All Forum Posts by: Jason Ray Richardson

Great job with your first deal!

It's a double edged sword. You want a agent that knows about investment real estate but that means they are probably doing the investing themselves and all you are getting is the left overs. Easy solution, fire them and get another agent.

Welcome to BP! You are in a hot real estate market so should be a great opportunity.

I had a similar situation when I got started. I wanted to buy a house to flip and I sold my wife on what the house could look like. So good in fact that she said she wanted to move in that house. So part of the compromise would be that she would be ok with me continuing to purchase more rentals. Maybe your compromise isn't buying a house, but it could be something else or selling her on how real estate investing will help her reach the goals of more family time

I've seen others five a simple evaluation of 5,000 per home and a formula to multiply per pad in order to get the value of the park. Either google it or look it up on www.biggerpockets.com or www.mobilehomeuniveristy.com and you should be able to find. In all of the deals that I have looked at, park owners over inflate the value of a depreciating asset (mobile home) which drives the price of the park up.

I'm dealing with this now even though the supreme court of MS ruled that a city can't keep a park owner from pulling in new homes after an old one moves out. The broke city where my park is located still tries to give me grief. It's really aggravating because they did NOTHING when the former owner let the garbage pile up in the park, had leaking sewage in the park or the water was turned off for 4 months. In 3 months I've done more in the park then the former owner did in 3 years and they still got this snobbish attitude about the park.

Though they can be tricky to find, and certainly finance, I would suggest starting with a smaller park. The reason why I say that is

1) If you make a huge mistake on the purchase and/or everything goes wrong then it wouldn't be the end of your world financially.

2)You can make the mistakes with less zeros. No matter how much you study you will make mistakes. It's better to have those learning experiences on a smaller park. At least in my opinion.

3) With a bank it helps to have experience in park ownership. So if you have a small park already then you have that experience if you look to finance a bigger park.

4) If you buy the smaller park in area where potentially you could invest in the future in a bigger park. Then you can still take advantage of scale that bigger parks have.

Just my 2 cents worth.

 I agree, learn all you can learn. Then set your investing parameters (what area you want to invest, how much you want to spend, etc.) and then find the deal based on those parameters.

There seem to be only 2 extremes. The parks that are awesome (and are demanding large asking prices) or the distressed parks that are supper capitol intensive. Either are barriers of entry into this space. I think finding wholesale or off market deals, or establishing relationships with park owners that will one day sell, are the only real ways to go