Interview with Mobile Home Park Fund Manager Skyler Liechty

Listen on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interview-with-mobile-home-park-fund-manager-skyler/id1520681893?i=1000500034312

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 Skyler Liechty, a third generation mobile home park owner and founding member of American Dream Communities. Throughout his career Skyler has overseen a multitude of turnaround, stabilized, and value-add mobile home communities. Skyler is an expert in the space and has his mobile home retailer, broker and installer licenses in a number of states. His success in the industry has led him to a total pad count of nearly 5,000 mobile home lots. Today, Andrew and Skyler talk about the difficulties in finding a good mobile home park management team, trailer park risk assessments, why Skyler prefers not to buy used mobile homes, Skyler’s preferred percentage of park-owned vs. tenant-owned mobile homes, Skyler’s management company and investment fund, as well as what passive investors should look for when investing in mobile home parks.

***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 1,400 lots under management. His team currently manages over 20 manufactured housing communities across ten states – AR, GA, IA, IL, IN, MN, NE, OH, PA and TN. 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.

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:

00:18 – Welcome to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast

00:28 – Skyler’s introduction

01:47 – How Skyler got into manufactured housing

02:42 – What the ’08-’09 recession was like

03:42 – The hardest part about this asset class

04:35 – Skyler’s management company

05:26 – Ideal community & mismanaged communities

09:18 – What passive investors should look out for and the cost of a used home

14:38 – The terms of Skyler’s fund

17:15 – Park-owned homes versus tenant-owned homes and converting

23:53 – Putting money into the fund and signing recourse

25:28 – 10-year plan: goals and exit

26:15 – GP and LP splits and fees

28:00 – Skyler’s team

29:40 – Skyler’s first deal and great deals

35:43 – Getting a hold of Skyler

36:10 – Conclusion

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Links & Mentions from This Episode:

Skyler’s Email: skyler@americandreamcommunities.com

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/PassiveMHPin…

Andrew Keel Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/passivemhpi…

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 the 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. Skyler Liechty. Skyler is a third-generation mobile home park owner and a founding member of American Dream Communities. During his career, he has overseen numerous types of mobile home communities including stabilized, turn-around, and value-add opportunities. He has held manufactured housing retailer licenses, broker licenses, installer licenses in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kentucky.

Skyler has owned communities in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Kansas with a total pad count of nearly 5000 spaces. The portfolio is currently comprised of over 2000 homesites, placing it in the top 100 of park owners in North America. The most recent American Dream Communities Fund was a $15,000,000 equity fund.

Skyler, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Skyler: Thank you for having me, Andrew. I really appreciate this opportunity.

Andrew: Wonderful. Let’s jump right in here and get started with questions. Would you mind starting out by telling our listeners a little bit about your background, and how you got into manufactured housing?

Skyler: Absolutely. As you mentioned in my introduction, I’m a third-generation mobile home park owner and operator. I acquired my first community in 2001–2002. We started in our path within the family. In 2009, we formed American Dream Communities that was the movement outside of the family portfolio into more institutional-type syndication assets.

Andrew: Awesome. I just wanted to chat with you a little bit about this because not many mobile home park operators had a business back in 2008–2009. Could you tell us a little bit about that time and the recession-resistant or non-characteristics you saw at that time in this asset class?

Skyler: Like anything, Andrew, it’s one of those things we’re depending on what region you’re in, what market, those are going to impact communities differently. Our communities, through 2008–2009, didn’t see much of a hiccup. Collections as with this COVID situation remain relatively stable. We had a couple of move-outs, we went out and did what we do now—bought new homes, replaced those lights, resold, or released those homes.

Again, it’s one of those things that the guys and gals in the industry who were paying attention knew what they had to do, and tend to go through the recession fairly well. I think it would be the same thing here with COVID, the guys again are just paying attention and know what to do. They’ll do just fine in this asset class.

Andrew: Tell us, Skyler, what is the hardest part of this business in your eyes?

Skyler: I’ll tell you. It’s interesting because we were chatting about this right before we went into the interview here. In our judgment and in my judgment, the hardest thing is finding the right people. You got to have the right people for us, for our corporate team, for our on-site team. Whether we want to admit it or not, whether we like it or not, we’re in the people business. Whether it’s working with our team, whether it’s working with our residents, our vendors, that’s just what it is.

