By Andrew Keel | Keel Team Mobile Home Park Investments

Most mobile home park investors spend their due diligence time scrutinizing cap rates, lot rents, and occupancy numbers. They hire inspectors to walk roofs and probe sewer lines. What they often skip — and what’s quietly becoming one of the most expensive operational landmines in this business — is the utility billing system.

In 2025, residents at Flowing Wells Mobile Gardens in Tucson, Arizona received electricity bills that had mysteriously tripled or quadrupled overnight. One man’s bill jumped from roughly $60 a month to over $416. A completely vacant home next door received a $311 bill. More than 35 residents at the same park experienced identical spikes simultaneously.

The culprit wasn’t a surge in energy consumption. It was a manual meter reading error — a single transposed digit that ballooned into hundreds of displaced dollars across dozens of families, many of them elderly and on fixed incomes.

The residents had no recourse with the utility company. In a master-meter park, the park owner stands between tenants and the utility. Tenants can only dispute through the park. And in Arizona, when utility charges are bundled into rent, a disputed bill doesn’t stay a billing dispute for long — it becomes grounds for eviction.

This Is Not an Isolated Problem

I’ve been investing in mobile home parks for years. I’ve owned and operated communities across multiple states, and the utility billing conversation has become unavoidable.

Arizona’s Department of Housing and the state attorney general are now actively scrutinizing submetering practices at parks statewide. Washington state passed rent stabilization legislation in May 2025 partly in response to utility-bundled rent disputes. Oregon has capped inflation-based rent increases and requires tenant approval for increases tied to infrastructure upgrades. Several other states have active legislation in committee right now.

What does this mean practically? If you’re operating a master-meter park — and tens of thousands of parks across America still are — you’re operating in an increasingly regulated environment with increasingly organized tenant advocates watching.

And many parks are still running billing out of spreadsheets.

Why Master-Meter Systems Keep Causing Problems

Here’s how master-meter billing typically works: The utility company sends one bill to the park. Park staff then manually read individual meters, calculate each resident’s share, and generate individual bills. In theory, straightforward. In practice, a management nightmare.

Manual reads get transposed. Calculators get used wrong. Staff turn over. Meters get skipped. And unlike a direct utility customer who can call their provider, dispute a charge, and get answers — a resident in a master-meter park must convince their landlord that the bill is wrong, and trust the landlord to investigate and correct it.

That power asymmetry is exactly what’s drawing regulatory attention. Advocates are calling it systemic. State attorneys general are calling it a billing obligation compliance issue. Some media outlets are calling it predatory.

Here’s the thing: in most cases, it’s not malicious. It’s operational sloppiness at scale. But the consequences — tenant turnover, legal exposure, AG investigations, reputation damage — are the same whether it’s fraud or error.

What I’ve Done in My Own Portfolio

After seeing this pattern repeat across the industry, I made utility billing a major operational focus in my own parks.

First, I moved to utility bill-back systems with smart water meters. Not because regulators required it yet, but because manual systems don’t scale and they create disputes I don’t want. When a resident gets an accurate, itemized, automated bill — disputes drop dramatically.

Second, I’ve started requiring camera-inspected sewer lines and documented pressure testing on water systems before any acquisition closes. Utility infrastructure failures are the most expensive surprises in this business. A full water line replacement in a larger park can run $300,000 or more.

Third, I’ve been watching which states are moving toward direct-metering mandates. Converting from master-meter to direct-metered — where each lot pays the utility directly — eliminates the park owner from the billing chain entirely. It’s a capital expense upfront, but it removes legal exposure permanently.

The Practical Checklist for Any Mobile Home Park Operator

Whether you’re running one park or twenty, here’s what I’d prioritize now:

1. Audit your current billing process. How are meters read? By whom? How often? Where are the records? If the answer involves sticky notes or spreadsheets, you have exposure.
2. Implement a photo-capture protocol immediately. Even before upgrading to automated systems, require timestamped photos of every meter at every read cycle. This creates an evidence trail that protects both you and your tenants.
3. Research your state’s requirements. Arizona, Oregon, and Washington have specific submetering statutes with disclosure and billing format requirements. Other states are drafting similar rules. Know what applies to your parks before an audit does.
4. Evaluate smart submetering options. Several companies now offer hardware and software packages built for mobile home park-scale deployments. The ROI isn’t just dispute reduction — it’s also water leak detection, consumption benchmarking, and tenant-facing transparency that reduces conflict before it starts.
5. Consider direct metering for long-term capital planning. If you’re planning a major infrastructure upgrade anyway, coordinate with your local utility about converting to individual accounts per lot. The upfront cost pays for itself in operational simplicity over a 3–5 year horizon.

Utility billing is one of several operational areas we dig into before any acquisition closes. If you want a full framework for evaluating utility systems and other due diligence factors, the Keel Team MHP Due Diligence Playbook walks through the process in detail.

The Bottom Line

Utility billing isn’t glamorous. It’s not the part of mobile home park investing that gets featured in podcasts or conference keynotes. But right now, in mid-2026, it’s one of the fastest-growing sources of regulatory risk for operators who aren’t paying attention.

The parks that get ahead of this — that implement transparent, automated, auditable billing systems — are going to have a significant compliance and tenant-retention advantage over the parks that don’t. The parks that don’t are going to end up in newspaper headlines.

I’ve seen both outcomes. The paperwork-based billing system might look free. It isn’t.

Andrew Keel is the CEO of Keel Team Mobile Home Park Investments, a Mooresville, NC-based company that acquires and operates mobile home communities across the Southeast and Midwest. Keel Team focuses on institutional-quality operations in affordable housing markets.