Interview with Craig Schneider from RYZE Communities

Listen on Apple Podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interview-with-craig-schneider-from-ryze-communities/id1520681893?i=1000600905058

SHOW NOTES

Welcome back to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, hosted by Andrew Keel. On this episode of the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, Andrew talks with Craig Schneider from RYZE Communities. Craig and Andrew discuss why park-owned homes can work when you have scale in a specific geographic area, they also discuss how a good team is all the difference with park-owned home maintenance and why building relationships with nearby owners of other mobile home communities is important. Craig and Andrew also discuss lifestyle changes and why mobile home parks might not be as affected by a down economy like other asset classes will be.

Craig Schneider is the managing partner at RYZE communities and RYZE focuses on value-add opportunities in the mobile home park, RV park and multi-family real estate space. Their team focuses on revitalizing under-performing assets and partnering with local leaders and communities to improve neighborhoods throughout the country.

***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 2,000 lots under management. His team currently manages over 30 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.

Talking Points:

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

00:46 – Craig Schneider’s introduction

01:14 – Craig Schneider’s background

02:10 – Craig’s history as a commercial real estate appraiser

03:30 – Toughest hurdles to overcome in mobile home park investing and ownership

05:37 – Why it can take so long to close a deal

07:11 – Craig’s target market

08:00 – Craig’s first park and current real estate portfolio

10:28 – Park-owned mobile home models

17:26 – Craig’s mobile home park investing strategy and how it has changed

20:00 – Best strategy for mobile home park investing in the current market

21:36 – Mistakes that we can learn from

23:05 – How Craig educated himself in the industry

24:32 – The most important thing a passive investor needs to look out for

26:10 – Craig’s perfect mobile home park

27:55 – The future of mobile home parks

32:43 – Getting a hold of Craig Schneider

33:15 – Conclusion

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

Links & Mentions from This Episode:

Craig Schneider’s Email: craig@RYZEcommunities.com

Craig Schneider’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-schneider-cpm-b7b81911

Keel Team’s Official Website: https://www.keelteam.com/

Andrew Keel’s Official Website: https://www.andrewkeel.com/

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

Andrew Keel Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/PassiveMHPinvestingPodcast

Andrew Keel Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/passivemhpinvesting/

Twitter: @MHPinvestors

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TRANSCRIPT

Andrew: Welcome to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast. This is your host, Andrew Keel. Today, we have an amazing guest in Mr. Craig Schneider.

Before we dive in, I want to ask you a favor. Would you please leave the show a five-star review wherever you’re listening to this podcast? 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.

Craig Schneider is the Managing Partner at RYZE Communities. RYZE focuses on value-add opportunities in the mobile home park, RV park, and multifamily real estate space. Their team focuses on revitalizing underperforming assets and partnering with local leaders and communities to improve neighborhoods throughout the country. Craig, we are excited to welcome you to the show.

Craig: Thank you so much for having me.

Andrew: Definitely. Can you start out by telling our listeners a little about your story and how you got into manufactured housing communities?

Craig: My background is actually in forensic auditing, having an accounting degree. I found out that quickly, I didn’t have any interest in a desk job, so I started learning more about the real estate industry. I worked for an appraiser for a few years, got into property management, and then started doing value-add, single family flips, transferred to apartment buildings, and then started seeing all over the place the need for affordable housing. When I first encountered manufactured housing, I said, this is actually a very affordable and great way to live. We’ve been doing that for a few years.

Andrew: I love that. Accounting degree. I think the most interesting piece is you worked for an appraiser for a few years. Maybe you can shed a little bit of light on that and how you use that in your business today, because that’s an interesting deal.

I have an ongoing joke with a friend of mine. We say in commercial real estate, it’s amazing how appraisers always come back at the exact price that was on the contract when you’re acquiring a property. Maybe you can just share what you’re using from that time in your business today.

Craig: It’s valuing property and looking at it from all different angles. You may look at a property one way and I may look at it another way. That’s why property sells for a price you may not like or I may like. Those are the stories behind why people will pay more for a property than an appraiser may even think is accurate.

If you had a 1031 exchange, if you deploy capital, then you may have to overpay a little bit for a property. Or you’ll see a property come down in price while it was in contract at A, but it’s sold for a lot less because we don’t see the due diligence that happens behind the scenes. But the appraiser sees all that information, and they take that into account, as well as they look at other economic factors in the area, not just income and expense. Those always helped me as well with my accounting degree.

Andrew: Very nice. Okay, thank you for sharing. Let’s jump right in, man. What do you think is the toughest hurdle to overcome in mobile home park investing and ownership?

Craig: I think a lot of people don’t understand the asset class. It’s a little bit different than apartments. You may have a 5-storey building with 20 units on each floor. Individual homes are pretty much what it is, a tiny home that everyone’s trying to develop for affordable housing.

I don’t think people understand that. I don’t think people understand the way they’re constructed. It’s a little bit of a different kind of repair. They shift over time. Setting pads up is a different animal than doing a foundation for a house. Those are things that people have to learn as they’re getting into the business. That’s why you really need a strong team around you.

Andrew: Definitely. What’s the toughest hurdle? What’s the one liner?

Craig: The toughest hurdle is managing people in any business. It’s also from contractors to due diligence, to talking with attorneys, to financing. You have to be able to talk with different people and manage them. All different kinds of people from all different walks of life, that’s really what it comes down to.

You may buy a park from a mom and pop versus a big brokerage house. You’re managing, talking, and communicating with those individuals that have a different mindset.

Andrew: Definitely. Maybe you can share your story. When did you buy your first mobile home community, Craig?

Craig: It took us many years to find our first one. We had a lot of people telling us to go back to apartments, go back to apartments. We’re spending too much time on this. In 2019, we finally hit our first one. It took us about two years since we first saw it to actually close on it.

That’s really been our story. We look at every property we’ve owned. It takes at least 12–24 months before we could actually contract and close. Now we have 10 properties in Northeast Florida.

Andrew: Tell me about that, 12–24 months to close it. Why is that? What transpired because that seems long?

Craig: It is long. We tried to build relationships with the sellers, and that’s usually a long-term process. Sellers don’t want to get a phone call, hey, you want to sell your property. We don’t do that. We try to build relationships, so people know who we are. People in the community now know who we are as well.

We’ll get introduced to someone and then we’ll reach out to them five, six, seven times a year. We’ll be in the area, we’ll stop by, and say hello. Then all of a sudden, they’ll say, now I’m thinking about maybe it’s time to move on or I found another asset that I really need capital for. That relationship takes time to grow, and that’s how you get building relationships. All of a sudden, that person is someone else who has a property that they may be interested in selling.

That’s why it takes 12–24 months for us to find the property and then to purchase it. The first one, obviously, once we were in contract had a lot of issues that came up over time. Due diligence can’t be rushed. It’s just a different kind of animal, each of these individual homes, plumbing, the electric on them. There are a lot of different aspects that go into these properties.

Andrew: Definitely. 2019 was your first park. I think before we were recording, you said you’re up to 350 lots now?

Craig: Yes.

Andrew: And those are all in Northeast Florida?

Craig: Correct.

Andrew: Okay. You probably have a specified area around Northeast Florida that you’re targeting, and there’s only a certain number of mobile home parks there. That’s your target market that you’re focusing on purchasing. Is that right? You’re very geographically located centered?

Craig: Right there, we have our own management team, our own maintenance team, so it gives us a little bit more strength. But we are looking in other parts of the country, other parts of South Texas as well for larger properties versus cumulating a whole bunch of 30-, 40-, 50-unit properties.

Andrew: Got you. How many lots was that first park? Maybe share a little bit about the portfolio and the other parks you guys have.

Craig: That first park was, originally, we were told that it was 32. We found out actually it was 38. That particular one was actually sandwiched in between two other larger mobile home parks. We didn’t originally have access to all the records from the old owner. All of a sudden, we started seeing a lot of discrepancies between the leases, rent collected, rent paid. That’s one of the reasons that one took a long time.

Once you get the first one going, we look at it like it’s a rusty wheel. It takes some time to get the oil and lube. Then we started with another property that we got connected with through a mobile home retail connector, sells. That one was a family, and they’re a family forever. Actually, I looked at it, met with them, and it took a long time to close that deal. But they were finally ready to retire and didn’t want the headache, so we were able to transition that one.

The second to the last one is a really nice park. It’s 93 spaces. It’s actually very unique, where each of the lots is directly connected to city water and city sewer. A lot of these parks are one line that comes in and it’s a landlord’s responsibility. But this particular one, individual meters, which is really awesome. Lots, they’re about 50 x 100 each. People come in, they’re like, wow, this is not my anticipated mobile home park.

