The Land Geek Podcast #51

Welcome to the Land Geek Podcast, your resource for information and tips to making money by buying and selling land. Let the Land Geek show you how to make a passive income by working smart, not working hard. Learn strategies and tricks to make money buying and selling raw land today. And here is the man that's gonna help you do that. The Land Geek.

Hey, it's Mark Podolsi, the Land Geek.

From your fingers.

Favorite niche website, www.thelandgeek.com and I'm really excited for this week's podcast. My special guest is a good buddy of mine from Seattle, Washington, and he has such an amazing program and an amazing niche that I want to share with everybody. Jerry Luker. Jerry, how are you? How you doing, buddy?

Hey, Mark, I am doing fantastic today. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. So Jerry Luker is the guy for. Well, I guess, you know, Lonnie Scruggs used to do this deals on wheels, but you've taken it to a whole new innovative level. It's mobile homes make money dot com. And Jerry's going to just kind of tell us how he kind of got into all this. So, Jerry, what's going on? Why, why mobile homes? How did you even start this?

Well, that's all, you know, probably everyone's favorite part of their story, and I just about tripped and stumbled onto it. At age 54, I was in dire need of making some good money. And that's kind of a funny age to start at. But I looked around and I decided that, you know, job, we're just not going to cut it. And, you know, Starting at age 54, you can't make enough money in a job to really save anything for retirement. So I had to make some chunks of money. And, you know, that's how you do that. It's pretty daunting. So I looked at real estate and that looked like a good way to make money. But I got involved. There's so many people trying to do things in real estate. And I went to some auctions and I kind of poked around, poked, poked here and there and found that you really could not buy shopping centers with no money down. And it was pretty scary. And one day my wife actually found a little ad in the newspaper that was offering a bank repossessed mobile home in a mobile home park for sale and relatively inexpensive. And she showed it to me and I said, well, that's, you know, I kind of distant at the time. I said, well, you know, it's a trailer in a trailer park. Right, right. And she persisted and Said, well, let's, you know, we should look at it. And I kind of rolled my eyes and I said, well, let's go ahead and look at it. So made an appointment to see and it was offered by an agent and went and looked at it, and it was a decent park, a couple hundred houses. And we kind of drove around the park and it was nice. And there was several houses for sale in the park, and they all seemed to be selling for you, 35, 40,000. We went and looked at the home that was for sale, and it was offered at 10,000. And the agent said the bank could take a little bit less than that, he thought. So we actually ended up offering 7,000 on the home. Buddy of mine did some work on it, and we were into it about 15, 16, something like that total, and turned around and sold it for, you know, right around 40. And the whole process only took a couple months. And we said, well, yeah, we said, well, that. Wow, must have been a fluke. You know, we thought, well, that's, you know, can't happen a second time. But I called the same bank that we'd gotten it from, and I said, do you have any more repos? And they said, well, sure, there. There's always a certain number that, you know, of loans that go bad. And I said, well, they said, would you like a list to look at in your area? And I said, sure. And they sent me a list. We went out and looked at some homes, being that we just done one and made some good money on, very simply, I looked at some more and selected another one and did another one and just kept doing them from there. That's how it all started. And the first full year, we did, like, eight houses that we flipped, right? Yep. Ape mobiles. Yeah.

So it's basically fix and flip.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we. We get bank repos. Generally. There's a lot of other ways to get them. People are, in various circumstances, sometimes, you know, because of a job loss or a divorce or, you know, you. You name it, people will just. Sometimes just, you know, leave them or whatever. But there's. There's various ways to get good deals on them. And you take a peek and say, well, gee, that'll pretty up real quick and sell at retail. And you look at the numbers. Real simple to do that and just keep doing it. So that's. It's simple. There's a lot of little tricks to the trade, of course, that we've developed over the years, things to know to maximize the profits and alleviate all the hassle or stress with it. But you know, it's been a phenomenal business. And that was. Boy, that goes back over a decade now. Wow.

So let me ask you, what was your background in? Have you always been an entrepreneur?

