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I bought a park in Washington in 2019 for $1,000,000 The rents were $350/mo...less than half market rent for the area in 2019 The power was unsafe, and almost 12 spaces were vacant due to inadequate electric There was no fence between the park and the junkyard next door, creating innumerable safety issues We 1) Upgraded all the power 2) Added a 9' privacy fence between the park and junkyard 3) ...

  Early in my career, I struggled with the idea of profiting from affordable housing. Was I building opportunity—or benefiting from people with the fewest options? To answer that question, I explored the nonprofit sector. The conclusion I reached was clear: ethical, for-profit investment is essential if we want to solve the affordable housing crisis. Government and nonprofits play...

I used to struggle with the idea of building a successful business around manufactured housing. Was I profiting at the expense of vulnerable tenants? After exploring the nonprofit world in depth, I came to a clear conclusion: ethical, for-profit investment is essential to solving the affordable housing crisis. Government and nonprofits are vital, but they can’t act as quickly or at the sca...

  In 2015, we acquired a community for $1.2M that was in rough shape: Overgrown trees with dangerous falling limbs Roads broken apart by roots A dilapidated community center sealed off after years of neglect We immediately tackled the safety issues — clearing trees, repairing infrastructure — and spent time on-site, speaking directly with residents. Wha...

In the first year rent control takes effect, it does help. It caps rent hikes and protects renters from sudden increases. No argument there. But what happens next is what really matters. The unintended outcome? Every landlord raises rent—every year. Before rent control, we evaluated rent increases carefully. At Bridgeview, that meant reviewing: Local market comps Site c...

  In 2017, we bought a 14-unit mobile home and RV park for $495,000. At first glance, it looked like a small, stabilized deal. But we dug deeper: We pulled 75+ years of historical records and discovered the park had long operated as an RV campground—even though the county had only started classifying RVs as residential units in the late ’90s. We identified 15 aband...

Affordable housing doesn’t need more red tape. It needs more creativity. In 2016, we bought a mobile home park for $2.1 million. Along the southern edge of the property, there was a narrow 35-foot strip of land—too small for conventional homes. But we noticed something interesting: old utility hookups buried there. Turns out, this had once been used for RV parking. So we asked:...

Nearly 15% of single-family homes are owned by large private equity investors, a figure projected to rise to 35% in the next six years. Like many, I have reservations about this. It's not a judgment on ethics or market share, but rather an educated observation that many of these entities are multinational, meaning it’s unlikely that they have the resources – or the desire – to ...

Countless plans exist to solve affordable housing, nearly as many as the homes needed to end homelessness. I’m not proposing a catch-all solution but a specific, scalable, long-term approach that goes beyond simply “housing the unhoused,” as many proposals assume will suffice. Without a comprehensive, community-centric, homeownership-based design offering sustainable pathways for...

What is market rent? For such a critical question—one that every investor should be able to answer when evaluating income property—I’m always surprised by how few can. This is especially true in the case of mobile home parks, where the wide range in asset quality makes researching and establishing market rent deceptively difficult. At its core, market rent refers to the rental...