman 

They can burn a lot of electricity. 

05:01 Maxwell Baker 

Interesting. 

05:02 Ed Bridgman 

Burn a lot of electricity in the winter as well as the summer. So, you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to monitor and charge for electricity. 

05:09 Maxwell Baker 

I got you, move into key point number four that we were talking about. We as brokers come across deals all the time that our RV communities that are halfway built, we’ve got some that are vacant, and the owner is not really their present trying to, you know, manage it probably the way it should. If anybody is thinking about building an RV community or purchasing an RV community that’s already been built, but need some management turned around. I’m assuming they should probably call you can you break down exactly what you do for people?  

05:46 Ed Bridgman 

Yes, I, I get called a lot when people are determining either how much should we charge? The as a seller? How much should I put this on the market for? Or usually, as the buyer when they’re doing their due diligence, I get called to say, please come out and tell me what I need to do to develop this property or update this property or modify this existing RV destination into something that I can make money with, the bank wants to know, how much money am I going to need? The bank wants to know, when am I going to pay him back? That’s what, those are the questions that we answer, we come out, we walk the property with the owner, and we develop an understanding of what their vision is, for this property. That’s one of the ways that we are unique from our peers is that we don’t try to do it from the basement of our house back in Texas, we actually travel to the property, we find every property is unique. Every property has some nuances that need to be brought out during the layout design. 

06:59 Maxwell Baker 

Obviously. 

07:01 Ed Bridgman 

We spent three days in the area, we develop a complete comprehensive understanding of the competitive analysis. We don’t just go around to the other RV peers or competitors. We also talk to the city council, we also talk to a manufacturing in the area and understand, Is Walmart getting ready to put in a huge distribution center five miles down the road? What’s happening in your area? When? Why should people be coming to this area? So, once we have the understanding of what you want, and we understand what the local market demand is, then we can properly advise, does your vision align with the local market? There are five different RV destination types. We discussed that last meeting, people need to go back and review that, are you designing the correct RV destination type for your land? Because if you’re trying to put a resort, where you should have put a community, you’re not going to maximize the value of your property… 

08:02 Ed Bridgman 

… So, we identify that for you. Now we know what the market wants, we know what the vision of the owner wants, we know the correct RV destination type, we know what the revenue generation is going to be. Now we put together a CAD design site, a complete site layout of how to maximize that value of that property. Either working with the existing structure, or with raw land, laying out a whole new design. Now we work with the owner to develop the construction cost, maybe the owner has a brother-in-law and the excavating business, we have no way of knowing that. So, we work with them to understand what the construction cost is going to be. Put that together with the operating costs and put all that into a spreadsheet and algorithms is a very complicated process. But we ended up with a 10 year cash flow, which is exactly what the investor whether it’s a private investor coming in as a partner or a public bank investor coming in to support the loan, we tell them exactly what we’re going to need and exactly when they’re gonna get their money back what their return on their investments gonna be over a 10 year period. 

09:24 Maxwell Baker 

What does that cost? I mean, do you charge like a percentage of the total build like some of the architects do in the industry? Or what does it cost for y’all to do all that?  

09:35 Ed Bridgman 

I don’t think that would be ethical. So, the little guy has to know I don’t have to. We have a flat rate of $20,000 Plus expenses. And the reason why the expenses are held out differently. We are located in Mobile, Alabama, and we’re going 30 minutes away. We can drive there every morning and sleep in our own bed at night. But if we’re going like I just finished one Elkhart, Indiana. So, I had to fly there. They provided me with a vehicle, the Owner had an extra vehicle. I don’t care what I drive. I stay in a hotel. I don’t charge for food because I eat whether I’m in Elkhart, Indiana or Alabama. But lodging and travel is the expenses. And obviously, the expenses in Elkhart, Indiana are a lot different than they are in South Mobile. So, it’s 20,000, our flat rate plus expenses. 