What’s interesting is, the flip side of that equation is once you have the right team in place, it’s amazing because you could do things you really didn’t think you could do. When everyone’s flowing together, you just sit back, say, wow, this is how it’s supposed to be type of deal.

Andrew: Totally. Do you guys have your own management company?

Skyler: Yeah, we do. We manage the deals we own and then we also have a third-party management platform. That’s something that we’re pretty selective on who we manage for. We really feel on our third-party platform, we want to be good partners with people that are managing their assets.

Everyone has a different viewpoint of how their asset should run, how it should be managed. For the groups out there that we manage, we’re really good partners with because it’s the same vision, it’s a shared vision. We do both. We manage our own assets and then we do third-party management as well.

Andrew: Wonderful. Tell me, Skyler, what does the perfect community look like in your eyes? What do the communities look like you prefer to manage?

Skyler: Great questions. That’s kind of a two-part question. One, what’s the perfect asset? It’s 100% occupied, 55+ retirement community in Florida, just picture-perfect, no tenant issues ever. That’s what the ideal community looks like. What that also means is it’s very challenging to get a current yield when you buy assets like that. Not that it can’t be done, but it’s a challenge.

I would say from an investor standpoint, from a yield standpoint, we’re going to look at a good market—maybe it’s a primary-secondary market—big MSA, we’re going to find an ugly park or a park that’s completely mismanaged. Those are the deals we want to buy. We want to put the right management policies into place, we want to fix what needs to be fixed, and that to us, is something that’s a lot more challenging but the rewards are a lot bigger on those types of projects.

Andrew: This may be market-specific, but what cap rate do you look to pay on those primary market, mismanaged assets?

Skyler: Good question. When we look at a cap rate, a lot of times people maybe don’t fully appreciate it, as you and I and the other investors out there. A cap rate is supposed to be a reflection of the risk. If you’re buying a deal that has been mismanaged, you’re going to pay a different cap rate because you got a different risk profile.

The flip side of that also is, if you buy a property that is really mismanaged—maybe the owner doesn’t keep up with the repairs, doesn’t keep up with the market rent—in today’s market, you may find on current numbers, you’re buying an ultra-low cap rate.

For example, we bought a property in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was a little over 100-unit park, with about 35 vacant homesites in it and what we were able to do is go in, do the repairs, fill up the vacant homesites, and take that asset from mid-200 lot rent up to about 400 lot rent which is the market rent.

For us, that was a good illustration of the deals we look for. In the current cap rate on that, we paid a 2-cap, but it didn’t matter because when you step back and look at what the asset had the potential to be, that’s how we underwrite it as well. It’s not just always, hey, going in, we’re going to buy a 7-cap on current income. Stabilized deals, full market, full boat, probably today’s market, depending on what market you’re going to call it 4- to 6-cap in a major market.

Andrew: Thank you for sharing that. You put a lot of value upfront on what it’s going to be post-to-rehab, post-to-renovation work, and improvements. As we talked about prior to this recording, a lot of our listeners are passive investors in other asset classes—multifamily, self-storage, et cetera. What are the most important things you think that those passive investors need to look out for when investing in mobile home parks? What are those big risks that they should be aware of if they’re not familiar with the asset class entirely?

Skyler: The first thing is, probably like any investment, you want to be comfortable with the sponsor. You want to make sure that they’ve done it before. You want to make sure that they’re invested in the deal. You want to make sure that they’re willing to do the industry normal stuff, such as if you buy a project that’s going to require a lot of fill, those homes mean you’re going to have to sign on a full-recourse debt. Sponsors who aren’t willing to do it, don’t invest in their own deal, have no track record doesn’t make it a bad deal, doesn’t make them an incapable sponsor. It’s just that those are the things that limited partners should look into. That’s a big key to it.

We’ve seen deals out there and guys who say, hey, we can do 30, 40, 50 homesites. We can fill 50 homesites a year. While they may be able to do that, industry data out there doesn’t support something like that, so the more seasoned sponsors are going to put out projections that are closer to reality.

