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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...

  The  convergence of local, sustainable food production and affordable housing presents a unique and promising opportunity, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. By leveraging agriculturally zoned land—often overlooked for residential development—this approach can address housing shortages while supporting local food systems. It also offers investors a chance to generate s...

Despite some promising developments, an unfortunate reality persists: Manufactured housing still suffers from a long-standing, now outdated stereotype that “trailer parks” and “mobile homes” don’t belong in modern affordable housing discussions. To overcome this, the investment and real estate communities must focus on facts, not innuendo, and recognize the critical r...

Small Parks (and Why I Love Them)  Economies of scale dominate real estate investment logic: Larger properties enable concentrated capital deployment and streamlined management. But this is common knowledge, making competition for big properties fierce. Meanwhile, smaller properties—often overlooked—offer unique advantages. Large institutional lenders may set minimum loan amounts...

I suppose if you do anything long enough you start to feel this way. In more than a decade as a mobile home park developer, investor, and manager, I have feelings about these properties that land on opposite ends of the love/hate spectrum. I’m grateful for these properties—they’ve allowed me to build and operate a successful business at Bridgeview Asset Management and enjoy a l...

The mobile home industry may not be known for tremendous innovation, but there exists a number of interesting housing and development options that were created, sometime unintentionally, by the mobile home and related industries.  One such innovation is the park model home; like anything, park models can be (and often are) misused, but they offer promising solutions for affordable housing, in...

A winning personality, prestigious education, big LinkedIn network and slick marketing all seem to be the driving factors when selecting an operator to back for a real estate investment. The truth, however, is that none of these things matter in the slightest. In fact, most quality operators who have a demonstrated success in the long term all share some other similar characteristics, and none of ...