Well, I've done just about everything. I tried commission sales, I've washed dishes, I've worked in a factory, I've installed burglar alarms. I had quite a uneventful career up to my, you know, age 54, into my mid-50s. And I say that to encourage a lot of people might be in the same circumstance, but you know, I really hadn't made a huge success out of my life up until that point. But things can change when you find the right. Right medium.

That's. Yeah, unreal. So in the past decade then, how many fix and frank, I should say fixing flips, but how many mobiles have you bought and sold? Would you say?

I lost track pushing 200 somewhere.

No kidding.

Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty quick because they're not real estate, they're personal property. And so they're bought and sold just like you'd buy or sell a car or a truck or motorcycle or snowmobile or anything else. And that's one of the things that people don't realize. There are homes, there are houses, but they are not real estate. So they're bought and sold with a simple bill sale and a title. So you have a real quick in and out.

So there's no title company, there's no frictional costs like you would with a house.

There's not. And there's not five pages of, you know, is there any easements or boundary disputes or da, da, da, da, none of that. They're personal property. And seriously, they're a little larger than a car, but they're bought and sold just like a car or truck. And so you just do a simple number, you look it up house and say, well, gee, what's the market? What's similar homes selling for in the market right now? Okay, you know that figure. Then you know, what can I buy this for and party it up a little bit and is there any profit to be made? And it's very accurate. There's only three or four numbers you have to look at.

That's crazy. I mean, you know, playing devil's advocate, when I hear mobile home park, I immediately think ugly, distressed, dangerous poverty. I mean, am I off on that? What is it? What is, are there a range of mobile home parks? I mean, do you, do you look at higher end parks? Does it matter?

Well, that's Kind of a yes or no question. And I'll answer this way. Parks are just like neighborhoods. There's some regular neighborhoods that are, they're really run down and trashy whatnot. There are some neighborhoods that are, you know, million dollar estates. Parks are the same thing. There are some parks that are really run down and kind of low end and trashy and whatnot. And that is one of the thing that I have found in the business and the most exceptional thing is there's really not a lot of competition because a lot of people had the same attitud I did about a trailer in a trailer park. Well, there's a lot of myths and misconceptions, but when you get around those, you start realizing that there's a lot of good parks. There are parks that have beautiful homes and the way that the homes are made now and have been actually they keep getting better all the time. But homes now you walk in, they got real sheetrock, they got two by four or maybe even two by six construction, beautiful vinyl windows, rigor comp. They have the new cement board, hardie board exterior. I mean they're built just like a regular stick built house, but they're built in a factory. It worked for Henry Ford and assembly line. But the materials, the way they're built, you take some of these beautiful new homes that they're making now that are pushing a couple thousand square feet, you put them in a nice park that's well managed and it's a beautiful community. And in fact one of the things I like about parks, most of them have some occupancy requirements and they can say, hey, you fill this, you know, you have to apply to live here. We don't want felons, so you know, you don't have drug dealers and child molesters and you know, they have some rules and regs which really work out for the best most of the time. And making a really, really nice neighborhood and a really nice park. Now that's not to say that you have to deal with those type of homes because let's face it, some of the parks that might be kind of a medium range park, or maybe even a little less than that. Hey, do people live there? Yeah. Do they own homes there? Yeah. Do homes buy and sell in some of the lower end parks? Yeah. I mean, you know, the people aren't living there free. They bought and they sell their homes. So you can actually do this business and any type of park you want. I mean I don't go to the rural low end ones. Sure but, you know. Yeah, yeah, that is a great question. That's a great question.

Do you have to finance on these or they just pay cash, they get a bank loan. How do you get paid?

