Driven by some of the strongest returns in real estate, investors have shaken up a once-sleepy sector.
Jeremy Ward poses for a portrait in front of his home in the Ridgeview Homes mobile home community in Lockport, New York, June 23, 2022. Ward is one of the residents at Ridgeview participating in a rent strike after new owners of the park announced they were raising rents by 6%.Lockport, N.Y. — For as long as anyone can remember, rent increases rarely happened at Ridgeview Homes, a family-owned mobile home park in upstate New York.
“All they care about is raising the rent because they only care about the money,” said Jeremy Ward, 49, who gets by on just over $1,000 a month in disability payments after his legs suffered nerve damage in a car accident. “These industries, including mobile home park manufacturing industry, keep touting these parks, these mobile homes, as affordable housing. But it’s not affordable,” said Benjamin Bellus, an assistant attorney general in Iowa, who said complaints have gone up “100-fold” since out-of-state investors started buying up parks a few years ago.
George McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, said about a fifth of mobile home parks, or around 800,000, have been purchased in the past eight years by institutional investors. In Iowa, Matt Chapman, a mobile home resident at a park purchased by Utah-based Havenpark Communities, said his rent and fees had almost doubled since 2019. Iowa Legal Aid’s Alex Kornya said another park purchased by Impact Communities saw rent and fees increase 87% between 2017 and 2020.
On top of rent increases, residents complained of being inundated with fees for everything from pets to maintenance and fines for clutter and speeding — all tucked into leases that can run upwards of 50 pages.