Buying a Mobile Home Park
The Land-Lease Business Wearing a Housing Trade
A mobile home park rents land: residents own their homes and pay lot rent for the pad, utilities, and community underneath. That structure is why the asset class earns its reputation for stability, homes rarely move, collections hold, capital needs are modest compared to apartments, and why institutional buyers compressed the premium end years ago. It is also affordable housing, which brings rules, scrutiny, and in a growing number of places, resident-purchase rights into the deal. The prize is a city-utility park with sub-market rents, high resident ownership, and clean pads; the trap is private utilities at end of life under a rent roll the local market cannot actually support.
What Parks Trade For
The only park capitalization rates on the public record are lenders' own conventions, and they sit below what the market talks: one listed owner's syndicate values its unencumbered communities at 6.0%, down from 6.5%, with two others fixing 5.5% and 6.0%. Broker reporting prices tiers above that: premium metro communities at 4% to 5%, stabilized secondary parks around 6.5% to 8%, value-add at 8% to 12%. Inside any tier the same facts move price: lot rent against the local market, occupancy of usable pads, the utility setup, and the park-owned-home share. The searcher-scale opportunity still lives in the family-owned park with decades-old rents, and more of them meet an institutional bidder every year.
Lot Rent, Occupancy, and the Park-Owned-Home Split
Read the rent roll in its parts. Lot rent first: the current rate against comparable parks and against apartment alternatives, the increase history, and any local rent rules, because the walk-to-market story is the industry's standard plan and its pace is a choice with consequences. Occupancy second, counted in usable pads: vacant lots only matter if a home can economically be brought in, and infill costs real money per home. The park-owned-home split third: POH rental income prices like rental housing with its maintenance and turnover, not like lot rent, so separate the streams and read the seller's POH strategy. Collections history and the tenancy rules complete the file.
Utilities and Rules Decide the Tier
Two structural facts sort parks into their price tiers. Utilities first: city water and sewer command the tightest pricing, while wells, septic systems, and private treatment plants put maintenance, compliance, and eventual replacement on the owner, and submetering versus master-metering decides who absorbs usage. Rules second: manufactured-housing communities sit inside state landlord-tenant frameworks of their own, several states add rent stabilization or notice periods for increases, and a spreading set of laws gives residents rights when a park sells, from advance notice to a chance to purchase. None of that is a reason to avoid the trade; all of it belongs in the underwriting before the letter of intent.
What to Verify in Diligence
The record to assemble before the offer holds:
- The rent roll: lot rents against market, increase history, collections, and tenancy terms
- Usable-pad occupancy, with vacant lots priced at the real cost of infill
- The park-owned-home count, condition, and their rental economics separated from lot rent
- Utility structure: city versus private systems, their condition, permits, and metering
- State and local rules: rent regulations, sale-notice and resident-purchase requirements
- Roads, drainage, and electrical pedestals, the park's own physical plant
- Three years of P&Ls and tax returns, reconciled against the rent roll and deposits
Financeability Notes
Parks finance across a wide ladder: agency and bank debt dominates the institutional end, while the searcher-scale purchase runs on regional banks, SBA structures where a real operating business justifies them, and seller financing from retiring family owners. Lenders read the same tiers this guide does, city utilities and high resident ownership borrow best, private utilities bring inspections and reserves into the structure, and heavy park-owned-home income is underwritten as the rental business it is. Model debt service on current rents rather than the walk-to-market plan, hold a reserve for what the park's age implies, and read the state's sale-process rules early enough that the closing calendar respects them.
Terms in This Industry
Private utility infrastructure
Water and sewer lines the park owns itself, which nobody inspects until they fail.
Lot rent
The monthly rent a resident pays for the pad under a home they own themselves.
Park-owned home
A home the park itself owns and rents, distinct from a resident-owned home on a pad.
Utility billback
Submetering water and sewer to residents, turning an owner's cost into a recovered charge.
Change of use notice
The long warning a park owner owes residents before the land can do anything else.
Deposit transfer
The move of residents' held deposits from the seller's account to the buyer's, at the same moment.
Community water system
A park on its own well is a regulated water utility, with an ID and a calendar.
What the Data Says
The manufactured housing industry's own August 2025 fact sheet counts 44,000 land-lease communities holding an estimated 4.3 million homesites, the entire supply side of this asset class in two figures. New community development has been rare for decades, which is the scarcity story under every park trade.
Source: Manufactured Housing Institute fact sheet (August 2025)
The same industry fact sheet counts 16.6 million Americans living in manufactured homes as of 2023, with 23 percent of the 103,000 new homes produced in 2024 placed in communities. That is the demand durability a park buyer is actually underwriting: residents own the home and rent the land, and moving the home is rarely economic.
Source: Manufactured Housing Institute fact sheet (August 2025)
The census has no clean line for land-lease communities. Parks sit inside lessors of other real estate property, a class of 8,957 employer establishments as of 2023 that also holds every other miscellaneous landlord. So the industry association's community count is the sharper supply figure, and the federal class is the cross-check.
Source: Census County Business Patterns, lessors of other real estate property (2023)
Holding a live deal in this industry? Underwrite it with the comps, cited band, and charge-off rate pre-loaded.
Compare bands across industries in the cited multiple bands by industry.
Who Else Is Buying in This Industry
- RHP Properties · Farmington Hills, Michigan
A long-running manufactured housing community owner that buys whole communities by name and site count, where the land and the lot rents are one asset rather than two.
- Pinewood Acres · 2026 · An all-age manufactured home community in Dover, Delaware, with 346 home sites in the state capital region.
- 2 more confirmed on the firm's profile
- Flagship Communities REIT · No head office on its own pages; releases are datelined Toronto and carry a Kentucky phone number
A listed consolidator of manufactured housing communities in the Midwest, announcing single parks at prices a searcher's capital stack reaches.
- Marblehead, Ohio community · 2026 · A 28-lot, fully occupied community in a Lake Erie resort area, with total consideration the release puts at $1.5 million.
- 4 more confirmed on the firm's profile
- UMH Properties · Freehold, New Jersey
A listed manufactured housing REIT that buys whole communities rather than portfolios, names each one and its site count in its own release, and keeps operating them.
- Albany Dunes · 2025 · A 130-site manufactured home community in Albany, Georgia, bought for $2.6 million by the firm's own release.
- 6 more confirmed on the firm's profile
Buyers is the shelf these come from, ordered by who closed something most recently.
What It Costs to Replace the Owner
The multiples above are quoted on SDE, which adds the owner's pay back into earnings, so they hold only if you do the owner's job. Hire someone instead and the going rate for the role comes back out. For this trade that is usually the manager who runs the site, the tenants, and the rules, paid a median of $69,990 a year nationally. Subtract it from SDE before applying any multiple, because at a 3x multiple that wage also takes about $209,970 off what the business is worth to you.
Property, real estate, and community association managers, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (2025), national, all industries, before payroll taxes and benefits. Every role, and the same arithmetic worked end to end, is in Manager Wages.
The Numbers That Run This Business
- Lot rent against the local market and its increase history
- Usable-pad occupancy with infill cost per vacant lot
- Park-owned-home share and its separate rental economics
- Utility structure: city versus private, and metering
- Collections history against the rent roll