This is really funny. That's one of the other myths about mobile homes and mobile home parks. And one of the myths floating around is, well, gee, you know, people just can't get financing on mobile homes in a mobile home park. Which means that A, mobile homes now being over 10% of the total housing market, that either all the people that live in them, they all paid cash for their houses. Not likely. Or B, they're not really bought and sold. People just live in them. And when they get tired of living in them, they just pack up and move away. And the first family that happens upon the vacant house moves in. You know, there's nothing bought and sold. And that's one of the myths that has made me a lot of money in the business. Because when, you know, once again, 99% of people have, you know, the misconceptions, but the fact is that they're easily financed. I mean, when I buy a house, I purtied up a little bit, you know, a nice family or a couple or whatever, they want to move in there. It's easy to finance. Not every bank does it, but, you know, a lot of banks do, and they do it reasonable, you know, requirements. They're no more stringent than, you know, getting a loan for a car or anything else. Because, let's face it, a lot of these homes are, you know, 20, 30, 40, $50,000 homes. They're not a $400,000 house. So it's not really hard for a bank to be loaning a. People know they have a credit. They don't have to be perfect. But, you know, they. Why would not. Why would not. And this is what I say, why wouldn't a bank, you know, loan money? I mean, one banker had told me at one time, the things you hear in this are so funny. He says, well, he says, I know the problem, why banks, you know, don't finance them. And I said, oh, why is that? He says, well, they're mobile.

They're mobile, right?

They're mobile. Maybe somebody will abscond with it in the middle of the night. And I said, well, if banks don't like loaning things on mobile, why the hell would they loan money on a car, right? I mean, come on. I mean, but the stuff that's people for you. But no, they're easily financed. So, you know, you pretty up a house and somebody's interested in it. And of course I work with, I've got my financing sources and they get loans for people to buy these homes all the time and they're very easily financed. Really.

Is it hard to find a deal? I mean, what's deal flow like for you?

You know, as far as, as far.

As, you know, getting a good list and finding something. I mean, I assume you only go in Seattle, correct? Or do you go all over the country?

No, no, there's, there's enough. And Seattle is not really a mobile home mecca or anything, but there are enough parks and everything here within, you know, 30 minutes, 45 minutes from, you know, where we're at. I mean, no, no worse than the commute anywhere. There are enough parks and mobiles around here to keep me busy, you know, more than, more than I could ever do by myself. But what I've done is that there are, let's face it, every home out there or most of the homes in every park out there, and there's hundreds of thousands of them. They got loans on them, Most of them, some people pay cash, but the vast majority, there's loans. Well, all those. There's going to be a certain amount of people that default on their loans just like there is in any genre. So every month there are homes that come up as repossessed by a bank. And I have just learned. And of course we share this with the people that work with us. How to find out? All the banks, all the credit unions, all the mortgage companies, everybody that has repo lists, you just get their lists and some of them are emailed to me, some I go on their websites to find them or whatever. I compile a list of all the repo homes available. And it's fun. It's really, it's like a box of chocolate. You never know what you're going to find. My wife and I take off with a pack of big lunch and we go around and we look at all these homes and we've arranged with the banks everything we've got keys or codes to get into the key boxes of all the houses. We go out and look at them and we, you know, the ones that looked to us like, you know, because we know the numbers, what it would sell for, prettied up a little bit and what the bank is asking for. The ones that are the highest profit potentials, we'll go ahead and throw bids on them. So it's. There's plenty of inventory out there and we go ahead and look at them and make Bids on the ones we like and we make, you know, I call it, I guess a low ball offer. But a lot of folks don't realize how reasonable you can buy a mobile home. And this is something that really shocked us. Completely unlike real estate, mobile homes to our advantage, they do depreciate. It's not like a house on land, you know, except for some downturns once in a while, but it usually holds value or appreciates. Well, mobile homes depreciate and that's a plus for us because a home that somebody bought 10, 12, 15 years ago, they've been paying it on all that time. The bank's got plenty of money out of it. The value of it isn't huge anymore. And when there's a default, the bank might be in Tennessee or the mortgage company, the assets here in Seattle. The bank doesn't have people in every state and city and wherever they can go and deal with the home, clean it and fix it and try to resell it and, you know, all that. No, when it goes default, what the bank really would like to do in most of these, they just want to get rid of it. It's a liability. I mean, the bank is going to be responsible for the park rent, the insurance and the maintenance and utilities. Plus here's a house sitting vacant and it's subject to deterioration and vandalism. So the bank, when a mobile home is default, they've already figured in to begin with. When they're doing their actuary stuff, all their accounting, they know a certain amount will go into default. It's already figured in. So when one does, they don't worry about it or fuss with it too much. That's why I come along sometimes with 3, 4, 5,000 dollars and I can buy a really, really decent house for just a little bit of money. The bank says, oh, give me a little bit of cash. We just want to get rid of the liability. So most people have no idea because it is personal, not real estate, how the values, depreciations and all this, how it all works to our benefit, to the people want to buy them. You know, I bought a lot of homes for 5,000 bucks and less. And we're talking three bedroom, two bath, all appliances, everything. You know, people just don't realize that this, this exists. I didn't until I got into business. It's phenomenal.