Andrew: That’s an interesting point that I’d like to talk a little bit more about. In all of our previous interviews, everybody has said that infill is the toughest part of the business. It’s the most labor-intensive and time-intensive process in terms of any value-add, and the easiest is raising rents to market. With the infill process, do you guys prefer new homes? Have you ever done used homes? What are some of your tips or maybe just overall feelings on that process for investors that are aware of what’s involved?

Skyler: Good question. Everyone knows in this asset class, there are primarily two ways that you can increase valuations. One is infill, the second is raising grants. We’ve done well at projects doing both sides of it. When we buy an asset that’s pure rent escalation play, we look at it and we say, what’s wrong with this community that we can fix? Because most people don’t mind paying market lot rent if the community looks the way it should look.

We bought a property here in Texas. Last year, we went in, it was about $200,000 under market rent. We went in, we spent about $300,000 on streets, put in a new playground, fixed all this stuff that needed to be fixed. We did a very large rent increase, and most of the people said, thank you, which is different because if you go in and you just say, hey, we’re going to crank rents to market, we’re going to put no capital back in. I don’t know that you’ll get the same response from your residents.

Andrew: Yeah, totally agree.

Skyler: On the fill side of things, that’s absolutely correct. That is one of the most challenging value-add propositions, simply because when you buy a home, you bring it in. For us, it’s all-new homes.

We’ve gone down the used home route. Truthfully, that’s a fool’s errand to try and source a bunch of used homes. Sourcing one or two for […], no problem. But we consistently found when we try to source used homes is by the time you buy it, move it in, rehab it, you’re within about 15% of the new home. It’s a lot more brain damage trying to source a home, fix a home, go through that whole process, compared to buying a new home.

The other side of that is—as we’ve talked about with the value-add—when you’re moving into brand-new homes, the rest of the residents view that as a shot of lifeblood into the community. They view that as someone setting up, paying attention, they want to bring this community back to a nice great place to live. There’s a lot of benefits to going in with the new homes compared to the used homes.

It’s definitely a challenging piece of it when you buy new homes. You bring them in, you don’t know how long it’s going to take to deck home, put on skirting, and all those components. You don’t know if the city is going to change the rules on you which have happened to us. We brought in 15 new homestead communities and they said, our setbacks are actually X. We said, wait, during diligence, we got it in writing at […]. They said, well they misunderstood, so you got to comply with this. We got all sorts of unknowns, but the flip side of that is a huge value creation if you can pull it off.

Andrew: Totally agree with you there. You guys currently have a fund. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that and what your outlook or business plan is through your current fund?

Skyler: We’re wrapping up our second fund right now. We anticipate launching a third fund probably by the end of this year or the first of next year. All of our funds are at a 10-year time horizon.

The difference of our fund from some of the other funds out there—not saying theirs is bad, I’m just saying ours is different—for our limited partners, they get a 7% preferred return on all their dollars that go in. Of the cash flow, 100% goes back as a return of capital. Meaning, as the GP, we have a management fee in place, and some other fees as far as the acquisition fee, disposition fee, the typical things there.

From a profit center, there’s no profit to the GP until 100% of the equity is paid back at the fund level, meaning we have eight communities in a fund, we don’t just say, oh, we pay back equity on deal number one, now we get half of the cash flow. It’s at a fund level which is different than a lot of the guys out there that are doing funds. After that, it’s a 50/50 cash flow split, and then it’s 50/50 on the upside.

Again, our thought process is this. If we get into deals, we hope they’re going to go the right way. Most of them have gone the right way because we have the right partners, we have the right structure. If the economy just tanks—as it has been—and the deals go the wrong way, what’s the worst case? The worst-case scenario is our limited partners lose money.

We’ve structured this deal to try and get everyone’s equity back as quickly as possible. That’s done through cash flow, that’s done through refinances. Some of our deals are big value-adds, so we can move the needle pretty quickly in a period of time. Go from a bridge to a permanent debt situation and do a cash-out there once they’re stabilized.

Andrew: There’s a pretty similar model across the board that a lot of operators use—including myself—the buy-fix up-and-refinance model. Those seem very competitive, the terms of your fund there. Quick question before I forget, what is your thoughts on the park-owned home model versus the tenant-owned home model?

Skyler: If you could buy a park with all park-owned homes, you’re going to have less turnover, your expenses are going to be more stabilized if they’re all tenant-owned homes. Whenever you get into the park-owned homes, your expenses look different, you have some up and down in the revenue. But the reality is there are very few parks out there that are all tenant-owned homes.

