Mobile Home Park Investing Ethics

[Melissa B.]

I want to work towards investing in a mobile home park. My husband disagrees but is open to changing his mind. He recognizes mobile home parks as good way to make money as a business (with the right ones, of course). For him, it's an ethics issue. He believes that owning a mobile home park is scummy to the people who live there. He thinks they would be better off owning a stick built home. He thinks utilities would much higher and they would break down easier, causing more maintenance for the owners. While I agree with the maintenance, I think utilities would depend on the individual mobile home's energy efficiency vs. the average energy efficiency of homes in the area. It also depends if the mobile home park is located in a moderate climate area or one with seasonal extremes. (We live in an area that gets extremely hot in the summer and a working cooling system of some sort is a requirement on mortgages, but I've told him we don't have to buy one in our area.) I also feel like in most cases a mobile home is a step up from an apartment in terms of what they get for their money. Not every American can or wants to own a regular home. A mobile home is somewhere in between and gives an option in getting to a place where you own the actual home you live in, just not the land. It doesn't take as much money to get started. I think it's perfectly ethical as long you're running it well and making proper repairs to the park itself. What are your thoughts? What are your arguments ethically for or against it?

[Frank Rolfe]

Mobile home parks provide the only affordable form of detached dwelling in the U.S. If that's a "scummy" concept, then I'm not sure what would not be classified as such.

But words mean nothing. I would go out and drive through a decent mobile home park -- one that is owned by an operator that cares. Not that nasty one that everyone drives by on the way to the car wash. But go to Google and enter "mobile home park in ['name of town]" and then go drive through several nearby. It might change you entire outlook on the industry. You see, the U.S. media has portrayed mobile home parks as terrible dumps for decades. 

We own mobile home parks that serve as some of the nicest things in some of the markets we're in (Bloomington, Illinois for one). 

Just don't let the "trailer trash" stereotype guide you -- it's totally B.S.