I never knew what I realized. I love the simplicity of it. The simplicity of it is, wow. It's crazy. It's crazy. I love the fact that it's not Real estate, that's a plus. Yeah. And you can get financing and it's just a buyer and a seller and it's such a big market, 10%, it's a huge market. And there's no competition.

There's really not. There's really no competition because people have, you know, it is just grown up with a lot of misconceptions. Misconceptions and myths and just attitudes about mobile homes, traders, whatever you want to call them. An old fellow the other day said, oh yeah, a wobbly box. Well that's what he called them. And true, the first ones that were made in the 60s and the early 70s, whatever. Yeah, they were junk. A lot of them really were, to tell you the truth. But 1976, the HUD came along, you know, and they put standards on them. And since then, you know, as far as safety and construction and whatnot, like I say, the last, I even go back 20, 25 years, they've been making really nice homes. They're good value. And I think, and this is just a little bit of philosophy here, but the way I see the whole country going, let's face it, you know, with $20 trillion debt, hey, all Americans have been living on borrowed, borrowed time. I mean it's like they preach to us not to run up our credit cards in the country's $20 trillion in debt. People are not the ideal for the American dream anymore is not a 4, 5, 600 thousand dollar house. It's just not. Affordable housing, you know, will continue to be in the forefront of what's happening in the market and that is manufactured homes. I mean, let's just face it, I mean it really is. I mean the rich get richer, the middle class is not as rich as they used to be overall. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with mobile homes. I mean, I'm not trying to sell them or the idea to anybody, but just a fact of the matter that a lot of people are coming and they look and they say, well, what would I get an apartment for? Or what are my options? And a lot of times you can go ahead and buy a mobile home. You can, you know, you're, you buy the home but you're renting the space it sets on from the park. But you know what, both of those two things combined, the rent for the park and the, and the payment on the house is less than, is less than a two bedroom apartment.

No kidding.

And you can own the home. You got your own four walls, your own yard, your own parking space. You don't, you know, you're not connected like you are in a condo or an apartment. Yeah, the figures are just phenomenal. And one of the stigmas is slowly disappearing. People are saying, hey, I have my own house in a decent surrounding. That's all that matters.

What's more important to you? Would you say the park itself and the management of the park or the mobile that you're picking up at the right price? You know how much it's going to cost to fix up and sell at the cub?

Location, location, location.

Okay, yeah.

I'll give you a real quick example. And this is last year there was a beautiful big mobile home and it was 2008, relatively new, just immaculate condition. This was in a mobile home park and they had raised the rent in the park through the roof. The management really didn't seem to care about the people in the park anymore. And the people were pulling out their homes and putting them elsewhere or leaving in droves. We managed to buy a home in that park and we moved it to a Park about 35 miles up the road where the space rent was reasonable. The management was first class. They really cared about the people. They really had developed a beautiful community there. And there was a high demand for people getting into that park. And we were able to, you know, actually move it from one place to the other place. We don't always do them. Sometimes you just fix them in place. But we made close to $35,000 profit by moving the house from park A to park B. It was the exact house, the exact.

House, but just a better park sold.

