YouTube video (August 2021) by Nichole Briscoe (aka Mobile Home Mommy) documenting her experience buying and renovating a problematic mobile home she acquired June 20 (video dated July 1, 2021). She recounts hidden water damage and rot discovered after removing occupants’ belongings, extensive subfloor and wall replacement, a new roof and T11 siding, two moves, and unexpectedly large costs (she reports buying the unit for $6,500 and being over $30,000 invested after repairs and two moves). The home is a 16x80 unit from model year 2000–2001. Because of high total costs (including ~ $4,000 per move in North Carolina), she plans an exit strategy of converting the property into a room-rental group home (targeting ~4 tenants at ~$600/room) to recoup the investment within roughly 1.5 years. The video is framed as a cautionary lesson for new mobile-home investors and emphasizes careful walkthroughs, asking sellers to remove belongings, and checking insulation/installation and plumbing.
Questions this video answers
June 20 (video dated July 1, 2021).
$6,500.
Over $30,000.
16 by 80; model year cited as 2000 and 2001.
About $4,000 per move.
Mobile home mommy. Home mommy. What's up, everybody? It's your girl. Nicole Briscoe, AKA the mobile Home Mommy, AKA Bao, head coach for Mobile Home Elite Investors. I want to take you all through a property walkthrough of a mobile home that I acquired last June 20. And now here it is, July 1, 2021, and I still have the same mobile home. This video is going to show you what you shouldn't be doing. Buying your first mobile home. So the backstory of this mobile home, I was super excited. It was like my. My third. My third purchase, and it was the most expensive one. I purchased for $6,500. I was still new, but I was failing forward. Failing forward. Didn't have any mentorship. Didn't have any. I just was like, but I can do this. So I messed up because I bought this mobile home and my fourth mobile home at the same time. My budget wasn't big enough. I just had big dreams and goals, and I needed more structured guidance. So I'm gonna take you all through this mobile home to tell you how I messed up. So let's start in the master bedroom. Now, this master bedroom was filled with a waterbe. A water bed, y'. All. And the walls were completely deteriorated. But I didn't know. Here's how I messed up. When you are purchasing mobile homes and you're walking, you. You're walking through. I was deceived because this home was full of all of their belongings. And I just saw as, ooh, another mobile home. And it's a 2000 and 2001. It's the newest mobile home that I've ever purchased. Let me buy it. 100 isn't bad. Well, the problem is it was filled. It had a water bed in this room. Back in the other bedroom, it was a big, bulky dressers, a tanning bed, y'. All. All of this stuff was in here. So when we finally took it all out and took the carpet out, my handyman was like, man, Nicole, this is gonna be a problem. The floor is completely rotten. So he pulled up the carpet. He's like, I mean, it's rotten all the way to the wall. And he touched the wall, y', all, and he fell through. Did y' all hear? Did you. Did you hear what I just said? The brother fell through the wall. Everything in this house I've had to replace. Let me take you in the bathroom. Even the floors in the bathroom. Under the bathtub I had replaced. Look, the bathtub is not attached to the wall. We had to take the Bathtub out is a shower. Behind me, behind this door, the vanity. We had to pull everything out and replace the floor. Sub flooring from here to the other end of the trailer. This is a 16 by 80. You know the price of lumber is going up, right? So yeah, that was a lot. That's extra flooring material there. But I'm telling you, y', all, it was, it was a lot. It was a lot going on. So now let me take you all through the kitchen. So we had messed up walls throughout the entire home. We had a. It was a built in cabinet here, like a china cabinet. We had to pull it out because again, the walls, the floors were completely rotted through. This house had like, it had a water leaf. So once my men took down the walls of the house and the installation, you could tell that it was only. It was no installation between it. It was only like a thin green piece of. I'm pretty sure somebody will comment below what it's called. But it was just a thin green layer of insulation. Kind of felt like, like plastic. But it wasn't the thick insulation that I'm used to. You know, the pink itchy stuff, fiberglass stuff. But anyways, here's the floors and we're nowhere near done. Here's the floor. We had to come in, completely redo the floors, laid a subfloor down and put a roll out linoleum on it. Here's the carpet. Again, we're not finished. We're not finished. I've put a lot of money into this home, a lot of money. But it's going