10:32  Maxwell Baker 

Wow, that’s pretty reasonable. And I was thinking you would charge a percentage based off of the total bill like that’s what I see a lot of architects here, but 20 grands, pretty cheap to do all of that? 

10:44 Ed Bridgman 

Well, I would rather have good quality product. And you can look on our website, we’re carrying a perfect 5.0 review rating, I would rather make certain that I have good quality and we deal with about an average of three a month. So, my team is designing and maximizing properties. averaging three a month, you can go to your local civil engineer, and they’ll be very proud to tell you hey, we’ve been in business for 25 years. And we’ve designed 4 RV destinations in those 25 years. We know what we’re doing, and we can help you do it. We’ve done 4. My team did 4 last month, okay? They’re not going to be able to work with you and give you the latest and greatest state of the art setup. I own Homestead RV Community and it is the most technologically advanced RV destination in the world. We’ve been open two years and we have over 240 reviews, are turning a 4.9 Google review, the only 3, the only 3, 1-star reviews we have are from our three neighbours who’ve never owned an RV in their life. We know the latest technology, we know how to set it up to maximize the value of your property. 

12:05 Maxwell Baker 

Gotcha. Now moving on to the last point here is the, read step-by-step guide on your website. Can you kind of explain the step-by-step guide on what you mean by that? 

12:19 Ed Bridgman 

First of all, the website is EOB. My initials echo, Oscar, Bravo, dash, the straight line between the B and the C for consulting. It’s EOB_consulting.com. And they’re on the homepage, one of the pages that you can launch is called step by step. Again, for free. You can read step by step it’ll take you 10 minutes, and it will answer most of your basic questions. Who when you go get permitting, when do you talk to the neighbours? What should you say when you go to the civil engineer? What should you say when you go for Sony? whether you’re developing an RV destination, it also explains the five different RV destination types. Or you’re building a boat and RV storage facility either one, it tells you exactly where to start exactly how to go through step by step and it’ll take you 10 minutes. It’s free, answers a lot of questions. 

13:24 Maxwell Baker 

Nice. Very cool. So if anybody is anxious to get a hold of you, what’s the best way to reach you on? 

13:30 Ed Bridgman 

A telephone number is always good. (512) 785-1379 and of course the website I just mentioned EOB consulting, it’s Eco Oscar Bravo Dash Consulting.com. If you want to look at the most technologically advanced RV destination in the world, that’s Homestead RV Community and the website is homervc.com At home, and Romeo Victor Charlie.com. You can take a virtual tour, drive through, you can stop and look at any of the sites through virtually and understand how we did it. 

14:14 Maxwell Baker 

Nice. Well, Ed, I appreciate all the insights here. I’m glad that we could do a part two here with the EOB consulting, so if y’all ever have any questions or anything, feel free to reach out to Ed. As always, this episode is brought to you by the Community Price Maximizer and Ed is definitely a part of the Community Price Maximizer because that’s what he does. He is consistently working on trying to create and add value to all the RV and boat and storage community owners out there. So give us a call if you have any questions (678) 932-0200 and we look forward to hearing from y’all and let’s keep moving forward.

Bio

Ed O. Bridgman is an Air Force veteran with a background in Electrical Engineering and an MBA. While an Electrical Design Engineer he co-authored “Six-Sigma Quality Initiatives” earning Motorola the 1st Malcom Baldridge award from President Ronald Reagan. He has been a Six Sigma consultant for 30 years helping companies in a variety of industries reduce operating cost and increase profit margins while exceeding customer’s expectations. www.EOB-Consulting.com. For the past several years Ed has been consulting for the RV Industry preparing Feasibility Analysis, Business Plans, Site Design Layouts and Project Managing the construction of RV Parks, Campgrounds, Resorts and Communities as well as Boat and RV Storage facilities. Ed helps people “Maximize the value of their land.” In 2021 Ed opened Homestead RV Community www.HomeRVC.com as his “Flagship” employing forward thinking features including the ability to automatically monitor both electrical and water use at every site and building for every reservation (short-term and long-term) and adjust the guest bill automatically.