The reality in our industry is there are park-owned home components. There’s a difference between buying a park that’s 30%–35% park-owned home compared to buying one that’s 100% park owned home. That, to me, starts feeling very much like a hybrid of an apartment complex. That model is different. That’s not really a model that we’ve dabbled in. We tend to buy deals on the outside at 40%-45% park-owned homes, and then what we do is we’ll go in, we’ll try and convert those to people to have homeownership.

Whether we can convert them from a rental to a lease-to-own model, whether we can convert them from a rental into a consumer finance through some of the groups out there, the objective for us why we call the company American Dream Communities is the American dream is homeownership. Our objective on the park-owned homes is to get people in a position to own as quickly as possible.

Andrew: That’s great and that’s similar to what we do as well. Would you mind shedding a little bit of light on your lease option program? What’s worked for you on some of the communities that you’ve purchased, and how have you converted those park-owned homes? Maybe you have some percentages? I don’t know if it’s a myth (I guess) where they say, a third, a third, a third. Your park-owned homes, a third of them are going to want to stay rentals, a third of them will convert to a lease option or similar, and then a third of them will move out. Would you say that’s accurate, or you’ve had different numbers?

Skyler: That’s a broad brush. What we have found in the communities we go in that have, for example, we bought a small community here in Texas, about 60 units, of that 45 are park-owned rentals, predominantly, the 80s and 90s vintage on the homes. When we went in, there were about two years of ownership. I believe we’ve flipped about 75% of those.

We went in and pitched everyone on, hey, we want you to be homeowners because that’s what our objective is at a corporate level. Not many people; we had one or two of the 45 that signed up for it. The rest of them, when the end of their lease came up, they moved out, we made them ready. All the new people we’ve put into lease options.

For us, we’ve been very successful with vacant units, putting them into a lease option, the conversion from a rental into a lease option. The reason that we have trouble—I don’t know if it’s just us; maybe it’s just us, I don’t know—a renter is a different mindset than someone who wants to own a home.

It’s a tough mindset conversion of, hey, you’re a rental, you don’t have to take care of any of the repairs at all, to we’re going to convert you into a lease option where you’re going to have some responsibility on repairs, you’re going to have some responsibility on upkeep. That’s the biggest challenge that we’ve seen, and we’ve done it in Texas, we’ve done it in Missouri, we’ve done it in Kansas, we’ve done it in Oklahoma, so either it’s us or it’s a mindset of the renter compared to someone who wants the home owned.

Andrew: I agree. We have parks across 11 states and it’s very similar across. It’s just that mindset like you’re saying. They’re not used to owning things, they’re used to renting, and you just get a different outcome. Would you say there’s a set percentage, or is it just variable, depending on the park?

Skyler: It is variable depending on the park. It may be a situation where you get more buying on the front-end and part of that (I believe) is also the ownership you buy it from. If you are buying it from an ownership that is treating everyone fairly, is trying to make improvements to the community, you will have more buy-in because the guy renting the home, later on says, hey, the community looks the right way. This is somewhere that I want to stay.

On the other hand, on the deals that are the heavy value-adds where you got infrastructure issues, you got tenant issues, you got all those things going on, even when you start doing the improvements, it’s still a tough conversion because someone who’s willing to live in a C-minus asset when you bring it up to a B-plus, it’s a different tenant profile. That’s one of the things. Also, if you went into an A or B community and there were a lot of rentals, you definitely are going to get more buy-in.

Some of the senior parks in Florida have programs where they rent to 55+, they rent it for a year, they convert them into ownership. That’s because that type of an asset they’re looking at, do I like the amenity package? Do I like the manager? Do they have the right events? They want to try it and they’re eventually going to buy it. I don’t know if that translates over to the family park the same way, though, or all rental parks, should I say.

Andrew: I agree. With us, we make it very, very attractive to people that when we come in and buy, and there are some park-owned homes, just the path to ownership like you’re mentioning earlier, we make it where it’s like it’s a no brainer. We’re not trying to get rich off selling these homes. Once we show them that, they become more interested in it and interested in owning the homes. It’s very market-specific. We had a park near Memphis that was completely different from a park up near Grand Forks, North Dakota, so I think that’s important.

