In 2019, buying mobile home parks off-market was almost too easy. You built a list of 100-lot-plus parks in your target states, sent out 500 yellow letters, and waited for the phone to ring. One in every 20 calls you got on would turn into a deal. The sellers were largely unsophisticated, the competition was thin, and if you had capital and patience, you’d find opportunities.

That playbook is dead.

I know because we’ve tried to run it in 2025 and 2026 alongside our relationship-based approach, and the numbers tell a stark story. Response rates on direct mail have dropped 60–70% from their 2019 peaks. The sellers who do respond have already received calls from Marcus & Millichap, from institutional buyers, from a dozen other operators running the same lists. The pricing expectations are fully institutionalized even at the mom-and-pop level.

After buying 50+ mobile home parks — almost entirely off-market — I want to share what actually works right now and what’s just burning your marketing budget.

What Changed and Why

Three forces converged to kill the classic MHP direct mail play:

First, capital flooded the asset class. The 2020–2022 ZIRP era created a gold rush for “recession-resistant” assets, and MHPs were at the top of every list. New operators by the thousands went through the same training programs, read the same books, and launched the same direct mail campaigns. Sellers in quality markets were receiving five to ten unsolicited letters per month. They stopped reading them.

Second, data became commoditized. The park-owner lists that used to be proprietary intelligence are now available through half a dozen services. If you can find the list, so can every other buyer targeting your markets. Competitive advantages built on data access disappear overnight when the data becomes universally available.

Third, brokers got smart about MHPs. National commercial brokerages now have dedicated manufactured housing teams proactively reaching out to owners of quality parks. A 90-lot park in suburban Charlotte with city utilities is getting a call from a Berkadia or Marcus & Millichap rep every couple months. By the time that park is “off-market,” the seller’s been pre-educated on value expectations for two years.

What Actually Works: The Relationship Advantage

The deals we’re finding in 2025 and 2026 are coming from relationships, not mail. And specifically, relationships with the people who are in the room when a park owner decides it’s time to sell — not the owner themselves.

Think about it from the seller’s perspective. A 68-year-old who’s owned a 90-lot park for 30 years doesn’t start their sale process by responding to a yellow letter. They call their attorney. They talk to their CPA. They mention it at the local Rotary meeting. They ask their banker what it might be worth.

The investors who are winning right now have spent years building relationships with exactly those people:

Estate and transactional real estate attorneys in secondary and tertiary markets are worth their weight in gold. They’re the first person an owner talks to. A 30-minute coffee meeting and a simple “if you ever come across a park owner thinking about selling, we’d love to be the first call” introduction can generate one quality referral per year from a single attorney relationship. Build a network of 20 attorneys across your target markets and your deal flow changes completely.

CPAs and financial advisors in rural markets are even better. They see the full financial picture — they know when the depreciation is running out, when a health event is creating urgency, when estate planning conversations are triggering a sale decision. Same approach: introduce yourself, explain what you do, and make it easy for them to refer.

State MHP association boards and chapters are wildly underutilized. Most states have an active manufactured housing association. Board members of these associations are embedded in the owner community. Sponsoring a state conference or joining an association committee puts you in the room with sellers in a completely non-adversarial context.

Local government contacts — zoning officials, county tax assessors, utility managers — often know about park sales before the owner has talked to anyone else. A park applying for a variance, falling behind on property taxes, or disputing utility bills is often a park that’s about to change hands.

Building a Digital Presence in Target Geographies

Here’s something almost zero MHP investors are doing systematically: becoming the known buyer in their specific target markets through local digital presence.

When a park owner in Cabarrus County, NC finally decides to Google “sell my mobile home park,” whose website shows up? Almost certainly nobody who’s specifically targeting that county. The local search space for MHP sellers is almost completely unclaimed.

A targeted content strategy — county-specific landing pages optimized for “sell mobile home park [county name],” a simple Facebook presence in local community groups, occasional participation in county chamber events — creates a completely different category of inbound. These are sellers who are actively looking for buyers. They’ve already decided to sell. You’re not interrupting them; they’re coming to you.

We’ve generated some of our best deals in the last two years from exactly this kind of inbound. A seller who finds you is already 80% more motivated than one who got a cold letter.

The Pitch That Cuts Through the Noise

Even when you do get in front of a seller, the pitch matters more now than it ever has. Sellers have options. They know it. The investor who wins isn’t always the highest bidder — it’s the one who removes the most uncertainty.

Sellers in their 60s and 70s who’ve owned a park for decades have a few core fears:

• What happens to the tenants they’ve built relationships with for 20 years?
• Will this buyer actually close, or will they retrade the deal during due diligence?
• How complicated is this going to be? Do I need to hire lawyers, accountants, a broker?
• What are the tax implications if I sell outright vs. doing a seller-financed deal?

The buyers who address these fears directly and specifically — in writing, in a clear seller guide, before they ever make an offer — are the buyers who get the deal even when they’re not the highest price.

The Fundamental Shift

The MHP deal sourcing game has shifted from a marketing problem to a relationship problem. The operators who understood this early are sitting on robust pipelines. The ones still running the 2019 playbook are frustrated and spending money with nothing to show for it.

If I were starting over with no portfolio and no relationships, I’d spend the first 90 days doing one thing: building a database of 50 target markets (not individual parks — markets), and systematically identifying and reaching out to one attorney, one CPA, and one local lender contact in each market. That’s 150 relationship seeds. Nurtured over 18–24 months, that network generates more quality deal flow than any direct mail campaign ever could.

For a complete system covering how we evaluate and underwrite deals once they’re in the pipeline — including the questions we ask sellers and the due diligence steps we never skip — our MHP Due Diligence Playbook at keelteam.com walks through the full process.

The parks are out there. The sellers are there. They just need to find the right buyer — and that buyer needs to be you.

Andrew Keel is the founder of Keel Team, a mobile home park investment and management firm operating 50+ communities across the Southeast and Midwest. To learn more about our acquisition criteria, visit keelteam.com.