All Forum Posts by: John Fedro

Excellent advice Ben Reese!

On your first few deals try to aim for the path of least resistance. Focus your efforts on advertising and finding sellers with good-looking homes that are motivated to sell and already have homes for sale on land or inside parks.

Hope the deal works out for you. Stay in touch.

Best,
John Fedro

Hi Steven,

Each mobile home should be evaluated on a case by case basis. Homes with additions can be equally in demand as a model without an extra addition on it. However if the addition is done poorly that is a different story.

Be aware that if you try to move a home with an addition it may be difficult to ever get it back the way it was.

Permitting on mobile homes inside parks is different and you can bet many (my opinion) of the additions you see are likely not permitted or up to code. That doesn't mean they are not worth the money. There is likely a buyer for every type of home you come across, however as an investor we are interested typically in the MHs with the least work needed and the highest resale demand.

Hope this helps and makes sense.

best,
John Fedro

Thank you Bryan.

This looks great. I will read it further and private message you with my thoughts.

Thanks again,
John Fedro

Haha Thank you Ann Bellamy! That would be helpful for me to look at in the future. Hopefully someone can gain some value from all these comments. I wonder how Ken Madill is doing now with regards to his mobile home investments?

Best,
John Fedro

Hi Kathryn,

Welcome to BP! First let em say thank you for fighting for us and being an active military member. We are all proud of you!

If you are interested in MHs you may want to get with Sam Parkins who is an active investor in your area.

Good luck and stay with it.

Best,
John Fedro

Hi Ken,

To give some feedback on the original question about you struggling to find a deal under $10k in your area, here it goes. MA prices, and in fact most of New England in my experiences have higher priced mobile homes compared to most of the country. This isn't because the homes are newer or in better shape. It is due to the lack of mobile homes compared to other areas of the country, AND because people are moving to your area willing to spend cash to purchase a mobile home - this obviously drives prices up.

With that said if you are looking for the $10k or less deals they will come from a few select sources on average. Here are two... 1. MHPs that took back a mobile home and don't want them or don't want to do the work necessarily to make it live-able. If you don't mind repairs these are good deals to get, plus you can often arrange a few free months lot rent with the PM. 2. Highly motivated sellers that must leave in the next 20 days. These sellers are behind in park payments and about to be evicted OR highly motivated for some other reason. You only often get a few days to find or attract this seller when they become desperate to sell.

I would also advise that structuring payments can be a way to strike a win-win deal with a seller and still create cash-flow. Also start looking for mobile homes on land if you are willing.

With all that said my advice if you are gung-ho on completely your first "Lonnie" deal, which I think is a great idea. :) Then I would highly advise to quadruple your efforts to meet local managers as well as all your other marketing mentioned above. Dominate your area.

Thanks for the shout out Nick!

Best,
John Fedro

Hi Bryan,

I would love to see your business plan of MHP investing and/or what you have so far. I will of course share with you my thoughts and plans. As of this point I have no formal Business plan in place.

Thanks for starting this thread.

Talk soon,
John Fedro

Hi Michael,

With regards to the first question and sellers asking $50k to $130k. This is normal even if the land is only a fraction of the cost. I speak with sellers weekly that were oversold by dealers on beautiful new and used mobile homes. These sellers end up paying $50k to $130k+ for just mobile home itself and often times finance a majority of the balance. In many of these cases I am the one that has to break the unfortunate news that many of these sellers are trapped until they find someone else that wishes to take on their burden, but after a few years we all know that the mobiles depreciate and are harder to obtain conventional lending. So it is a downward spiral of confusion and anger for some of these sellers.

In short there is little help we can offer as investors to sellers that were oversold on manufactured homes and paid such high prices for these homes. Unless they own the home free and clear and are willing to discount or finance the sale.

Your 2nd question about walking through the $15k deal is as follows. Look for all signs of past and current repairs needed, ask the seller about these repairs or issues. Test all appliances, water facets, hvac system, roof, walls, even each outlet if you desire. Check with the county or city for flood levels and new laws that you are unaware of if you purchase this particular home. This is a good start to evaluating the home yourself.

Best of luck and let us know if you make the deal.

Best,
John Fedro

Hi Josh,

Really great idea! It is important to educate a tenant to think wisely about their monthly expenses, I think we can all agree that a roof over our head is more important than going out to eat nightly or buying a new car.

In my experience you can really tell a lot by the tenant with how they evaluate their own expenses. Here's what I mean, I love it when a tenant asks me to wait a day while they figure out if they can afford this home. The conscious effort and acknowledgement to review their own budget to verify if they will be able to comfortably pay for rent plus all other bills is the vast minority of potential tenants.

The obvious other remark is to make certain the tenant(s) is taking home a salary equal to 3 times monthly-rent from their jobs monthly.

Please let us know how you proceed as this is a great thread and topic to discuss.

Talk soon,
John Fedro

Sorry everyone! That was me that didn't make the appointment as mentioned above. Hope to be recording a great podcast with Joshua and Brandon very soon. :)