Today's episode of The Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast delves into the all-important topic of due diligence. Host Kevin Bupp is joined by Jethro van Aardt, the Director of Operations at Sunrise Capital Investors, and they break down the many moving parts and processes of due diligence--from kick off to title transfer.
Due diligence is one of the most critical aspects to master when diving into the niche of mobile home park investing. It has its own unique set of nuances and to be aware of, as well as opportunities and usual skeletons in the closet to watch out for.
Quotes:
"Due diligence process, it's a pretty thorough process and a lot of sellers often get intimidated by it. They're worried that you're going to uncover something and it's going to completely throw the deal out so they get kind of secretive, which is pretty strange. It's counter-intuitive."
"The offsite phase is critical. We need to know that we have the exact information. For example, simple things like the exact address of the property, the exact pad count, how many homes are abandoned, how many homes are resident-owned, how many homes are rented by tenants, etc etc. So it's verifying a lot of information."
"DD is really just a long checklist and it's following that checklist and obviously you start off with the most critical things and, if you can get through those critical things from the top to the bottom, then you reassess and understand do you move forward or not."
"Sometimes these places look really nice from the outside. When you get inside, they're in really bad shape. You need to understand the quality of the resident base. If anybody is prepared to live on the floors, you know that person's not paying the rent and they're probably going to skip the town in the middle of the night."
"Unfortunately that's one of the painful things sometimes is that you can do all that prep work and offsite, think that you've covered everything but there's still going to be skeletons and that's why the onsite is so crucial."
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This episode of Mobile Home Park Investing features MAI Appraiser and manufactured housing expert Erik Hanson. He is Executive Vice President of Midwest Appraisal Group, a real estate appraisal and consulting firm with offices in La Crosse and Madison, Wisconsin.
Erik specializes in mobile home parks, franchise hotels, and convenience stores. He also earned his MAI Designation from the Appraisal Institute in 2014, where he serves on the board of directors as vice president and educational chair for the Wisconsin Chapter.
Kevin and Erik dive into industry and rental trends, cap rates, sales activities going on now, and predictions for the industry in the coming years. Erik also shares a couple of stories from his experiences in the mobile home park industry.
Quotes:
"Definitely the new buyers are far more aggressive. I don't know if that's a good thing or not but it seems like they're really willing to pay all those cap rates and maybe buy in an area that doesn't make a whole lot of sense."
"I think a lot of it is the supply side is so small right now for anything that's out on the market that people just tend to gobble up whatever they can find."
"It seems like it's a little more accepted now on the park-owned homes side, especially on the newer homes--the older homes is still kinda hit or miss--but the newer homes it seems like if they can't get them sold, they're willing to rent now."
"We also look at it from a rental side. If the rents are exactly the same but one tenant's got to pay 150, one tenant's got to pay 40 in addition to rent, you have to consider that especially if there's vacant sites in those parks."
"You got to buy a couple of parks on your own first before the brokers are going to even consider you. Get your track record kind of in order before you start reaching out there."
Discussed in this Episode:
New people in the industry: Trends and experiences
Appraising homes and risk assessment
Case study on utilities
Trends with market rents
Noteworthy stories on the field
RESOURCES:
In this episode of The Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, Kevin Bupp speaks with manufactured housing finance expert Jerry Muir. He is Managing Director at Greystone working with the Agency Lending Team with a primary focus on building out and expanding their manufactured housing lending platform.
Jerry is a 25 year veteran of Fannie Mae and, during his time as Director of Multifamily Credit underwriting Fannie Mae, was responsible for a 12-state southeast region.
He had dual roles in developing and managing the manufactured housing community lending platform. Impressively, he has overseen north of 10 billion in financing.
Quotes:
"You might not have the prettiest homes in there but if it's a well-run community, it's stable, it's going to do well."
"Our manufactured housing community, because you've got so much stability because it costs so much for a resident to take his home and move it to another park (I mean it could be in excess of $7000), they're not just going to move down the road like in the multifamily property."
"If you've got a tier 2 loan on the property and you want to do a supplemental, you would get tier 2 pricing on the supplemental, basically."
"Their regulator, the FHFA, basically restricts the amount of business the two agencies can do and they call it cap or uncapped business. An uncapped business is they can do as many loans as they want in that space."
"They really open to more people and make it more affordable for them to get into a home and get into a park, no question about it.
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Discussed in this Episode:
Developing MHC at Fannie Mae
Differences of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Supplemental Loan Program explained
Future outlook of Fannie Mae
Detailed overview of Greystone in the MHC space
RESOURCES:
In this episode of The Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, Kevin Bupp hops on a call with real estate expert Matt Ricciardella, managing member of Crystal View Capital, a private investment firm with a focus on value add real estate.
Since its inception in 2014, the firm has raised almost $17 million of equity capital and has approximately $60 million in assets under management with a specialized focus on manufactured housing and self-storage asset classes.
Matt also goes into fine detail about recent successful projects and how his company manages all the different asset classes they handle from across the US.
Quotes:
"In my hunt for finding deals that would yield the best cash flow, I kinda came across mobile home parks and self-storage as the key assets that I wanted to focus on since those properties yielded the highest free cash flow out of all commercial real estate classes that I came across and underwrote."
"These opportunities are available to all of us. You've got to dig--especially now you've got to dig even harder--and then you've got to have the wherewithal to recognize that there is that untapped, hidden value."
"Once you've added value and you've maximized that value, it's time to look to exit."
"Through the years, we've been kicked down the street and that's the only way I think we've learned and we've learned from our mistakes and as a result we've implemented some of these strategies that has made us successful managers of mobile home communities."
"The best thing I can tell you is to take action. Go out there, make it happen, start looking at opportunities, get educated."
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