​Facebook Posts and Ads to Fill Lots in a Small Town

We closed on the subject mobile home park in December of 2017. The park is composed of 30 MH lots. 12 of the lots were occupied at the time of purchase. The park is located in small city. In fact, at a population of only 2,500 people, this city would be too small for most other investors. The closest large city is 60 miles away.

Despite the city size, we found sufficient demand for affordable housing to pull the trigger. Some contributing factors for demand are: 1) this is the only mobile home park in town. 2) The town caters much to seniors and as a result it has a few health care facilities. 3) This is one of the nicer towns in the area. We’ve found a few people would prefer to live in this town, but have never found affordable housing. 4) The same demand drivers you’ll see across the country apply here. That is, a large segment of the population doesn’t make enough money to own a home and home prices continue to go up.

The highest upside is in filling lots. Other opportunities included sub metering utilities and bringing lot rents to market. Given the capital investment needs it became apparent we needed to pursue favorable purchasing terms. We were able to leverage a seller’s note and purchase the property with only 15% down.

We began the process of bringing homes to the park immediately. Our business plan called for selling homes (seller financed) with a $1,200 down payment and monthly payments (home and lot) that would be below what a potential buyer would be paying at a competing apartment. Things looked very promising. Our first home sold before we finished skirting it. Our second and third homes were already at the property when we were faced with evicting a tenant we had not expected to evict. We knew we had at least one more eviction. Then the sale of one of the homes fell thru. If not careful, our small park could be faced with four empty homes!

Was there sufficient demand? Did we bring too many homes too soon? All of these questions began to undermine confidence. But this low was precisely the motivation I needed to examine more closely our advertising efforts. Our advertising had been mostly Craigslist ads and a Facebook post. I put a little more effort into those Facebook posts and the results were very encouraging. 

Armed with this knowledge I began to read about Facebook advertising. The more I applied what I learned the better results we were getting. I did this without spending a single dime, by posting in the local groups only. Then I tried the paid advertising. I spent less than $10. We didn’t’ get a sale from this, but my eyes were opened to a world I wasn’t familiar with.

Soon I was listening to advertising podcasts (the Facebook Marketing Ninja, the Art of Paid Traffic, Facebook Ads with a Twang, etc.) Holy cow! There is so much to learn and so much to improve on. Thru FB advertising you can target people by area, demographics, purchasing behavior, stage of life, etc. For instance you could set advertising to reach only low income, retired, renters that are considering moving! Or you could do hundreds of other combinations to get the right audience. Then you get FB users that see your add or post and forward it to their friends. I was just scratching the surface on advertising. In fact, I sort of stopped advertising to focus on getting the infrastructure ready.

What infrastructure? Well, I learned that thru FB advertising you can send people to your website. Then you can install FB Pixels in your website to know which FB users visited your site. Then you can re-market to those FB users that visited your site. Not only that, you can create a target audience that mimics your website visitors.

I am just now starting to test FB paid advertising. To keep evaluate this I stopped placing posts in the local groups, which was providing very good results. So far I learned most of the people interested in what we offer are female, 35 and older, and they are using mobile phones to browse our adds and click to visit our website.

It is too early to know for sure if FB paid ads will provide results, but if this is as promising as the local groups have been, filling lots may not be the concern I thought it was when we hit our low point. In fact, is it possible social media advertising would lead a few courageous investors to consider smaller markets? We won’t know for sure for several months, but the possibility exists.

What about medium size or even larger markets? We suspect most other mobile home park owners are not taking advantage of this new advertising medium. If true, then perhaps there is opportunity where others see lack of demand. Maybe a park you thought had no demand deserves a second look. In fact, I should share that I inadvertently posted one of our for sale home ads in another city (Vancouver, WA). I was working on this at midnight and within 3 minutes of the add posting I had 3 inquiries via FB messenger!

It is no surprising all other industries are using social media platforms for advertising. I could be wrong, but I suspect that’s not the case with mobile home parks. What about you? What is your advertising strategy? Feel free to reach out. I’ll be happy to share the little I’ve learned. 

Update 

It is now September 2020 and thought it would be a good idea to provide an update.  I didn't pursue FB paid advertising.  Instead, I kept using the FB Local For Sale groups.  This worked well.  

As things evolved I had the need to network at a bigger scale.  I ended up creating a investing website for that purpose.  This helped me understand advertising in a bigger context.  I am now experimenting with Pinterest.  But really, having a website where to post blogs, create a forum, gather email lists, and in general connect with an audience is of tremendous importance.  

Certainly small markets can benefit from this approach.  I recently encouraged my sister in law to start blogging to help promote her realtor services.  She is in a small market in Minnesota.  I recently received an automated email from her company and was pleased to see it was a blog post about virtual tours.  

That's all for now.  Cheers and happy investing!

JC