Many of our sellers reach out to us before selling their mobile home park to better prepare for a future sale. Below are a few tips and tricks to improve the sale price of your mobile home community.
Tips for Improving Sale Price
Bookkeeping:
Be ready to provide a breakdown of your income and expenses over the last 2-3 years or your length of ownership.
If you don’t already, consider keeping a separate list of finances for your mobile home community. This doesn’t need to
be an online or professionally prepared tax statement. It can be something as simple as a ledger book of rents collected
and utility, contractor, and service receipts. This helps us determine what expenses will apply to a new owner and which
ones will not, such as your personal write offs. The majority of buyers will need this information to get a loan for the property.
Tenant Information
If you don’t already, start keeping a list of where your tenants live on the property, how much they pay for lot rent or park
owned home rent, how long they’ve lived there (approximates are fine), and on what date they usually pay.
Lot Rent
Many long term mobile home park owners tend to fall behind on what lot rents are in their area. Lot rent directly affects your income which
directly affects your future sale price. Lot rent can not (or should not) be raised to market rates all at once either by you
or a new owner. Once you are looking at actively selling your community, it is often too late to raise lot rent.
Instead, talk to other owners in your area or reach out to us to see what owners in your area charge for rent and what
services are included in rent at their property. From there you can decide if it is worth raising your lot rent over time to
be more in line with the current market. This is one of the most effective ways to improve the sale price of your property.
Deferred Maintenance
If you know of any deferred maintenance such as abandoned homes, broken utility lines, or damaged asphalt or concrete
roads, try to be proactive in either receiving quotes from local contractors or having the work done prior to the sale of your
community. The more prepared you are the better your sale price is likely to be.
Park Owned Home Titles
Many of our long term owners with park owned homes know they have titles to some or all of their homes, somewhere.
Mid-transaction is not the time to be searching for mobile home titles and causes more stress to an already stressful process.
Usually these titles are with your bank, in a safe or filing cabinet at home, or with your local attorney or title company.
Prior to listing your property, try to find your mobile home titles. If you are missing any or don’t have titles at all,
don’t worry about it, this is a common occurrence. We simply need to know which ones you have and which ones are missing
so that we can let the closing company know which ones will require a bill of sale when the time to sell comes.
Declutter The Property
Nearly every property with multiple tenants, whether it be an apartment building or a mobile home community, tends to
have a few residents that leave junk around their homes. Prior to selling your property, consider bringing in a roll off
dumpster or a dump trailer and post notices to the tenants to remove their clutter by a certain date.
This helps the property photograph better and gives prospective buyers less reason to submit a lower offer.
If you have any questions about what improvements would be best to improve the value of your specific mobile home community,
please reach out to us for a free consultation.
Interested In Selling Your Mobile Home Community?
If you are considering selling your Mobile Home Community, please reach out to us by calling at
563-880-9679, emailing us at MidwestMHCBrokers@c21sre.com, or visiting our website at www.MidwestMHCBrokers.com, you can also
fill out the attached listing guide and email it to us.
Our pricing estimates are always free, and there is never an obligation to sell, we want all of our sellers to know the current value of their
properties so they can decide if selling is the right choice for them. Our listing contracts are free to cancel at any time, and no fees are ever due prior to closing.
