Making the best of our bad bargains, per the NYTimes:
“Don’t get too hung up on appearances,” Frank Rolfe reminded us as our tour bus made its way to the first of several trailer parks we would visit on a bright Saturday afternoon in Southern California. “Remember, you don’t have to live in these homes.”
It was Day 2 of Mobile Home University, an intensive, three-day course on how to strike it rich in the trailer-park business. Seventy-five or so students had signed up for the class, which Rolfe offers every other month in different places around the country. Most of the enrollees weren’t real estate speculators; they were jittery members of a hard-pressed middle class. They were nervous about retirement. Or they were worried about their jobs moving overseas. Or they were making $100,000 a year, maybe even $200,000, but felt the need to earn more. All of them, though, had somehow come to see the lowly mobile home as their vehicle to financial freedom. “It’s about self-preservation,” one 42-year-old attendee told me. He had flown down from San Francisco for the seminar because he hated his job selling health care plans.
Our first stop was Green Lantern Village in Westminster, a city of 90,000, landlocked between Santa Ana and Huntington Beach. Green Lantern is a giant patch of asphalt crammed with 130 trailers. We gathered in a circle around Rolfe and the lot’s manager and listened as the manager explained that rents at Green Lantern had been bumped up by more than 30 percent over the past three years. The Mobile Home U. students nodded appreciatively: They learned early in the course that one of the best things about investing in trailer parks is that ambitious landlords can raise the rent year after year without losing tenants. The typical resident is more likely to endure the increase than pay a trucking company the $3,000 it can easily cost to move even a single-wide trailer to another park. As Rolfe put it, an “extra $10 or $20 a month isn’t going to bankrupt anyone.” He compared the hikes with cable companies’ annual bump in fees, which get people into “the habit.” Raising rents by 30 percent might sound steep for trailer-park tenants, who at Green Lantern earn $40,000 on average, but the manager explained why that isn’t the case, as if he were reading from the 500-page instruction manual Rolfe distributed on the first day. For years, Green Lantern rented only to people 55 or older. But these days, the manager told us, a trailer is just as likely to be filled by a two-income family “making minimum wage at a Taco Bell.” There was a murmur of approval: Another early lesson was that whereas seniors tend to live on fixed incomes, greatly limiting their ability to absorb rent increases, working parents “can always pick up extra hours,” as Rolfe put it, even if they’re struggling….
The Way We Live Now: “The Cold, Hard Lessons of Mobile Home U.”Post + Comments (32)