Mobile Homes on individual lots provide many opportunities for profit. One entrepreneur in Nevada found an entire neighborhood filled with Mobile Homes on their own individually owned lots. Unlike a conventional manufactured housing condominium community, there were neither association fees nor regulations. He set out to make the most of this.
He found a pre-HUD unit on a completely fenced trashy lot whose owner agreed to carry back the financing. Ordinarily such a lot would have retailed for about $30,000, but the elderly Mobile Home kept potential buyers from buying it. Using private investor financing, my friend bought the lot and unit for $39,000 cash and proceeded to spend $10,000 more on it; doing the work himself.
His first step was to clean up the lot and transform the exterior by installing a shallow pitched shingled roof over the old flat roof and covering the old aluminum exterior with Masonite siding more in keeping with modern units. He gutted the interior of all partitions and divided the unit into two by installing a sound-resistant wall down the center of the unit just where it was joined.
Each side had a kitchen, a bath, and an exterior door. The remainder was divided into 4 tiny rooms with a locking door, a small unit air conditioner, and a twin bed with a built in lamp, a closet, and a bureau. He relocated the washer and dryer into an exterior storage area that ran the length of the unit in matching Masonite.
He put a combination lock on the gate leading into the walled lot, and on the entry door so everyone could get in. He also installed a peep hole and gave the meter reader a set of fine binoculars so he could read the meter without entering the premises.
Having completed all of this, he proceeded to rent each small cubical to a single male with no vehicle other than a motorcycle or a bicycle, so had no parking problems. Rent was $100 per week for a small private room including utilities and use of the washer/dryer. He filled it up and kept it up, but admonished the residents that they had to be quiet and orderly, or everyone would be evicted.
Do the math: Eight rooms times 52 weeks times $100 means that he was grossing $41,600 per year. Assuming that vacancy, taxes, insurance, utilities, and maintenance cost at least 25% of this, he still was making more than $30,000 per year profit on his investment. At the time of this writing, he has three of these units.
