The World of Mobile Home Parks

A little bit of my life story, I kind of accidentally happened into real estate but it’s the most wonderful thing that’s happened in my life. Like most, I went through high school, graduated and a lot of my friend’s kind of had a direction, I did not. At that point I was not like most, I didn’t have much direction to what I want to do in life. So I went to community college and I didn’t want to go burn my parent’s money away by partying at a university and so I did what I thought was a responsible thing and I went locally. During that period of time, I met an individual by the name of David and David introduced me to real estate. He happened to be dating the mother of my girlfriend at the time so it’s kind of a random story of how we met. Dave was a local real estate investor, he owned a bunch of single family and smaller multifamily properties in Pennsylvania where I grew up and Dave and I became friends and not a long time after him and I first met, I’m not sure why. I don’t know to this date, I don’t think I’ve ever asked him this question but he invited me, he must have saw something in me because he invited me to a real estate conference. I never even had to express much of an interest in what he was doing, however, he invited me to a three-day conference that he had already paid for. His partner couldn’t attend with him and so he invited me to go in their spot, take their spot and I did. It was a life changing event, it really was the turning point in my life where I saw something now that gave me direction. That gave me purpose, that got me excited and just gave me that enthusiasm to get up every day and just kind of run full steam at it. 

Listen to the full episode:https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/09/ws318-the-world-of-mobile-home-parks-with-kevin-bupp/

Left that three-day event and essentially went to Dave and said, “Hey, I like everything that I learned this past weekend but I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know where to start. There’s a lot going on here, there’s a lot of smart people in this room, I think I could be one of them. But I need a little bit of guidance, you know, how can I help you and your business, how can I help you grow your business. How can I take some work off your plate? I’d love to be around you more.” We are friends at that point so we already enjoyed being around each other but I said, “How can I be around you even more and how could I give value to you in your business end?” He graciously accepted the offer and what I did is I – in between tending bar in the evenings and going to school during the day, I was at David’s home office or out in the field with him. I was running errands, I would go get him coffee, I mean, whatever I had to do to be around him on a daily basis, I did. I did that for a little over a year before buying my first property so I felt comfortable to actually spend my own money and take the leap of faith and buy my first investment property and that was back when I was 20 years old. Bought my first property when I was 20 and that’s really all I’ve done since then. I’ve owned other types of business, I’ve owned a mortgage company and other businesses outside of real estate but real estate’s always been my core.

I very quickly accumulated a large portfolio, single family rentals both in Pennsylvania and then in Florida when I moved down a few years after. Also started acquiring multifamily properties during that period, this was kind of leading up to 2008, you know, everything was going great, you know, economy is super strong, everyone’s making money in real estate even waiters and waitresses and you know, just about anyone was making money in real estate at that point in time so the roller coaster was going up-up-up-up-up. Somewhere around late 2006, early 2007 I started seeing some slowdowns happen and before I knew it, 2008 was right on my tail and we had a very, very challenging time with our real estate down here in Florida and lost just about everything. It crashed pretty quickly, pretty aggressively and pretty much had to start over my entire life at that point in time. So that’s kind of the general background of how I got into real estate and what brought me up to kind of where we are today at least. There was a period of a couple of years where I stepped away from real estate. I’ve never been through anything like that before I was in my 20’s still and I’ve never experienced such a thing. I only knew going up and making money. I didn’t know what bad credit meant. I didn’t know what being broke or not having any credit cards or anything like that, that I could rely on. I didn’t know what that meant and so it was very challenging emotional time for me for those three years following 2008 and I stepped away from real estate in its entirety. I started a few other businesses that were not related to real estate just to get my mind off of it but the burning desire was still there, it just never went away. The flame was there and that’s ultimately what led me to what we’re in today which is mobile home parks and I was introduced back in 2011 to a guy by the name of Randy. By a mutual friend and Randy owned mobile home parks here in Florida and long story short, Randy peaked my interest and after having a two-hour lunch with him that I left that lunch and said, I’m going to buy a mobile home park. One way or another, I’m going to buy a mobile home park and figure out how this game works and see if we can make some money out of it. Seven years later, that‘s what we’ve been doing full time and buying parks throughout the US. Currently own just about 2,000 lots throughout 13 different states and having a lot of fun with it and making a lot of money.

Listen to the full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/09/ws318-the-world-of-mobile-home-parks-with-kevin-bupp/