Quick question on you and your fund. Do you guys put money into your funds? Do you also sign recourse if that’s required?

Skyler: Good question. In all of our funds, all of our pre-fund investments, we started the evolution from a single entity asset. We had investors who said, hey, I want to be able to identify the park that I’m involved in. That’s worked out okay for us. The fund gives us the ability with the investors to smooth out the right of the value-adds. We have some stabilized deals that produce a nice cash flow, and then we had the value-add deals where you could be 2-3 years with no cash flow because it’s a huge lift job.

All of our deals we do invest in, every single one of the deals where we have either recourse on the park, recourse on the homes. We’ve become comfortable with that function of debt in this space. Everyone would prefer the non-recourse debt on the park, but value-add deals, I just don’t see how you can do that. Our typical model on the value-add has been a bridge to permanent, so maybe it’s a local bank, maybe it’s a regional bank or a lender. They give us a couple of years of bridge that gives us time to go in, fix it, fill it, lease it, get rents to market, make it look the right way, and then go into the permanent market.

Andrew: Great, that’s fantastic. What’s your plan for 10 years from now? What do you think that looks like, Skyler?

Skyler: Our internal objective is to gather 10,000 spaces. It’s going to take us a couple more funds, but that’s where we’re headed to. As far as an exit, our funds are structured for 10 years and at the end of 10 years, we’ll ask the limited partners what they want to do, if they want to sell everything or if they want to ride along for a little bit longer. We haven’t fully defined in our minds what the tenure exit plan looks like.

Andrew: Got you. You mentioned a little bit earlier about the GP-LP splits for your fund. But would you mind just shedding a little bit of light on the typical fees—acquisition fee, dispo, property management—what those look like and what they cover?

Skyler: On the acquisition fee, we charge three points of an acquisition fee. That is a typical real estate brokerage commission. I shouldn’t say typically because some brokers out there, charge up to 10% of the commission. One thing that is predominantly different about our group is all of the deals we have bought to date have been off-market. They’ve been principal-to-principal transactions. Those deals require I’m not going to say more effort but different effort. We have deals that we’ve been working on buying for the last 15 years. This year is going to be the year that they come to fruition.

As far as the ongoing fees, 6% management fee, property management fee, there’s a disposition fee which is 3%. Other than that, we try and keep the fees skinny down. Acquisition and management, the way we look at it is, within our fund, if we went into the on-market deals, there would be a potential commission to pay. If we outsource the third party management, there would be a fee to pay. From our point of view, I’m not exactly sure how a syndicator can outsource management, and have the same grasp of what is going on on the grounds. I know there are guys out there who do it and they do a good job of it, but for us, we want to be in the weeds with everything going on at the property level.

Andrew: I think that’s super important, and I’d do the same thing. How many employees do you have in your property management company?

Skyler: Right now, I’m not sure if we’re fully staffed today or not, but when we’re fully staffed we’re about 55 employees.

Andrew: Wow. Big operation.

Skyler: It’s a big operation. We have everything from district managers, area managers, community managers, assistant community managers, maintenance guys, all the way from regional guys to lead make-ready guys. I’ll tell you that that’s an important component of any park. If you have parks on homes, you got to have make-ready guys who know what they’re doing, they could put the product back together if there’s any churn.

That’s one of the things we found on the mom-and-pop type operators, or even the small, regional type guys. They miss that component. Make-readies can eat your lunch. If you’re not paying attention to it, if you’re not putting them back in, service is quick as possible. If you’re not leasing them, it can turn a profitable park into an unprofitable park very, very quickly.

Andrew: I agree. Real quick, would you mind sharing a case study? A negative case study and a positive case study. Break it down, like maybe you had one park and some bad struggles with that park. Maybe you can elaborate on what those were. And then, share a good one as well so we could see the opposite side of it.

Skyler: Absolutely. The very first deal we syndicated was a park in Missouri. We drove through the town, the town looked good, the park looked good, the sweet old lady had managed it for the last 15 years for the out-of-state owner. Everything looked exactly like it should. We got into the deal. We found out post-closing that the manager had been titling a bunch of abandoned homes into her name she had been running. Basically, we had a partner we didn’t realize we were going to have in the deal. We work through that.

