Mobile Home Horror Stories

During site visits one of our priorities is taking a look at any vacant homes. If your onsite manager is Jonny-on-the-spot, they would’ve already sent over photos of the home’s condition & started the process of obtaining title (if needed). Still, it’s good to see the homes to sanity check renovation bids.

Interestingly enough, some of our worst homes were in pretty decent parks. No park owner is safe from the occasional junker. The outside of the home could be beautiful, with perfect landscaping, but the inside might be a nightmare:

Just when we think we’ve seen it all, a fellow operator shows us the inside of a park owned home that knocks our socks off.

Now, mobile home parks don’t have a monopoly on crazy tenants. If you have 100+ people in any community at least one of them is going to be a little nutty & comfortable living in chaos. This is just one of the special joys of being a landlord.

Below are the major categories of horror story mobile homes.

For privacy purposes, none of these pictures were our tenants. We’ve seen worse, but these are good examples.

HOARDERS

The nastiest park owned homes are occupied by hoar…well, let’s just call them overzealous collectors. As many park operators have experienced, these tenants are often in delinquency. They tend to prioritize thrift shopping over rent. One tenant claimed they couldn’t find their checkbook under all the junk. Not the line of defense I would have taken, but extra credit for brutal honesty.

Hoarder homes filled to the brim with trash can be extremely dangerous (think 1970s Pinto with a gas leak dangerous). Typically there is a dead animal or three & plenty of other gross stuff.

We feel for these people as there are clearly mental issues leading to this destructive behavior. But it’d be a whole lot cooler if they cleaned up the place before leaving.

It’s typically easier to demo these homes as is. Needless to say, it can be difficult to find vendors willing to deal with these homes. Obviously if it’s a newish home, you have to figure out a way to protect / keep your asset. But these are usual older park owned homes with minimal value.

VANDALISM

Nothing screams ‘I’m a stable human being’ like punching holes or shooting bullets in your walls & destroying your appliances/bathroom fixtures.

Sometimes as tenants are evicted they like to ‘stick it to the man’ by taking a sledge hammer to the home on their way out. Fun stuff.

If it’s a park owned home, you can go after them for felony vandalism. Yet, I don’t think we’ve ever done that. If a tenant can’t pony up cash for rent and was willing to do this kind of damage, they probably don’t have assets to go after.

Some might argue a landlord should do so on principal, but my view is we’ve already wasted enough time and resources on this delightful human being.

On the bright side, it’s a nice start if you the home has wood paneling and you wanted to upgrade to drywall!

CRAZY PET PEOPLE

These tend to be nice cat ladies, but occasionally you’ll come across a Joe Exotic type with extreme pets (snakes, pigs, baby alligators, other total normal, non-domesticated creatures).

We once had a park manager receive complaints from neighbors about “putrid” and “gagging” smells coming from a home. The manager, worried about the tenant possibly being dead discovered instead the tenant had taken in a Noah’s ark worth of animals. It was quite literally crawling with dogs, cats, guinea pigs, birds along with their food. One lucky room designated the communal “potty” room.

Apparently, a pet store was closing & the tenant thought they could save the animals & sell them off one by one. They either were horrible at sales or had become attached to their new furry roommates.

We applaud the sentiment, just not the execution!

Animal control was called, the animals were taken to a shelter and the county health department condemned the home until the fleas, feces, rodents, & lovely smell be removed before reoccupying. As parting gift, Dr. Doolittle stiffed us on last month’s rent and left the mess to us.

BREAKING BAD(DER)

Walter White might have had a chemistry degree, but we can assure you most “cooks” do not. Drug fires and perhaps an exploding mobile home will eventually happen if you own thousands of pads.

After evicting a few of these “entrepreneurs” for non payment (drug dealers that can’t come up with $400 is sort of hilarious) we discovered their makeshift ‘lab’ and referred our findings to law enforcement.

One tenant didn’t hold any grudges over their eviction and arrest though. They were thoughtful enough to put us as references for another housing application years later. Sadly, we couldn’t give them a glowing recommendation.

Conclusion

Obviously the overwhelming majority of mobile home park tenants hardworking, law abiding citizens. Once again, you find these problems in just about every residential asset class (and even self storage, which are apparently popular back-up labs). These are just the realities of dealing with large amounts of people.

Until next time, Happy Trails.

MHP WEEKLY