For that much difference. So the park and the management. Is really crucial as far as the valuation of the property. Of course, once again, even if you get in a park that is not pristine and not really poorly managed, but they're kind of middle of the road, it still is a numbers game. And if you can buy it and put it up and you know what the selling prices are in that park, I mean, they are what they are. If you can buy it and pretty it up a little bit and there's profit to sell it at the prevailing market value. Like I said, there's only four numbers involved in any deal. If it works, it works. And one of the things that we do that's different than some of the other folks in this business where they buy little old cheap houses and they try to get their initial investment back by reselling it to somebody and carrying back the contract for cash flow. We have gone to the bigger, newer, nicer homes and pretty then them up and then we Just go ahead and resell them and we take the cash and we're on to the next deal. So we take the. And in fact, we have averaged the whole history over $20,000 per deal the last three years. We've averaged over $25,000 profit on each deal we've done. We just go ahead and take that profit and we're out of there. We don't have to give a second thought about what's done is done. We just take the cash and then we've got other things to do with the money we're making to reinvest in places that pay us back. So we don't keep the houses and worry about if the people are paying the monthly or not, whatever. We just, you know, take the nicer homes that we can make a nice profit on and flip it and take the cash and then go invest that where we want to headache free.

What if I don't have a lot of money, Jerry, to get started? I mean, what if I don't have $5,000 to get started? Is that a problem?

No, for two reasons. It's not. One of the people that just, I've got to know, he's in this area. In fact, he's a senior management at one of the big box stores in their home office. But he decided to go ahead and join us and he got our information. He looked it over for a week, one week, and he got up with a buddy of his. They put in $3,000 a piece, bought a house as a repo. They didn't do anything to it. Mary Mae cleaned it or something, but they put it on Craigslist. They sold it two weeks later for $22,000. They made 16,000 bucks on a $6,000 investment in roughly three weeks, 3,000 a piece. So. And I have purchased a lot of homes myself for $5,000 or less. And so you don't need a lot of money now if you don't have any money at all, period. Let's say you, you know, you're zero, flat broke, right? There are investors, there are people out there that love this business model. And we have, in every community, there are people with money. And we know this, right? People, you know, takes money to make money. Everyone knows the people around with money. Well, I guarantee you, they don't make their money by letting their money sit into the bank. Paying, what now, one and a half, 2%?

I mean, one half, 2% is really ambitious. I don't know anyone getting that in the bank.

No. And so these investors are Looking for opportunities. And I don't even have to. And people don't even have to sell. There are people in every community that we all know of. And when I tell people who they are, they go, oh gee, why Dad? I didn't think of that. There's people in every community that they make their money by putting investors together with or you know, project people like me, putting us together with investors. They do the selling. I just, I sat down and explained it to them. Hey, here's what we do, how we do it, why we do it, here's the figures. And they go, gee, you mean somebody could put in $10,000 or $20,000 on a deal and make 5,000 bucks profit on that in a 90 day period of time? And yeah, well, why wouldn't I? It's a short period of time. It's a spectacular return. I mean that's just unheard of. Very low risk because the numbers are so firm and the, the investor has full control. In other words, he just doesn't have to hand somebody a blank check. He can actually. The people with the money, they can actually buy the home directly from the bank if they want. They don't even have to have anybody handle the money. They can be on the title. Just like a car title. You have your legal owner and registered owner. Legal owner is usually the bank and registered owner is the guy driving a car. Well, I've done investments where I'm the registered owner, the guy with the money is the legal owner. You're both on title, he's protected 100%. It's not that much money invested. So there are people out there that will jump all over this type of opportunity. And the thing that I stress than people and sometimes I say, yeah, we've had people doing this and we're getting better. We accumulate the information and how does, how do other people, how they got a hold of money? We share this. But the thing that you have to realize is that if you can make 10, 15, $20,000 on a deal, how many deals do you have to do? Or how many projects do you have to do before you have your own money? You don't have to look for investors after that unless you want to do as some people have. They say, well, gee, if all I'm doing is managing the project, I'm buying the house. I've got my handyman that fixes and paints it and a realtor that I listed with. I can manage several projects at a time. So they may want to work with investors to have a lot of money to work with, but that's up to the individual. But it's not that big a deal. You don't need a lot of money or like I say, to get started, or you can start with zero, as long as you're a little bit creative. So that's one thing I liked about it when I looked at real estate. Like I say, I found it really was not possible to, to be buying properties with zero money in the real estate arena, but with multiple. Yeah, you don't need much money at all. And I was surprised at how little I had to invest in some homes.