The last one we worked on for probably 18 months where the guy wanted to sell, didn’t want to sell, and then he said, well, my daughter’s getting married, I don’t want to deal with this anymore. He had other people that always jerk him around. We always say, look, if we’re going to do the deal, we’re ready to go. We always produce and perform, which has also helped us out over the years. That was our last one that we purchased.

Andrew: Wow. So 350 lots across four parks, is that right?

Craig: What we actually have of those is 8 of those parks, about 350.

Andrew: Very nice. You mentioned something a little earlier about having your own maintenance team. I’m guessing that you’re a fan of the park-owned home model. Is that right?

Craig: Yes.

Andrew: Tell us a little bit about that and how you chose that model versus the tenant-owned home model.

Craig: That was chosen for us with a lot of the homes that we do have and its properties. The way we look at it is there’s a lot of rent that gets lost between having a tenant-owned home versus a park-owned home. We’re like, well, if we have all these parks in one area, it’s easier for us to maintain and take care of them.

Now, if you said, Craig, I want to sell your park in Columbus, Ohio, I’m going to say, okay, it’s got to be 150, and I would want tenant-owned homes, not park-owned homes obviously. But because we have so much in one geographic area, we have the ability to have a full-time construction crew and we have a full-time maintenance crew.

You don’t have to be renovated. We just send our guys in. They know what to do. The turnover’s quick, and it gets back on the market. The way we look at it is, okay, well, if I can get $600 for lot rent or $1000–$1200 for a lot and home rent, the $600 a month isn’t really costing us the $600 a month additional to rent the home out. With having our own in-house staff, we feel as though that we actually make more profit on being able to rent those out.

Andrew: In your 350 lots, how many are park-owned homes?

Craig: I would say 90%.

Andrew: Wow. How much do you get for a park-owned home as a straight rental?

Craig: It depends on the area and the size. We have some small two ones. That’ll be 850. We have some 1600 square foot double wides that ran some of these parks. You’ll get 1350 for some of those, but they rent all in between and a location.

Andrew: Sure. Wow. I think that’s an interesting model. I know Chris Rood. He loves that same exact model where you’re able to just rent these things for such a higher amount. I prefer tenant-owned homes. As a friendly debate for me is I think that tenant-owned homes, they’re going to take care of the homes more personally.

You mentioned earlier that you know how mobile homes are constructed. I think that’s key. I do as well, and they’re not constructed very durable. They’re not constructed as well as a typical block home would be or even a stick-built home. The dry wall’s thinner, the doors are different sizes, the windows are different sizes, you have to custom order them from across the country. I’m just wondering, what is a typical expense ratio on one of your projects?

Craig: It depends on the age of the home. Since we have so many homes, we both have material that we store. If I’m renovating a home, we have a lot of it all ready to go. We have basically 20 sets of appliances that are ready to go. If I have to put an appliance in, they can just go take it, clock it out, and move it to a location.

Andrew: You’re making me sweat a little bit. You just said you got appliances. If someone says, oh, my oven isn’t working, my stove isn’t working, you’re in charge of repairing that and everything from the appliances, all through everything.

Craig: One of the things we also do is in a lease, we have a tenant sign it. When they sign a lease, they go through, they check with the property, and everything is working. In our lease, it’s very specific. If it doesn’t work as a result of negligence, we do not replace it, and then you’re on your own.

We have tenants who have replaced their own appliances. If it’s something that the stove just went, we always replace it. That’s why we have a maintenance crew. That handles all those issues.

Andrew: I think it definitely helps to be so geographically close to each other, because then you’re going to just be able to have that team. How many maintenance requests do you get a month just on average?

Craig: It really ranges. We’ll go through three days with none and then yesterday we had five. It all depends on the actual. It’s just so random. Who knows? We’re very lucky to have a maintenance crew to handle that. Plus, when we renovate the homes, we do it a certain way to make it better.

We always do overhangs. The water is always, as you know, a big issue in mobile homes. We always make sure we have all the overhangs. The caulking is all done throughout to make it really strong. We reinforce the floor in all of these. Those kinds of things are very preventative maintenance, which keeps the place clean and neat.

Also we’re very lucky because we’re in one location, mainly, that we get a lot of referrals for rentals. We always have people saying, I live in one unit, my friend is looking for something else, so having that referral basis also helps us with the renting. Then we also do background checks on the tenants before we take them. We’re very strict on backgrounds that we require for someone to move in. That also helps us have better tenants.

Andrew: That’s awesome. There are a ton of ways to make money in manufactured housing and a ton of different ways to do it. That’s pretty cool. You have a good model.

Craig: I wouldn’t recommend it for someone who has a 12-unit in one spot and a 12-unit in a different part of a state. I absolutely wouldn’t do it. I think it only works if you’re going to have a strong area and one has to be in one area. You have to have your own team. If you have to sub that work, you’re done.

Andrew: That’s the other thing, the type of work. The maintenance crew guys, that team, in my experience, when I’ve been doing big value-add projects, we’re rehabbing 12 homes at once, there’s a lot of churn. That type of handyman person, you churn through a lot. I applaud you for being able to do it. It has to be tough to keep up with it, in my experience.

Craig: It’s hard, but we take care of it. We work as a team. The way we look at it is we all have to work together. We tell the guys who are doing the maintenance, what can we do to make your life easier for you?

We’ve been very lucky, people wanting to come work with us and continue to work with us because they see we take care of everybody. There’s a goal together, which is we all work together. We want everyone who works for us, actually, to have someone underneath them, to oversee them, and be responsible for them. That’s been very helpful for us.

Andrew: That’s awesome. How has your mobile home park investing strategy changed over your time in the business, if it has at all?

Craig: We’re starting that process right now where we are looking for larger mobile home parks as well. That’s what we’re up to right now.

Andrew: Why is that?

Craig: Because it’s just easier to finance from a bank’s perspective. One of the things that, obviously, we’re trying to accomplish, is have a long-term relationship with banks.

Andrew: You just brought up a good point. The park-owned home model versus the tenant-owned home model when you’re financing these things, from my experience, the top lenders, the agency, the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, they prefer the tenant-owned homes model, and they prefer less than 25% park-owned homes. Are you able to get non-recourse on the loans you’re putting on your properties?

Craig: No. We guarantee the loans, but we’re very comfortable with that. If you have 30 homes times $600 additional rent and you have a lot of cushions in the homes, that’s really been very helpful. Also being in Northeast Florida, we know a lot of what’s going on. There are a lot of positives going on in the area, companies relocating. If we put one ad out, we’ll get 8–10 people reaching out a day for one mobile home. Of that, I would say 50% are from out of town relocating for work.

We do feel comfortable with taking on that particular risk. With financing, people get turned off very easily, but one of the things we do is we’re constantly calling banks, constantly trying to build relationships. We’ve been very lucky with that. We’ve even been able to refinance all the ones that we’ve completed already.

Andrew: That’s fantastic. Kudos to you for that. We own more spread out across mainly the Midwest, but one of our goals is to get it refinanced into agency debt, where you’re getting that long-term 10-plus year fixed rate, lower rates, non-recourse obviously is a big benefit.

There are definitely some of those regional lenders that are still offering really good terms. Those credit union types, they just require that guarantee, but that’s good. What do you feel is the best opportunity or strategy right now for mobile home park investing, given where we’re at in the cycle?

Craig: I think this is such an asset class that still has so much potential to it. We used to invest in New York. I’m from New York, originally. I talked to people up there and they’re used to, like, mobile home parks, what are you talking about? Then a few people saw that and they’re like, how do I invest?

There are so many people that just don’t understand the asset class. I tell them, I said, I’d rather live in a mobile home park where I could pull my car right up to the door, I could my groceries in, if you have kids, if you carry all the kids stuff in and out, versus, I used to live in Queens in the city and I have to find a spot. Hopefully, the snow’s not there, carry multiple trips of stuff up and down, and there’s nowhere to go.

Here, I think it’s a better lifestyle. I think more people are going to learn and more people are going to experience it. I think it’s going to continue to grow. We definitely get more of a demand for the mobile homes and the apartments that we have, especially if you have a noisy neighbor than people who get really turned off from apartments.

Andrew: Or someone above you that’s making a lot of noise or you name it. If they have a dog and you’re hearing footsteps all night and early mornings. I’ve been there in that situation. I agree with you. I think it’s a better way to live. It’s the American dream. You have your own space, you have your own little yard area and everything.

Let me ask you this, Craig. What mistakes in mobile home park investing have you made that our listeners could learn from? And me? I’ll learn from you.

Craig: I’ve made a lot. We constantly make them pretty much every day. You just have to learn from them. First off, we should have been bigger. Two, we should have probably bought every property obviously two years ago that came across our plate. That was another issue.

I’d say that the biggest mistake is we talked ourselves out of some deals because there’s a lot of hair on them. We had some opportunities to purchase some properties, and these homes were extremely rough. We didn’t know what we were doing. Some of them like the roofs caved in. They’re garbage. They just take it off a lot. We’re like, well, I don’t know if we should do it, we don’t know the avenue.

I’ll say when I first got into real estate, someone told me, stop, you can read so much podcasting, do it. As soon as we bought our first mobile home, we sat back and said, we should have bought the other ones. That was a mistake that we made, just being a little too hesitant.

Sometimes you just got to jump in and do it, especially if you feel very strong about an area and about the demographics of an area. I would say the biggest mistake is because we’re too hesitant about doing certain deals and especially big enough deals. We definitely know that that won’t happen again.

Andrew: How did you get educated on the space, Craig? You mentioned podcasts. What other avenues did you use to learn about this and the differences because I know you got into apartments before and then you moved into this?

Craig: In podcasts, I’m always trying to learn and listen from all different backgrounds of people to try to learn from everybody. Everybody’s got a story. How you and I got to sitting right here right now is amazing. That’s what I tried to deal with. I’m trying to learn and listen to everybody.

I am always reading books. My business partner will tell you, I’ll talk to everybody and anybody. I’m going to get to talk to the guy behind the counter. My attorney said to me, I know you’re going to ask, what’s selling? That’s how you start learning about different asset classes because someone may say, oh, I don’t do that, I do this. That’s how I started getting into mobile home parks.

Someone’s like, well, I hear about these mobile home parks and I don’t know anything about it. The first thing I tell them when I’m in podcasts, I go online and google it, and I start to talk to people. That’s how you do it, just talk to everybody. Everybody wants to tell you their story, so that’s the best advice I always tell people. No matter what you want to do, [00:24:30]. If you want to be an accountant, go talk to them. They’ll tell you their true story.

Andrew: That’s great. Thank you for sharing that. If you were a passive investor and you are looking for a way to put some money to work, what would you say as the most important things that a passive investor needs to look out for when investing into mobile home parks, or a mobile home park deal with another operator?

Craig: They need to see the experience that this person has in the industry, because like you said, the financing is much more difficult than an apartment building. A history of what they’ve accomplished is probably the most important thing. Having some sort of construction knowledge, not just relying on subs. Your land subs are going to get taken. It’s just part of it. Unfortunately for the sub, they’ll open up walls and not expect what’s behind there, and they have a change order. To me, track record is the biggest issue.

Andrew: That’s a big one. What would be your number two?

Craig: I would probably also say the demographic they’re investing in, the location they’re investing in. You and I have spoken about how the population in this country is changing and where they’re going. If they’re investing in areas with very strong rent regulation and difficulty for evictions, that tells me it’s not a person I would want to invest in. I’d want to invest in someone where the population is going, job’s going. They should be able to tell me and educate me on why they’re investing in this location versus that location without hesitating.

Andrew: That’s good. The first two were so good. Do you have a third?

Craig: I’m going to stop there.

Andrew: All right. What does the perfect mobile home park look like in your eyes and why, Craig?

Craig: I would say the perfect mobile home park, there isn’t one. Again, like you said, you like one, I like another one. It depends on the location. The property mobile home park to me if the utilities setup has to be bulletproof, because you have all these tenants that want to put laundry and then they put the clothing down or the grease goes down. To me, I can’t stress enough about the utilities.

I tell people that park that we spoke about earlier that has separate utilities for each unit, I can’t tell you how grateful we are to have a park like that. I wish there was a way to have every park like that. Once you have that, you can work around anything else. You could bring in new homes, you could repair homes, you could change the tenant base. But changing the utilities is such a large expense that it’s very difficult to do.

To me, that’s one of them and also the location of the park. I got a lot of parks put in front of me, and I look at the demographics and I see a declining population. I don’t see any jobs there. Those are two things that are very difficult. To me, the perfect part has to start with strong utilities and strong demographics.

Andrew: Yup, those are great. How big would it be? I know going bigger and faster is what I wrote down on my notepad here.

Craig: Yes. For the first person starting out, I’d say it depends on their bandwidth, financial timeframe. If I was a single person putting some money in and I was local to a 20-unit park, I wouldn’t be afraid of it. I would jump out in, even a five-unit park. What we’re looking for right now is 100–150 up. I’m trying to work on a 300-space park right now. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Andrew: Very cool. What does the future of mobile home park investing look like? And how do you see mobile home parks fitting in with the direction of the economy going, it’s 2023, everybody is mentioning this buzzword of a recession, interest rates are high, there’s obviously the Feds saying they’re going to keep going up? How do you think mobile home parks fit into all that?

Craig: It’s going to keep expanding, It depends on your location in the country. We still have a lot of people fleeing the northern part of the country, the cold weather, the high tax areas. A lot of those people maybe don’t want to own a home or can’t afford a home. They could either rent a mobile home from someone like myself. If they do want to go buy a home for $150,000, $100,000, or whatever it is, versus going to buy a stick-built home for $250–$350, it’s a very affordable option.

I’ve been in this industry long enough that 6%–7% rates still aren’t what they used to be. People forget what rates used to be at one point. I also think that a lot of the apartment buildings we had in New York, they look at these rents and they’re like, well, I can’t afford them because you have a lot of multigenerational people living in those units. But they start seeing what’s going on in other parts of the country—the Carolinas, the Tennessees, Georgias, the Floridas obviously.

Instead of having to live with three or four generations, they have their main family to live in their own unit. A mobile home park gives a family the benefit of having the parents live in one part of the park, one of the brothers living in another park, and another family living in another part of the park.

You still get to live close-knit as a family, but you get to have your own roof and your own space, which is what that offers, I would say, compared to buying a home, which I think as rates go up, like you said, with the recession coming, people may be more hesitant. But buying a mobile home, it’s not going to be as affected, I don’t think, if you go to buy a $300,000–$400,000 house.

Andrew: Definitely. I think it’s going to be interesting. I think there’s this movement of lifestyle, too. Think of that. If you’re going to take on a mortgage for a $150,000 house or higher versus paying $300 a month and paying lot rent and living in a mobile home, it’s just a no-brainer.

You’re going to be able to have so much more freedom, and you’re not going to be chained to a job that you have to go to to pay for that house that you bought to keep up with the Joneses. The millennial generation, I think, is more aware of that trade-off. They’re open to lower cost housing. I think it’ll be interesting.

Craig: It’s also easier to sell something that costs less. There are more buyers for it. If you bought the mobile home, and you’re paying it off, and let’s just say you want to relocate, you want to change or whatever your story is, for you to transfer that or sell that to someone else, it’s easier for someone else to pick on. That’s why I look at it at the positive.

Andrew: Look at these 30-year mortgages. I think I read something the other day. The average person moves every five to seven years, something like that. You’re paying all interests the first 5–7 years of a 30-year mortgage. You’re paying all this interest, and then you’re moving, you need a bigger house because you had kids or whatever the case is, and it gets really expensive.

It’s not really helping the American people because of that amortization schedule. It’s actually hurting them if they’re moving that often. With home appreciation, the last 20 years have been great. Everybody’s won, but I don’t think we can bet on the next 5–10. We’ll see what happens.

Craig: It’s also quality of life. I see in these parks that we have, a lot of these people become a neighborhood. I see one person will pick up five kids at the bus stop and then walk them back to their mobile home. You have that neighborhood, which is great, plus you don’t have the annoyances of an apartment building where you’re like, oh, the baby’s crying again, the dog’s running around. You have that neighborhood feel with some separation. I think that lifestyle, you can’t match it right now.

Andrew: I agree, man. Hey, Craig, it was awesome having you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Craig: No, my pleasure. Anytime.

Andrew: If any of our listeners would like to get a hold of you, what would be the best way for them to do so?

Craig: You could email me at craig@ryzecommunities.com, or I’m on LinkedIn, so either way works.

Andrew: Awesome, and we’ll put that in the show notes as well, Craig. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Craig: No problem. Thanks for having me, Andrew. Talk to you soon. Be well.

Andrew: That’s it for today, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in.