*“Take-out” is a journalistic term for an in-depth look at a single topic. Mobile home parks have few friends among owners of conventional real estate, but however you might feel about them, I hope you feel they are worth preserving. I’m not aware of any such legislation or other public policy aimed at protecting manufactured house, which is, after all, the last bastion of affordable housing in most cities. What local governments could do to address the problem, Oliver said, was to legislate a “right of first refusal” by which an owner’s association or other non-profit entity serving the interests of mobile home park owners, would be able to match any bona fide offer by a for-profit buyer, and purchase the mobile home park. This organization, called Resident Owned Communities (ROC), was featured briefly in John Oliver’s piece. The main presentation was by an organization which organizes residents of mobile homes parks to form an owner’s association which might then outbid other buyers of the park when the current owner attempts to sell it. Sadly, only a handful of the attendees were residents of a mobile home park. On January 21st Golden United sponsored a public meeting on the subject of manufactured housing which I attended, along with several city councilors and civic minded people. This is a heartless process, but it’s how our free enterprise system works. And down the road (so to speak), they can kick out the remaining occupants and sell the entire mobile park to a developer. Since it becomes abandoned property, the mobile park owner can then assume ownership of it, or scrape it depending only on what makes financial sense. Thus, if a mobile home owner can’t afford an increase in land rental for their home, their only choice often is to simply abandon the home that they paid thousands of dollars to buy. Also, since they’re not “real property,” you can’t get a mortgage on them for 4% over 30 years, you get a chattel loan at 15% and for a shorter term. Rather, they decline in value like a car or like the “personal property” they are. That rule feeds right into the greed motivating those corporations which, like Clayton Homes, are buying up every mobile home park they can.Īnother thing about mobile homes is that, while they can be really nice when they’re brand new, they do not appreciate in value like regular homes. I checked with Jefferson County, and you can only install a mobile home on land zoned for mobile home parks. You can’t just buy a lot somewhere and put your mobile home on it. The land owner can raise the rental fee without limit because, while the home can technically be moved, it would cost thousands of dollars to do so, and there’s little choice of where to move it. What makes a mobile home park a great investment is that, while people own their mobile or “manufactured” home, they rent or lease the land on which it sits. Historically, such parks were “mom and pop” operations, but it was inevitable that mom and pop got old and, even if their children had an interest in taking over the family business, it was more profitable to sell the park to a developer or to a company like Clayton Homes. The big trend in mobile homes is the influx of big corporations like Warren Buffett’s Clayton Homes in the mobile home park business. And there’s so much to learn just by Googling. Sometimes I wish I could be a full-time journalist again so I could really do investigative reporting, but I’m a Realtor now and have to depend on others like John Oliver and David Migoya of the Denver Post doing the heavy lifting. Here’s what I learned from watching John Oliver’s piece and was able to confirm by talking to others.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |