Interview with Apurva Shah from JAYS Properties

Listen on Apple Podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interview-with-apurva-shah-from-jays-properties/id1520681893?i=1000625543217

SHOW NOTES

Welcome back to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, hosted by Andrew Keel. On this episode, Andrew talks with mobile home park owner and operator, Apurva Shah from JAYS Properties. Apurva’s background in multiple asset classes has enabled him to have a unique entrepreneurial perspective on the mobile home park space. Apurva shares his journey on self education in the manufactured housing community space. Apurva also shares some of the mistakes he made as well as the important lessons he has learned throughout his mobile home park investing journey. Apurva provides wholesome advice for passive investors (limited partners) and he also shares his thoughts on the future of the manufactured housing community space.

Apurva is the Managing Partner at JAYS Properties, LLC his focus is on residential and commercial real estate investments, including value add, office, multifamily and mobile home parks. Apurva has completed over $50MM in real estate transactions and manages an eight figure portfolio.

***Andrew Keel and Keel Team Real Estate Investments (Keel Team, LLC) do not endorse any interviewee. This interview is for informational purposes only and should not be depended upon for investment purposes. ***

Andrew Keel is the owner of Keel Team, LLC, a Top 100 Owner of Manufactured Housing Communities with over 2,500 lots under management. His team currently manages 39 manufactured housing communities across more than 10 states. His expertise is in turning around under-managed manufactured housing communities by utilizing proven systems to maximize the occupancy while reducing operating costs. He specializes in bringing in homes to fill vacant lots, implementing utility bill back programs, and improving overall management and operating efficiencies, all of which significantly boost the asset value and net operating income of the communities

Andrew has been featured on some of the Top Podcasts in the manufactured housing space, click here to listen to his most recent interviews: https://www.keelteam.com/podcast-links. In order to successfully implement his management strategy, Andrew’s team usually moves on location during the first several months of ownership. Find out more about Andrew’s story at AndrewKeel.com

Are you getting value out of this show? If so, please head over to iTunes and leave the show a quick five-star review. I have a goal of hitting over 200 total 5-star reviews by the end of 2023, and it would mean the absolute world to me if you could help contribute to that. Thanks ahead of time for making my day with your five-star review of the show.

Would you like to see mobile home park projects in progress? If so, follow us on Instagram: @passivemhpinvesting for photos and awesome videos from our recent mobile home park acquisitions.

Talking Points:

00:21 – Welcome to The Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast

01:15 – Apurva’s background and journey into the manufactured housing community space

04:16 – Apurva’s first mobile home park deal in Michigan and his current portfolio

05:04 – How do car washes perform as an asset class?

06:46 – Research and self-education on different asset classes

10:53 – The toughest hurdle to overcome in mobile home park investing

13:31 – Apurva’s perfect mobile home park looks like this!

14:30 – Private sewer systems managed by Apurva and his team

17:00 – The importance of due diligence

21:00 – Passive investors should vet all of their general partners

24:55 – What does the future in mobile home park investing look like?

28:45 – The biggest threats to the mobile home park industry

33:28 – Getting in contact with Apurva Shah

34:04 – Apurva’s final piece of advice for passive mobile home park investors

35:10 – Conclusion

SUBSCRIBE TO PASSIVE MOBILE HOME PARK INVESTING PODCAST YOUTUBE CHANNEL https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy9uI3KGQmFgABsr9lUtRTQ

Links & Mentions from This Episode:

JAYS Properties: https://www.jaysinvestments.com/

Apurva’s email: apurva.liberty.solutions@gmail.com

Keel Team’s official website: https://www.keelteam.com/

Andrew Keel’s official website: https://www.andrewkeel.com/

Andrew Keel’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkeel

Andrew Keel’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/PassiveMHPinvestingPodcast

Andrew Keel’s Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/passivemhpinvesting/

Twitter: @MHPinvestors

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing podcast with your host, Andrew Keel. This is the podcast where you can get the education you need to invest 100% passively in a highly profitable niche of mobile home parks.

Andrew: Welcome to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing podcast. This is your host, Andrew Keel. Today, we have an amazing guest in Mr. Apurva Shah from JAYS Properties.

Before we dive in, I want to ask you a real quick favor. Would you mind please taking an extra 30 seconds to head over to iTunes and rate this podcast with five stars? This helps us get more listeners, and it means the absolute world to me. Thanks for making my day with that five-star review of the show. All right, let’s dive in.

Apurva is the managing partner at JAYS Properties LLC. His focus is on residential and commercial real estate investments, including value add office, multifamily, and mobile home parks. Apurva has completed over 50 million in real estate transactions and manages an eight-figure portfolio. Apurva we are excited to welcome you to the show.

Apurva: Awesome, Andrew. Thank you so much for having me.

Andrew: Would you be so kind to start out by telling our listeners your story and how you got into manufactured housing communities?

Apurva: Yeah, an interesting story. Again, I’m Apurva Shah. I’m the managing partner for JAYS Properties, JAYS Investments. I guess the whole backstory behind this is I moved down to North Carolina when I graduated college. My background is in electrical engineering. It was great. I was in the corporate for a while.

When I moved down here, I originally just wanted to buy a house, rent it out to some roommates, and basically have them pay the mortgage. Those roommates actually became my business partners for a while. Not having capital early on, that was obviously a struggle. But we started wholesaling homes, flipping paper, doing rehabs, and rental rehabs. Essentially doing some fix and flips, built up a capital stock and said, hey, this is great. We probably did, about 30 homes or so.

From there, I wanted to do larger opportunities, larger deals. Mobile home parks as well multifamily, was the next ideal step for us. I didn’t stick with those partners at the time with my roommates, because they wanted to continue doing the fix and flips. I said, okay, cool, let’s end here. I started actively looking for multifamily properties.

My business partner today, Jack Yen, he’s incredible and really great on the data side. He’s our spreadsheet master and does all of our underwriting. I actually was looking at a multifamily property for a while and was going to share it with Jack. I met him through connected investors.

I said, hey, look, I have this opportunity, do you want to invest with me, or would you want to pay me a wholesale fee? He said, I’m in the same space as you. I want to build a business around private equity and doing larger opportunities. From there, we said, okay, cool. Let’s look at manufactured housing and multifamily and see how we can work together on different deals.

One of our first deals was in Michigan. I think one of your previous folks that were on this show, Hansel, brought us this deal. We said, hey, let’s all partner together, let’s work on this Michigan deal. I think $550,000 is the purchase price. Within 18 months, we cash out about 1.6 million. A million dollar profit in 18 months.

That’s what really, really got us hooked on manufactured housing. That’s where we said, hey, let’s make sure we start building a business, or at least a portion of our business has to be dedicated to mobile home parks. Obviously, the yields are great. There’s lots of opportunity. This was probably five or six years ago, definitely less saturated than it is today, but that was the core of how I really got started there.

Andrew: Yeah, hard to make a million dollars and walk away from something. When was that? When did you buy that first deal in Michigan? That sounds like an awesome deal.

Apurva: I think it was 2017-2018 when we purchased it. About 2019-2020 is when we disposed of it. We basically sold it off.

Andrew: That’s fantastic. What does the portfolio look like today from mobile home parks?

Apurva: For our mobile home parks, we have a little bit over 500 units of mobile home parks, and then we have about 150 or so multifamily. Then we have some other businesses like car washes. We have a carwash, and then we have Wayback Burger, which is a little bit of a niche little product there.

Andrew: Wow. You’re doing all of this. Wow, that’s really interesting. Getting into multiple asset classes, which has performed the best?

Apurva: Hands down, mobile home parks.

Andrew: Really? Better than the car washes? I see all these car washes, these brand new fancy ones going up. I live in Orlando. Everywhere you go, there’s a new car wash going up on the corner. What’s going on there? Is that a good business? I figured from an operational standpoint, it would be tough.

Apurva: Yeah. That’s exactly it. Car washes are an incredible asset class. They’re very fruitful, especially if that is the main focus that you have. It’s very operationally heavy. Luckily, we purchased a car wash that’s essentially in our backyard. I’m based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The carwash we purchased is in Durham.

We’re still learning daily on how to operate it, how to navigate it, how to build out staff accordingly, to work the day-to-day. We purchased it about six months ago. We’re still working through the kinks. I’m over there. I’m still working to get those coins. A lot of it is cash, so understanding that side of it has been interesting and being able to trust someone who can pick up the cash, pick up the different responsibilities there. But certainly fruitful there.

Andrew: How do you get educated when you decide to go into a new asset class? I’ve gone into mobile home parks. We went into self storage. It was a lot of work to get up to speed on that. How do you get up to speed?

Apurva: The big thing, both Jack and I, we allot a specific part of our day, especially in the afternoons. We’ll allot just learning different asset classes. If we’re saying, hey, look, we want to get into self storage, and that is an asset class we do want to get into, currently we don’t have any, but a portion of our day is dedicated to just educating ourselves.

It can be just researching on biggerpockets.com, talking to other seasoned investors, or just googling. How do you evaluate a self-storage unit? That’s a lot of how we got into the mobile home park space. We didn’t know much about the operations. We knew the basics just from our fix and flip days.

From there, it was understanding the numbers, understanding, okay, this is how a septic system works, this is how a well system works, and really just diving deeper and deeper into the nitty gritty of each of these different asset classes and how to evaluate them to continue to make returns for us and our investors.

Andrew: Have you attended the MHU boot camp, the Frank and Dave boot camp?

Apurva: I haven’t. I’ve heard really good things about that.

Andrew: Wow, that’s interesting. I would say, 95% of the interviews I do, the operators have attended the Frank and Dave boot camp. I highly recommend it. Frank is super entertaining with his stories. He has a lot of stories from being in the business for so long. That’s a great way to like get educated on the nitty gritty of it. It’s interesting that you did it all on YouTube and just researching online yourself.

Apurva: Yeah, researching online. I remember, I read an interesting mobile home park or investing book. I wish I had it. I actually don’t remember what the name of the book was. It was about four years ago. I was like, oh, wow. Especially on the due diligence side of it, that’s such a monster on its own.

I feel like the financials, putting together an offering memorandum, and all that good stuff. That’s the easy part. The real part is, hey, okay, what happens if XYZ fails, or you have a bad tenant. Especially in this space, it’s very, very different.

Andrew: Management intensive and that due diligence is so important. On a deal we’re doing right now, we discover there’s $266,000 of basically replumbing gas lines that are underneath homes.

When we first started buying parks, we didn’t even know that you need to check where the gas lines are. But after refinancing several deals with agency lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they send out engineers to the properties to check out the sitemap. If there are gas lines that go underneath a home, it’s a life safety hazard, and they won’t underwrite your loan. They won’t do the deal if you’re going to refinance.

We got that checked out and found out there were 25 homes that need this line dug up and moved out from one of these homes, and it’s going to cost $266,000. Luckily, we found that in due diligence, so we know that going in and not get stuck with that when we’re trying to refinance with an agency lender.

Apurva: The big thing is, you certainly don’t want to overpay. I’m seeing this across the board. People are just trying to find deals and just try to close deals, especially in such a “complicated market” with today’s economy.

Folks could be purchasing at a three-cap. Sure, maybe that three-cap does make sense, as long as you’re able to add value and continue to potentially operate at a higher cap rate. For us, we’ve been super, super conservative on just understanding how that looks like. Honestly, I’m so glad, Andrew, that you found that upfront.

Andrew: Totally. What do you think is the toughest hurdle to overcome in mobile home park investing?

Apurva: It’s a great question. I think the biggest thing is operations. Right now, we’re currently in a unique spot. We don’t have to scale up if we don’t want to. We certainly retire and all these different things, but that’s just not who we are as business owners and entrepreneurs. We want to continue to scale and continue to build a business around our obviously, mobile home parks and essentially, our other asset classes, but putting the right people in the right places to have a successful team that’s efficient.

Early on, I remember, I was essentially micromanaging everything from underwriting to writing of offers, to dealing with some of the tenant related things, to all kinds of stuff. When you’re under potentially 50 units, sure, you might be able to do everything. But as you continue to scale up, and if you want to get to that 1000, 2000, potentially 10,000 units, there’s just no way. You’re never going to be able to scale if you’re not building a business or building out the right people and putting the right people in place.

For me, the toughest hurdle, essentially, has been working through hiring the right talent, hiring the right folks, and putting them in a spot in terms of our operation. We do our management in-house. We have our regionals. We have our on-site property managers. Having the right folks in those places that are efficient and training them on exactly how we want them to operate.

Andrew: I agree. That’s the hardest part, for sure. What does your management team look like? How many employees do you have? How many off site corporate office people do you have versus the on-site managers, et cetera?

Apurva: We have about nine people on our team. A handful of those are on-site managers. Not every single community that we own has an onsite manager. The larger communities that have essentially 30 lots and higher, we’ll have some on-site just to be the eyes and ears. They will essentially report into our regional manager. The regional manager essentially reports to me. I handle a lot more of our operations, and then Jack handles a lot of our investors, investor relations, underwriting, and broker relationships.

Andrew: Got you. What does the perfect mobile home park look like to you? If you were looking at a deal to bring into the portfolio, what would that typical park look like?

Apurva: I wish, this is our ultimate dream, but all lots are rent only, no park-owned homes, public utilities. That’s the ideal, but that’s not the case. A lot of our opportunities today we’re seeing are, we’re certainly open for private utilities, so well, septic tanks, that’s fine. We’ll underwrite it. We’ll do our due diligence on those.

Usually, it will be 30 lots and above. We’re certainly not in an institutional space. yet, but we’re working to get there. It will probably be a two to three-year plan of hey, look, our minimum check size will be $2 million or whatever amount at that point. Right now, our minimum check is essentially flat out 500,000 and above for purchasing mobile home parks.

Andrew: Got you. Do you guys have any private sewer systems that you guys manage that are not septic?

Apurva: Yeah. One of our latest deals that we just took on is essentially a sewage plant, in a way. It’s about 10 minutes from downtown Raleigh. We have been learning every single day on this thing.

We purchased this thing about three months ago. It’s 67 lots and has a gravel sewage field that has a pump house. There’s this open area that basically gets all the water and essentially the filtered water that goes into the field. We’re still trying to learn through that. That’s definitely been the most complicated opportunity that we’ve certainly had.

Andrew: Got you. Those wastewater treatment plants are expensive. I don’t know a lot about them. We don’t own any of them, but I’ve just heard that they can be complex, and you have to get like an operator to run them and all that.

Apurva: Exactly. Luckily, early on, when we found an operator, they also were licensed in wastewater treatment. He’s been managing it. We’ve been super blessed on that side of it. But just handling the day-to-day, just today, this morning, I was there and just reviewing the field. We spent $75,000 or so of repairs done to that thing, replacing pumps, replacing filters, turning the gravel bed.

We want to make sure now that we spent all this money. We did this due diligence upfront, so luckily, it’s not, oh, hey, now we have to spend this money, but we caught it up front. We said, okay, these are the different things that need to be done. Now we just want to make sure we’re maintaining. The big thing is having eyes on the ground and making sure it’s not going backwards to what it was before.

Andrew: Totally. I will say, at the MHU boot camp, the Frank and Dave boot camp, Frank Rolfe says, stay away from the wastewater treatment plants and the lagoon system. I know they do a virtual rendition of that boot camp. It might be worth checking out. What mistakes in mobile home park investing have you made that we could learn from?

Apurva: I think on our earliest deals, the biggest thing has been due diligence, doing the right due diligence upfront to make sure that you’re not getting bit later on. A lot of it comes down to septic tanks. Many parks in North Carolina or at least in our backyard here, they’ll either have well, or they’ll have septic, and just be able to do the due diligence on it.

For example, one of our first parks that we took on, we did the basic well system checks thing. Hey, is there any bacteria? Is there anything going on with the well? But what we didn’t do was a copper test, making sure there’s essentially a deeper water sample test.

What we found out is we’re positive for copper, which was very odd because we checked what the pipes were. Pipes were not copper pipes. They’re all PVC across the entire board. We’re saying, oh, why are we testing positive for copper?

There was a lot more digging and understanding, okay, hey, getting the right experienced folks, the well operators and folks like that, to really tell us, hey, this is what’s going on with your system. It’s not really the well that’s the issue, it’s the people’s homes where your plumbing sample is from, that’s why you’re getting the positive.

We had to do a little bit of due diligence and understand that. We didn’t catch this upfront, but we caught this as we’re operating. Now, what we’re doing is we have basically a due diligence checklist saying, hey, these are the different things. Especially if you have a well, you need to check. If you have a septic tank, you need to check these XYZ things.

I think the big thing is, don’t cheap out upfront. Make sure you’re doing the right due diligence. Get the folks that are actually going to open up this septic tank cover, put the camera and probe down the drain, and do what they need to do.

I’m, by no means, a septic experienced guy or anything like that. The biggest hurdle for us is putting together that proper due diligence checklist. I’m sure if I went to the MHU boot camp, I probably would have learned that earlier on.

Andrew: They give you a 30-day due diligence handbook. That is a great starting point. That’s how we got started with our deals. We followed the due diligence handbook, but it starts out with 50 checkpoints.

Of every deal we’ve done, we’ve added to our due diligence checklist, things we’ve learned like to check the gas line locations, to check the transformers, to make sure there’s enough juice to serve the park and things like that. Our due diligence checklist is 300-plus items now, or it started at 50. Every deal, we’re adding something on there, but you got to start somewhere.

Apurva: Yeah, exactly. We started from scratch. It’s a good thing, maybe a bad thing. It’s in between. Luckily, we’ve been in a really good spot, where we’ve been conservative enough up front on all of our opportunities to the point where, knock on wood, fingers crossed, and toes crossed, we haven’t lost any money on them.

Andrew: That’s good. That’s great.

Apurva: Spending a couple grand additional, sure, we’ve accounted for that. Especially early on because we were like, well, we didn’t really understand. Luckily, it was just all our internal capital. We didn’t raise money upfront.

Andrew: That’s good. I looked at a deal in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The numbers looked great. It was a well and septic. We went and got the well tested. The well tested out okay. But then we went to the EPA, checked the Health Department records, and saw that they failed some tests that were for—I forgot the chemical, but it was something bad. It was arsenic or something that was found in the test results.

We didn’t proceed far with the deal, but little things like that. You want to make sure you dot your I and you cross your T, because otherwise you could buy this thing, and now you are poisoning a large group of people. Think about the liability that comes with that. You just bought yourself a lawsuit. It’s pretty big.

Let me ask you this. What are the most important things passive investors, we’re talking limited partners here, need to look out for when investing in mobile home parks?

Apurva: That’s a great question. We tell our investors, hey, vet all of your GPs. Obviously, many of our investors invest in other opportunities as well. There are many, many operators out there. Understanding who your GP, general partner is.

What’s their social media look like? Or is it them consistently going out and not worrying about your investments? How transparent are they? Are they giving you monthly reports? Even with those monthly reports, how detailed are they? Are they actually showing you where all the pennies, dollars, and all this good stuff is going? Or are they just saying, oh, here’s your return?

The big thing for us is being very transparent. We pride ourselves as part of JAYS Properties. We say, hey, look, we want to show you guys financially everything. Up front, we’re going to show you everything. Once you’re part of the deal, we want to show you exactly where every dollar is being spent. and also show you what the general partners are making.

The big thing really is, obviously, the limited partners, they’re getting their preferred return and also the equity distribution, which is great. But what happens if things go south? What happens if you have large capex, or for some reason the well doesn’t work, or you have to replace a septic tank? Are you being upfront with your investors saying, hey, you’re not receiving your equity distribution this quarter? What does that conversation look like?

For us, the big thing has been being proactive about communication with our investors. We want to tell them, look, not everything’s going to go as planned and as forecasted. You may have something in a deal that’s a surprise, and that’s unfortunate. But being conservative, being transparent, and communicating properly with your limited partners is super, super important. And going that extra mile saying, hey, look, guys, it might be a mid month thing, it might not be at the end of the month. It’d be like, hey, guys, we’re running into a little bit of a potential cashflow issue based on XYZ things happening in the community. We’ve done that.

We’ve had to have those hard conversations, but we’re not just shying away, just typing an email, and not responding to anyone when people have questions. That’s the big thing. Definitely vet your sponsor, vet your general partner really, really thoroughly. Everything’s good when everyone’s making money, but what happens if things do go south?

Andrew: For sure. What does the future of mobile home park investing look like? And how do you see the business fitting in with the direction the economy’s going, with higher interest rates, possible recession, et cetera?

Apurva: Right now, as I said, the economy is an interesting spot. Obviously, interest rates are certainly elevated compared to what they were six months to a year ago. Today’s market is certainly different than what it was.

What we’re seeing is, where mobile home parks are going, it’s becoming more and more attractive, especially in certain areas of the country. This is a preferred style of living or preferred place to live, especially if it’s a clean, nice community. I’m not talking about basically a Class D or a one-star park, but I’m talking about those three to four-star parks.

What we’re seeing is a lot of folks who just can’t afford a single family home, which might be $300,000, $400,000, or $500,000, they’re preferring to buy a mobile home and bring it to our communities, other operators, or other communities that are there in the area. That’s been a huge shift.

Early on, when I was in the single family space, I didn’t know that people are actively looking at mobile home parks, and this is where people want to live. I just thought, hey, there are trailers on the road, and they’re on the side of the street.

For us, we wanted to do something different. We wanted to build a community. We didn’t want to just be another landlord, that’s, hey we’re collecting a check. We wanted to go and speak to our tenants and say, hey, what are you struggling with? What we tell our regional managers is, once a quarter, you need to go down there, talk with your tenants.

There could be a single mother who’s struggling to pay rent, but she’s just paying rent because she’s scared of getting evicted. We want to work with those individuals and help their life get better, not just, oh, hey, we’re collecting rent and great, everyone’s happy. No, we want to make it more of a community feel. Because of that, we’re seeing a lot more tenants being driven in. We’re at about, I would say, 99% occupancy across our entire portfolio.

Andrew: You didn’t fill projects?

Apurva: We do.

Andrew: What’s your biggest infill project? How many homes have you brought into a community?

Apurva: We brought in about 12 into a community. It’s smaller, but those will go within two months.

Andrew: Where’s your portfolio located primarily? Is it all in the Midwest or in North Carolina?

Apurva: It’s between North Carolina and Virginia. It’s where we’re purchasing.

Andrew: Got you. How do you finance these things, Apurva? What does that look like? Do you have a strategy there or anything like that?

Apurva: We put a number of relationships with local lenders for our smaller opportunities. The secondary side of it is, if it’s a larger opportunity, or if it’s essentially Fannie-Freddie play, we’ll certainly use agency debt. But most of our opportunities, especially up front when we’re in the acquisition stage, it’s going to be with a local lender, local bank, or someone that we have.

Andrew: You’ll just get five year balloons on those?

Apurva: Exactly, yeah. It’s usually five year balloons. For us, we’re not really a big fan of variable debt. We’re also not a big fan of doing just bridge debt or anything like that.

Andrew: Have you ever done those?

Apurva: We haven’t done those. We’ll do an interest-only period. Especially on those heavier value-add properties, we’ll want some interest-only, but we certainly haven’t done those to date. More than likely, we’re probably going to shy away from those.

Andrew: Okay. What’s the biggest threat to mobile home park investing?

Apurva: I would say, the city council is very dependent on the location of where you’re purchasing mobile home parks. For example, Brawley. They’re not looking for you to build out more mobile home parks, add additional lots to tear land, or anything like that.

We’re seeing a lot of developers come in saying, hey, let’s tear down this mobile home park, put up a brand new class A apartment complex. It’s been an odd spot, because we want to continue the affordable housing thing. Affordable housing is super important to us.

Most of our portfolio is going to be those class C, class B- properties. We’re seeing some concerns there. As the market continues to be saturated, we wanted to be cognizant of working with the local folks and the planners saying, hey, look, we have these mobile home parks, we want to maintain those as mobile home parks. We’re not just trying to sell it to the developer and cashing out on that side of it.

Andre: That’s huge. We ran into that issue recently, where we ran into a building inspector. He was the zoning guy, but he’s mainly the building department head. And he just hated mobile home parks. He was like, I’m going to make your life miserable, you’re going to need a permit for everything.

It was a nice double wide that we bought from a tenant. Everything from the outlets to the smoke detectors needing to be hardwired instead of battery powered, he went through them. He’s like, hey, you need to do all of this, you need to rip all this drywall down, and do all of this work. We did all this work, and then he was like, oh, you need to demo the home. It’s beyond repair now, you’re going to need to demo the home. After we did all this stuff, pulled the drywall down, and then he had to come for an inspection.

We went above him. We went and sat down with the mayor. We said, hey, dude, do you guys have a problem discriminating against affordable housing? It was amazing how fast that building inspector’s attitude changed when he and the mayor got together after that meeting. It’s just some people that have the stigma, and they just don’t understand we’re trying to do the right thing here. We’re trying to provide affordable housing to these markets that desperately need it.

Single family housing developers are not building affordable housing. It doesn’t pencil out from a return standpoint, so we need to be able to fill all of our lots, and we need to fill these homes as long as they are livable. We’re not trying to be slum lords here and fill trashy homes that are hazardous. No, these are workable living units. Sometimes you’ve got to go above people to get in front of the right people to get something done.

Apurva: I definitely agree. That’s the big thing. We talked about stigma about mobile home park investing, mobile home parks. When I first told my friends, oh, hey, we’re about to invest in some mobile home parks, they’re like, what do you mean? Why would you want to do this?

Luckily, since they’re my friends, we’re working to educate people. We want to tell them, look, this isn’t Joe Schmo down the street who’s not going to fix things and not provide a fire alarm, smoke detectors, and things like that in their units. This isn’t just a piece of junk or metal box. This is a really nice home.

Some of these homes that we have in our communities, you might not even be able to tell if it’s a single family house or a mobile manufactured house. The insides are spectacular. The great thing is having the tenants who really love the community and having them treated really well.

I remember when we were driving through one of our communities we had, we had a tenant picking up trash in their neighbor’s yard. That’s how you know, like, okay, hey, these people really want to live here. They want to take care of it. They want this to be their home. They want it so their kids can play around in the playground and all these different things, run around and have a safe place to live. Yeah, sure. They might not be able to afford that $500,000 home that’s been built down the street. We want to make sure we maintain it.

Andrew: How many can?

Apurva: Agreed.

Andrew: Apurva, it’s been awesome talking with you, dude. How can listeners get a hold of you if they’d like to do so?

Apurva: Definitely take a look at our website. It’s www.jaysinvestments.com. Feel free to email me if there’s anything that we can partner on, we can work with. I’d love to help listeners or limited partners, anything we can do. My email address is apurva.liberty.solutions@gmail.com. I look forward to the responses.

Andrew: Awesome. What’s one last bit of information or important advice that you would give interested passive mobile home park investors that haven’t pulled the trigger yet?

Apurva: Sure. My biggest question would be, what’s stopping you? Is it the risk? Is it the market? I think real estate is certainly cyclic. There’s a cycle. While it’s going up and down, up and down, real estate’s been consistently one of the true asset classes that continue to make money.

Whether it be stocks, real estate, gold, or any of this stuff, especially when the markets are down, real estate is continuing to outperform other asset classes or other investments. I think the big thing is definitely do your homework, do your due diligence on the partners or the sponsors that you’re going to be working with, and continue to learn. Continue to learn how you can own a mobile home park, an apartment complex, or whatever it is that you want to invest in.

Andrew: Awesome. Apurva. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Apurva: Andrew, thank you so much for having me.

Andrew: That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for tuning in.

Would you like to see mobile home park value-add projects in progress? If so, follow us on instagram @passivemhpinvesting for photos and awesome videos from our recent mobile home park acquisitions. Once again it’s @passivemhpinvesting on instagram. See you there.