Mobile Home Investing Tips For Beginners (Become A Local Expert)

We’ve met a lot of people who want to get started in mobile home investing but believe they either need a lot of time, a lot of money or a bunch of experience. But none of that is true and we’re going to prove it to you.

Here are our top 5 tips on how to get started right away. And this is based on our own experience.

Tip #1 Read This Highly Recommended Book

Deals on Wheels is the only book we read when we started mobile home investment. It’s by Lonnie Scruggs and he gives you the step-by-step method of doing ‘Lonnie deals’, which is similar to what you’re going to be doing with investing in mobile homes.

That’s where we got started and it’s super, super easy to read. It’ll at least give you some insights on what you should be looking for, what kind of deals, what kind of strategies you can use and he’s got a few marketing tips in there as well. The marketing tips are old school, but they’ll definitely help you get started.

He’s even got a couple of sample contracts in there so you guys can get an idea of what type of contracts to use. This is a very good book to help you understand the basics of getting started with mobile home investing.

Tip #2 Find Parks in Your Area

This is so important because you want to make sure that you live in a decent area with mobile home parks that are around your home. Mobile home investing is best if you live in, or near, a metropolitan area. But there’s other investors that we’ve seen who’ve had some pretty decent success by investing in rural-type areas.

So what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to find all of the parks and all of the communities in your area. How we do this is by using a website called mhvillage.com.

In the YouTube video at the top, you can skip to 3:06 to watch us walk you through the process. But we’ll summarize it here.

• Search for your city or county in mhvillage.com
• Select ‘Mobile Homes for Sale’ and it will filter the results for you
• Use ‘Narrow Your Search’ to filter by age group, community type, resident-owned homes and more
• Make a note of the communities in your area
• Optional step: Pay for a detailed report. It’s customizable to filter results. Select the Communities tab on the sidebar and click ‘Get a List of Communities’

The paid report option is very helpful because you want to make sure you have a good idea of the total reach with regard to the mobile home communities in your area.

You want to know how far leads are going to have to drive to these appointments, and how much time you’re actually going to have to put into this in your car – because that’s part of the business too. So definitely check out mhvillage.com. They have a lot of information that you’re going to need.

Tip #3 Drive Around the Mobile Park Community

Now that you’ve pulled out a list you want to give yourself the best opportunity to grab the low-hanging fruit.

So the first thing you can do is take a drive around the community looking for ‘For sale by owner’ signs. You’re looking for people who are listing their home, and they’re not working with any brokers or realtors.

These people are usually really motivated. Because a lot of the time that’s their only marketing. They’re just putting a sign in a window and hoping somebody drives by. So that’s definitely low-hanging fruit. Some of those people will have had their sign in the window for months and nobody called them. So they’re definitely motivated. They want your help.

We would say this strategy works best in age 55+ communities. Because those homes usually take a lot longer to sell than in the family communities, which usually sell much faster than 55 + type homes.

The other thing you can do while you’re in the community is stop by the Park Manager’s office, introduce yourself, and let them know that you’re looking for homes. Sometimes they have homes available that are vacant and they need that mobile home to turn. And so you can be really helpful to them too.

The Park Managers can put you on a list. Anytime a mobile home is freeing up and they know it’s going to be vacant, when someone’s trying to sell their home, or when someone’s being evicted, you want to be the first person they call.

So drive around those parks and talk to some people. And put your name on their lists.

Tip #4 Test Your Area

This is something that we would do. A little secret hack if you will.

Basically, we would post fake ads of mobile homes that we didn’t really have. Because we wanted to see the demand of the area. We wanted to see what price points these homes were selling for. And we also wanted to build our buyers list.

How we did that is we simply went online and found some pictures of mobile homes. Then we went on Craigslist, on Facebook marketplace, apps like OfferUp or 5miles, and just created some ads. The great thing about it is it’s not a real ad but it helps you generate a buyers list.

So anytime you get any interest, tell them ‘This one has been sold, is it okay if I put you on my exclusive list? So that the next time we get a home similar to this, you’ll be the first one we contact.’ It works really well.

And with this hack, you’ll also understand how fast homes are moving and what kind of homes you should be looking for. So definitely test your area. It’s super, super important.

Tip #5 Networking

Blast out your name and what you do to all of the local experts or newbie investor agents in your area. When we started off we went to any and every real estate meeting we could find, especially our local RIA.

RIA is short for Real Estate Investors Association. That’s going to be very helpful for you because in those meetings you’re going to meet a bunch of people that have mobile homes leads and simply don’t have any use for them. A lot of these people come across mobile homes all the time and they have no idea what to do with them.

You want their unwanted leads. So go and tell them you want their mobile home leads, work out a partnership, work out a referral bonus that you can give them, and trust me, you’ll start getting leads in your inbox as soon as you start spreading the word.

So get out there and network. Tell people what you do.

Want To Become a Successful Mobile Home Investor?

If this video and post have you interested in becoming a successful mobile home investor, you might want to check out our free case study.

It’s about a student of ours who made a $10,000 profit in 48 hours selling a used mobile home.

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