to pay off. And let me tell you how it's going to pay off. So if we're talking and running numbers, so far in this home, we're in over $30,000. Now, I have never spent that much on a mobile home. That being said, we normally typically try to stay in around 15,000. Only in four mobile home. But y', all, with this home, I had to move it twice. So I had to pay for two moves. Why? Because the first park I put it in, yes, it was investor friendly, but the problem was they had an issue with plumbing and sewer. So it was always saturated. When we tried to get someone to come out and build the steps, it would just seep into the ground. We tried gravel, rocks. I'm like, you know what, let's just get this mobile home move. So we had to pay for two move costs. Now I'm in the state of North Carolina and move costs are about $4,000 a piece. So you can See how these numbers are adding up? So, all in, we're over 30k on this mobile home. But I've come up with an exit strategy and I'm gonna tell you more about it. So come down here again, we had to replace the carpet. This is the middle bedroom that had that big old tanning bed in it. So we got the carpet replaced in this room. This is one of the small bedrooms. We come back out this way. I had to figure out how can I get my money back. Normally when I do rent to own, I don't, you know, I like to double my money. Well, if I'm already all in, this is the bathroom right here. If I'm already all in on this home, 30K, I had to get creative and come up with an exit strategy. So guess what I came up with. I'm turning this mobile home into a group home. I received permission, I've already started marketing and I'm selling the room. So I'm renting out the rooms, right? So with renting out the rooms at let's say $600 a piece, and I'm planning to have at least four tenants in here total. Two in the master, three, four. You do the math. I'm gonna make my 30,000 right back in almost a year and a half. So when you get into mobile home investing and you make mistakes, this was a horrible decision. To purchase, you have to be creative. So my creative exit strategy is going to be a group home. The next steps is I have to get the front and back steps built. The plumbing was done last week. The electric is getting done this week. So slowly but steady were coming along. And I'm gonna show you all the outside. The home is gorgeous. It's beautiful. But it truly was a lesson learned. Like, so when you're looking to purchase your first mobile home, you make sure you walk through that thing. Okay, you walking through it. But then you realize this house has clothes everywhere. It's furniture everywhere. If you are serious about the purchase and they seriously want to sell it to you, you should have no problem saying, excuse me, you mind if I move this dresser back? You. All the floors were rotting from the floor all the way out. I had never seen the closet, the bedroom closet floors were rotten. And it was all because this home was just constantly leaking from when they bought it from the manufacturer. I have, we have a few clips we're going to show you all as well. Where you can see when they ripped the walls out, it was just gaps of outside. So every time it rains, snow sleet hail, whatever it was, slowly just dripping in on that house, rotten from the inside out. So this is a brand new home, y'. All. We got. We put in new fans, ceiling fans. Nothing fancy, but. Yeah, Let me take you outside. All right, everybody. Now here we are on the outside of this mobile home. As you can see, new siding. This is brand new T11 siding. The roof is even new on this home. The ceiling was leaking, so the roof was leaking so bad, we had to put a new roof on it. You'll see some of these plumbing wiring getting done under here. We come around to the back. We come around to the back. All of this is where the plumbers were last week, digging up and getting all of our plumbing installed. All of this T11 isn't the best siding. It is the most affordable. But it is something you have to watch because in a few years, it'll start to rot. So that's something to be confident of. But it was. It was the siding that I could afford because, of course, I'm well in over budget on this home. The amount of money I put in, I could have done that for two homes. Goal for the backyard is to make this a nice, private oasis. As you can see, it's pretty quiet. Back here is a nice yard. So we're gonna get all this shrubbery picked up, clean the grass cut, put some. Probably some rocks out here, a couple of chairs out here so they can just sit back out here and relax. It's gonna be a really nice group home, guys. Gonna be. It's gonna be profitable, but. But as a social worker, my goal, too, is to provide clean, safe, and affordable housing. So that is definitely what this will be, somewhere safe for them to call home.