Our biggest house, our first deal, our biggest mistake we made there was we structured it wrong, meaning first deal out of the box, friends, family, neighbors, everyone who invested, it’s like, look guys, we’re going to give you the money, but if you can’t make it work, we’re not putting anything else in. We didn’t structure capital calls appropriately, and I can’t emphasize that enough.

Any syndicator, you don’t want to be undercapitalized. You don’t want to try and juice the returns by not raising enough money. You got to have the money because there’s 100% of the time, unexpected stuff. That was our first deal. We structured it wrong over about a 6-year run. It was about an 80% return of equity, we had a loss on that deal. It’s the only deal we’ve had a loss on today. Again, we structure things completely differently. Now, we moved into the fund model which is a much better structure. It spreads out risk. That’s the bad deal we did, the very first deal. We have a couple of deals right now that we’re working on refinances that we’ve done very well on.

We were talking a little bit about the value-add whether it’s a rent increase, whether it’s just a fill. One of our properties, for example, is in Tulsa. It’s 60 units. We bought it. I’m surprised that they hadn’t condemned it. The streets looked like they had never been fixed, never been repaired. Almost every home that was there was halfway dilapidated. It was just a train wreck.

We bought the property, we spent about $200,000 on street works, the off-street, the new asphalt, we put in 40 new homes. We leased out 40 new homes. We took an asset that looks condemned, and we basically 5Xed the value we paid for over an 18- to 20-month period. That’s a challenge to do, that’s a lot of heavy lifting.

We have another deal here in Texas. We bought the same type of deal. It was extremely under market rent, but it was full. You can understand the streets were in rough shape. No one had done any repairs. The residents were okay living there because it’s the cheapest rent in town. I don’t mind driving down the streets popping tires every week because everything’s all jacked up. That didn’t matter to them.

We went in, we spent about $400,000 on street work, increased the rental rates to market rent. Over the last 14 months, we’ve just about got a 3X on the valuation on that deal. Again, raising rents is easy but doing the street work is not easy.

As a principal, you’ve got to be onsite making sure, hey, if you pay for 2 inches of asphalt, you’re going to get 2 inches. They’re not going to do just a thin enough layer where it looks good. You have to make sure that they do the proper radius so you don’t have pieces break off. It’s a lot of work. That deal, obviously, turned quickly for us. We’re still in the process of the resident cleanup right now, but I’m hopeful we’ll be able to complete the cleanup without much loss of residents at that property,

Andrew: That’s fantastic. Those are the ones that give you the goosebumps because not only is it a win as an investment, but also you made that community look better. It probably hadn’t been touched for 20–30 years, so for you to be able to fix that deferred maintenance.

I’ll never forget one resident in Salem, Ohio, one of my first communities. I literally moved with my wife and my daughter into the community. There was a house in front of this community. We moved into it for three months, and we did a ton of work on it. One of the residents came up and literally was tearing up because she was like, I was embarrassed to live here for so long. I’ve lived here for 20 years, but now I feel good when I come home. You can’t beat that. That’s the other side of the business that just gives me warm fuzzies.

Skyler: And that’s it. People come out, they’re so appreciative that even taking rents to market, they don’t care because they’re not embarrassed anymore. We hired an assistant manager here recently, one of our properties and it was a big turnaround deal. I was talking to her last week and she said, I hated driving through this community. It was like the worst part of town. I was embarrassed to tell people I even drove through it. I don’t even live here. And she’s like, it’s a totally different deal.

The best analogy we use around here is when you’re done with it, you clean it up, you fill it up, you do the CapEx. It’s like giving bread to the hungry. Residents are just so appreciative of it and you’re right. You can’t beat it. It’s a good feeling. It’s a win all the way around.

Andrew: Totally. Skyler, thank you so much for taking the time to come and be interviewed on this podcast, and for just adding value to our listeners. If any of our listeners would like to get a hold of you, what is the best way for them to do so?

Skyler: The best way is through email. My email address is skyler@americandreamcommunities.com. That’s our investor-facing website, so there’s more information about us there as well.

Andrew: Awesome. Thanks again, Skyler. That’s it for today’s show. Thank you all so much for joining us.

Skyler: Thanks, Andrew.

Andrew: 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, that’s @passivemhpinvesting on Instagram. See you there.