Investing In Mobile Home Parks with Kevin Bupp Indianapolis, IN

Table of Content

• Ep #3: The Step-by-Step Process of Researching & Identifying Fundamentally Sound Markets to Buy Parks In.
• Ep #109: Mastering the Due Diligence Process
• Ep #4: Part 2 of The Biggest Mistakes Investors Make When Buying Their First Park... and How To Avoid Them.
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• Ep #117: SPECIAL EPISODE – MHP Industry Updates via Town Hall Webinar #4
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They’re surely not aggressive in that space by any means. However, they’ve been a game changer on the consumer side because lending for a borrower that wanted to own a mobile home and get financing on it has been very challenging. There was a crash back in the late nineties like we had the subprime bubble. Mobile home lenders had their own internal bubble about eight years prior.

So, in that original model and that still exists today, there are some hybrids, but you’re comparing that original model and we own many parks where we don’t own any of the homes inside that park. I think the big difference with multifamily is the operational intensity of the day to day, right? Because we’re not fixing plumbing, we’re not fixing ACs or roofs or doing make readies or anything like that. Ultimately, that’s the homeowner’s responsibility. So, our only job is to keep the park looking good and enforce the rules, fix any infrastructure problems that occur. Ultimately, formed a friendship and found out what he did.

Ep #3: The Step-by-Step Process of Researching & Identifying Fundamentally Sound Markets to Buy Parks In.

You’ve got to ask the management’s responsibility. But like to buy 2,000 units of mobile homes, you have to ultimately build out your own property management company. We created our first fund due to a large amount of opportunities we had at that point in time. We took them down inside that fund and started a second fund after the success of the first fund. It’s much more of an efficient process for us as well on the acquisition side rather than doing deal by deal.

New owner moves in, takes over the responsibility of that lot rent. So, there’s never a downside or down period of time, to where you’re not collecting rent. So, you don’t have that gap of revenue, that you might have an apartment that you’ve got move out, maybe it takes you a couple weeks to make ready, a couple more weeks to market.

Ep #109: Mastering the Due Diligence Process

What we don’t know, we don’t know, as far as rates are going to go. I know that the Fed keeps saying they’re going to keep them low here for the next couple of years, but really hard to bank a business strategy on that. The benefits and risks of mobile home park investing.

There were little luxuries as a kid that you want, bikes, dirt bikes, and four wheelers, cars, and baseball cards. We did get some of that but not as much. I learned that at an early age by doing chores around the house and then mowing grass, shoveling snow and getting the paper route, I need to make my own money if I wanted things. That describes my guest on Wealth Formula Podcast today.

Ep #4: Part 2 of The Biggest Mistakes Investors Make When Buying Their First Park... and How To Avoid Them.

We’re walking the park every day to make sure there are no water leaks because we own the water lines. We make sure that there’s no money seeping into the ground, which is when water leaks. We make sure that folks are keeping up with their units or not have abandoned vehicles or their skirting might be damaged or their home needs paint and things like that. There’s very minimal oversight in that type of community.

I shouldn’t have, looking back, I wish I had to start buying when there was all that blood in the street but it was my blood, too. It’s hard to step outside of that bubble and get comfortable again. Kevin Bupp has been an entrepreneur all his life. He completed a degree in business at a small community college in PA, but eventually decided to focus all of his energy on real estate.

One thing that they did during that crash, what happened was there was a lot of repossessions homes getting pulled out of their park. Whenever you have a home leave, that lot revenue’s not coming anymore. Your park is getting devalued by $20,000 to $30,000. Every time a home might leave out of that park and a lot of park owners didn’t have the capital to bring homes back in. I’ve been buying parks for about seven years.

The best way to get investors involved in multiple different mobile home parks and markets across the country is by creating funds. As a note investor, we look to go to where the deals are. We’re different than the more traditional real estate investor that wants to buy in their own backyard.

I had this burning desire to do something big. I met a guy by the name of David through a girl I was dating at the time. David was a local real estate investor on a bunch of single-family properties and multifamily. He seemed to have a lot of flexibility in his life.

You’ve done multiple funds to finance these deals as well, which is a natural progression. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve done with the funds and where you are with that. That’s why I call being an A student a handicap to becoming an entrepreneur. A students don’t get to experience failure.

Kevin Bupp went from a middle class family and little aptitude for school to starting multiple successful businesses including a highly successful venture into the mobile home park world. So, the allure, I think, to a lot of folks that live in apartments, if it’s not an affordability issue, it’s the it’s the allure of not being held down or stuck to one place for a long period of time. So, I basically went to Dave and I offered my services to him. He was about 25 years older than I and so I tried to figure out where I could add value to him and his business, in his life and technology. It was kind of it and aside from just helping him with the technology side of his business, create a little bit more efficiencies, I basically did whatever he asked me to do. I was meeting with contractors, I would go pick up supplies, I would draft documents, deliver documents, get things signed, anything he asked.

It doesn’t exist like in many other asset classes. We took our expertise from the single-family space. They’re all different niches and it depends on your personality and what your end goals are for your investing business.