YouTube video (by Chris Koerner) presenting 18 post-purchase value‑add strategies for mobile home and RV park investing. Koerner draws on experience investing in 31 parks over six years and gives practical, operational levers (signage, landscaping, roads, tenant acquisition and onboarding, rent increases, amenities like storage and billboards, online systems, and tenant relations) with concrete examples and some numerical figures.
Chapters
My professional time is split between two passions, starting businesses and investing in mobile home and RV parks. I have invested in 31 mobile home and RV parks in the last six years alongside investors and here are the 18 levers that we pull to increase the value of a park post purchase. Number one Signage. Many parks have either no or small signage. We'll have a massive sign prepped by closing on day one so we can install it. Many of these parks are on roads that get 10 to 30,000 cars per day driving by and we don't want to waste that traffic. Number two Local paper. Yes, newspaper ads for vacancies work great in rural towns. Number three landscaping. We will spend 10 to 20 thousand dollars in landscaping on day one so we can justify a small rent increase. A $50 rent increase across 50 pads equals $450,000 in added value at a 7.5% cap rate, I'd say that's a good use of 20 grand. Number four roads similar to the last one. We will go in and fix all the roads. There's almost always something to fix potholes, especially if it's gravel roads and upgrading to concrete or asphalt is never really penciled for us. Number five Adding portable self storage. I used to be against this but it's grown on me. Almost every park has extra space to put down 10 by tens. They're self sufficient and it really boosts the value and makes tenants stickier. And you can even use a service like square foot before you spend a dime to gauge if there's extra demand for self storage in your area because it might be oversaturated. Number six Backfilling vacant pads. We buy used RV and mobile homes and seller finance them out to the tenants to make move ins more frictionless while still not having to maintain them. Because think about it, if you're waiting for someone to pull in with their single or double wide mobile home to get a new tenant, you're going to be waiting a really long time. You need to remove the friction for them. And please note that seller financing these units. The legalities of this vary state by state. Sometimes you have to be a mortgage broker and that is not a fun thing to do. Number seven we will convert park owned homes to tenant owned. This also varies state by state but is fairly straightforward in Texas, Oklahoma and across the Southeast. You don't have to maintain them. That's the whole point of this game is to not maintain the units and just maintain the infrastructure under the ground. Number eight we will post these listings to Facebook, Marketplace and Craigslist we will often do this before we even get the property under contract. Not before we close, but before we even get it under contract. Because we want to gauge how much demand there is for these vacancies in the local area. We don't want to guess. And almost no parks do this, believe it or not. Go look on Facebook Marketplace right now and see how many mobile home or RV pads are listed for rent. Almost none. You will have inquiries on day one or day negative 60 if you do it before you get under contract and it takes 30 minutes to do. Number nine, we will add a billboard sometimes. We once bought a park in East Texas that already had a billboard. We parceled them off and sold them to someone else. But oftentimes these billboards will rent 400 to $3,000 per month without any maintenance whatsoever. Raising rents. Number 10 yes, we will often raise rents in year one and and then a few years later. But we only do this after adding value to the park and giving people plenty of time to move out. Usually 90 days. We don't do it yearly like many of the big players. You could do it respectfully or like we can do it respectfully or a big real estate investment trust, a REIT can move in, buy a park and be jerks about it. Number 11, website Wix is our favorite. Squarespace also works well. What's nice about websites is that you can get all the widgets on there and then every time you buy another park you can literally copy and paste the website and just swap out the pictures, the site map, the name, the address, et cetera. Number 12 we'll add online pay. We use Appfolio. Rent manager was too clunky for us. We don't have any affiliation with either of them. That's on the mobile home park side. On the RV park side we will use Campspot, which wasn't even around five or ten years ago, but it is taking the world by storm today. We also show tenants how to submit complaints and applications online as well and we convert them to online pay. It's tough. It depends on the park. It can take several months. Many of these tenants do not have a bank account, so we'll provide them with reloadable debit cards. Number 13, we will not have an on site manager. Believe it or not, this doesn't work for parks that are too big or that have a lot of amenities. But for smaller parks, sometimes we'll buy a park that has an on site manager that doesn't need one. And so we will replace them with Handyman from Thumbtack and with checking in every month or every quarter, depending on the size of the park. Number 14. Be available. Answer your dang phone. It Sounds simple, but 10 tenants need to have several ways to get in touch with you at any given time. Phone, text and email. Especially if you're going to be replacing an on site owner or manager. Like I just talked about. Number 15. We like to send small gifts on the tenant's 1 year, 2 year, 3 year anniversaries. No tenant has ever experienced this. This seems like a luxury, but it doesn't cost much. And so it really helps retain not just tenants, but good tenants. And it helps attract good tenants as well, because good people are attracted to good kind gestures. We'll often do an Amazon gift card or a fruit basket or something like that. Number 16. We will trim the trees on month one. I don't know what it is about these parks, but they always need their trees to be trimmed. They're rarely trimmed by the previous owner. It's something that's easy to overlook, but after you trim the trees in a park, it's shockingly noticeable how much nicer it is when you raise the canopy and you make them all look like a lollipop instead of just a sagging tree that's almost touching the ground and certainly touching the tops of these units. Number 17. We like to find that one tenant. There's always one. I call him my Bridget because the first tenant I found like this, her name was Bridget, bless her heart. Find the tenant that spills all the secrets. There's always one. You just save three grand a month on a property manager. Number 18. Give every single tenant an opportunity to get on the phone with you in week one. Preferably you meet them in person on day one and you shake their hands and they see that you're a real person. But get them on the phone phone as well, just as an added point of contact. Learn all of their gripes and what they love about the park and fix as many of the most common occurring problems as you can on day one. And you'll learn that a lot of these are not even that expensive. And believe it or not, back to raising rents. A lot of tenants are not even angry when you raise rents because they know that their rent is below market price and they're seeing it coming. And as long as you take care of them and actually add value to the property park and not just suck the value out of the park, they will not resent you for it. In fact, they will respect you for it. Thank you for watching. Follow me if you like stuff like this. We'll see you next time.