Well, Jerry, I'm really excited about this niche and I could talk all day with you about it. Unfortunately, we're at that point in the podcast now. I'm going to put you on the spot and I'm going to ask you for your tip of the week.

Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Mark. The tip of the week would be for, you know, people interested in more information, you know, about, you know, what we do and everything. There's a website and it's www. Forums mobilehomesmakemoney.com and I'm going to link.

To it in the show notes so everybody can go there. So it's www.forums.mobilehomesmakemoney.com.

Yeah. And that's forums. That's plural. That's F O r u m s forums.mobilehomesmakemoney.com and that's our forum where we have, you know, people chiming in and we discuss, you know, various mobile home, you know, projects and kind of what's going on in, in the industry, in the business. And yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Great. And my tip of the week is going to be learn more about Jerry and how mobile homes make unbelievable money on his webinar. So I'm going to link to his webinar so you can learn more about it because this is really quite fantastic niche. It's not real estate and there's no competition or very little competition. And Jerry, can you do this part time, full time? I mean, how much time does it take?

Well, it takes very little time. You can start part time. And one of our first projects, we went out, spent one day looking at homes, threw in some offers through the bank and we bought a house and we spent, my wife and I spent two weekends. This is when we first started. We spent two weekends, Saturday, Sunday, and we went and cleaned and prettied up and painted a little bit ourselves. Of course, you can Hire it done if you want, but the first one. So we spent about four days, put it on the market and forgot about it, went home and a couple weeks later got an offer and accepted it and put the money in the bank so you can spar. You can start very, very, very part time. And if you don't want to do any, just get the merry maids to come in and clean. And we give people a lot of tips on how to find a reasonable handyman. If there's a little bit of fixing or painting needs to be done, they don't have to spend any time at all. And there are. With me, it was. I started part time. I was full time in 60 days. That is just because, you know, when you make over 20,000 bucks, which is about. On one project, which was about half of what I'd made the entire year previous to that, when you do that, why would I do anything else? I went full time pretty quickly.

I don't blame you. Well, I'm definitely sold and I'm going to try to flip my own mobile out here just for fun. And I'm really looking forward to doing it now. You know, you come back on the podcast, we'll talk about it. I'll talk about my, you know, how it went for me. So, Jerry, how do you feel about the podcast?

You know what? I love the podcast idea. I think it's great. I think it's a great way to share with people. And that's what we're here to. And I, you know, we're in business to make a buck. But, you know, the really, really fun thing is being able to share with people and have them go out and in their lives now, the same type of success that I have and other people have, you get up every morning with a big smile on your face going, you know what? I think I did something worthwhile. And I love the podcast idea.

Yeah, no, I love it. I read a quote somewhere that said the myth is that successful people are generous and because of that, they're happy. And really what it should be is generous people are happy and happy people are successful. I love that idea. So I love that you're sharing your program with everybody and you're being generous with it. And I can tell you, not only just successful, but you're really happy. And that's really commendable. So, Jerry, I really appreciate it. If you guys want to learn more, go to again the link below, get on the webinar. And of course, Jerry's tip forums.mobilehomesmakemoney.com and look, give me some love. Go to www.thelandgeek.com Download the Passive Income Blueprint, get the ebook how to Avoid the Three Fatal Land Buying Mistakes. And of course, get this always informative and engaging podcast delivered each week to your email inbox. And if you want to buy some wholesale land, go to frontierpropertiesusa.com this is Mark Podolski with Jerry Luker. Jerry, thanks again. I hope you're going to come back.

Oh, I'd love to. Anytime, Mark. Thank you so much for having me.

And I'll see everybody next week.

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