Interview with Ryan Hill and Brett Bowman of Suncrest Capital

Listen on Apple Podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interview-with-ryan-hill-and-brett-bowman/id1520681893?i=1000568899426

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 Brett Bowman and Ryan Hill from Suncrest Capital. Brett, Ryan and Andrew discuss the following in this value packed episode: different tools/ software they use for managing mobile home parks, some lessons they have learned along the way and their preference in regards to tenant-owned homes and park-owned homes. Both Ryan and Brett have full time day jobs in addition to managing their portfolio of mobile home parks, on this episode they share with us how they balance their time and what transferable skills they’ve obtained from their initial profession.

Suncrest Capital is a fast-growing real estate management company with over 600 lots and over $30 million in assets under management. Brett has previously invested in a variety of property types, from multi-family and single-family rentals, industrial lots, to mobile home communities. Ryan has more than thirteen years of experience in real estate and has had over $41 million in sales transactions over his career. He is both a mobile home park owner and an operator. Both Brett and Ryan are chief officers at Suncrest Capital, with Brett being a chief investment officer and Ryan wearing the hat of chief operating officer.

***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 ten 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. 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

02:00 – Brett and Ryan’s journey

04:00 – Ryan’s first mobile home park

05:45 – How their other jobs help them manage mobile home parks

06:45 – Mistakes they have learned from

11:35 – Suncrest’s strike zone for mobile home parks

14:00 – Brett and Ryan’s thoughts on infill

16:00 – Their six-month order with Legacy Housing

17:50 – Getting educated on mobile home parks

21:00 – Some hard lessons about the industry

24:45 – Tools that Ryan and Brett use

26:26 – Advice for passive investors looking to invest in their first mobile home park deal

29:55 – Their perfect mobile home park

32:16 – Tenant-owned versus park-owned homes

32:52 – The future of the mobile home park industry

35:00 – Getting a hold of Brett and Ryan

00:00 – Conclusion

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

Links & Mentions from This Episode:

PEPs (Performance Equity Partners): http://peplending.com/

Legacy: https://legacypartners.com/

Suncrest: https://www.suncrestcap.com/

Brett: brett@suncrestcap.com

Ryan: ryan@suncrestcap.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/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 a group of amazing guests in Mr. Brett Bowman and Ryan Hill from Suncrest Capital.

Before we dive in, I want to ask a real quick favor. Would you mind taking an extra 30 seconds and heading over to iTunes to 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.

Suncrest capital has over 600 lots currently under management. They’re growing fast with another seven parks under contract. They have over $30 million in assets under management.

Brett has been investing for over 12 years acquiring $30+ million in assets spanning single family rentals, multifamily, industrial, and mobile home communities. He has a background in high tech, where he managed multi million dollar budgets in hybrid corporate finance and large-scale program management roles. He is currently the Chief Investment Officer at Suncrest Capital.

Ryan Hill has over 13 years experience as a real estate agent directly involved in over $41 million in sales transactions. Ryan is a mobile home park owner and operator, and is responsible for driving the operational efficiency at each community. Ryan is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Suncrest Capital. Thank you guys for coming on the show. We’re excited to have you.

Brett: Thanks, we’re excited too.

Andrew: Maybe I’ll start with you, Brett. Maybe you can tell us the story of how you guys got together and got into manufactured housing communities.

Brett: Sure, yeah. This will be fun. Ryan usually gets to tell the story, so I’ll jump in here. Like you said in my bio, I’ve been doing real estate for awhile. I started doing syndications about two or three years ago in multifamily primarily, and I got into industrial.

The way I got involved in that is I worked with a lot of really big operators and kind of came in as a junior general partner with them. We got tons of mentorship across several groups and several asset classes. I primarily did a lot of the underwriting, acquisition work, project management upfront. We got to learn that super well inside and out.

Meanwhile, Ryan on the side had already been buying mobile home parks. He was permanently investing in the Kansas City area, which is where most of my assets were as well. We both live in the same neighborhood here in the Boise, Idaho area. Basically, we met through a third-person acquaintance that actually partnered with us on our first mobile home park. Ryan, why don’t you take it from here because this is kind of your part of the story?

Ryan: My son is a budding entrepreneur, so he has a lot more business. The acquaintance of Brett I was talking about was one of my son’s clients. I had just returned from a trip from that first mobile home park my wife and I purchased about three years ago.

When I told him about it, he got excited to hear about it, and wanted to learn more, and said, hey, I have this friend Brett. We’re just talking about mobile home parks last week. We all connected and met. I had an off-market deal just a half mile or so down the street from that first mobile home park I bought just south of Kansas City. The three of us went in on it together and bought that one.

Andrew: Wow. That is fantastic. Ryan, how old is your son?

Ryan: He is 15 now.

Andrew: Fifteen, wow. That’s who we need to be talking to, man. He is the future entrepreneur.

Brett: My favorite part is when I pay him for mowing my lawn. Most of his money goes straight to buying stock.

Andrew: Wow.

Brett: And gave it up for his first mobile home park. Right, Ryan?

Ryan: Yeah.

Andrew: That is fantastic. Ryan, your background is in residential real estate. Is that right?

Ryan: Yeah. I was a residential real estate agent for 13 years in Washington state before my family and I moved over to Idaho. I really didn’t feel like rebuilding from scratch, a new client base. I had been educating myself on the mobile home park space for a couple of years reaching out to other owner operators. I’m just researching hundreds of deals really, like Crexi, LoopNet, et cetera.

I found a diamond in the rough for that first one that had some nice owner financing on it. I just refinanced out of it a few months ago, so I went essentially full cycle on that very first one, which was great. I haven’t looked back at the mobile home space, and now we’re dabbling in retail as well. We love it. We love the opportunities for not only ourselves, but our investors too.

Andrew: Ryan, when did you buy that first mobile home park?

Ryan: That was July, 2019. I think it’s important to know that Brett and I both have full-time day jobs. Mine is coming to an end here at the end of the school year. I’m an elementary school principal. We’ve grown so fast that we’re able to afford me going full-time right now, and Brett, hopefully in the near future. We’ve been able to hire employees as well in the last few months, which has helped us quite a bit.

Andrew: Very cool. Wow. I’m curious, what things from the elementary school principal role carry over into the management of the operations of mobile home parks, if you don’t mind touching on that?

Ryan: Just becoming adept at creating efficient systems and leveraging the talents of other people to achieve your goal. It’s similar in education with teachers and staff in helping students learn the best they can. It translates well over to mobile home park space, where in order to operate efficiently and to grow as fast as we have, we’ve put a lot of time and effort into just making sure our systems are smooth and taking care of expensive lessons that we’ve learned the hard way, so that we’re not making those expensive lessons into the future.

Andrew: Maybe you can tell us about some of those expensive lessons and some mistakes you guys have made in the mobile home park business that our listeners can learn from.

Ryan: I’ll turn that on over to Brett. He’s got a few examples.

Brett: Man, where to start? I don’t know if it’s the most expensive lesson, but in my mind, the most painful lessons are usually people-related in a sense that hiring the wrong person or having the right person maybe and doing the wrong job, for example.

We have one bookkeeper that’s overseas, but we had an onshore person that was kind of overseeing the bookkeeping and accounting that had just decades of experience and was just super knowledgeable in the space. It turned out after paying hours and hours and hours of work to the individual, they really weren’t doing much. We were in a world of hurt when it came time to prep our taxes. That’s one of the things that’s just staying on top of every aspect.

One of the things that we’ve been implementing in the last few months, we read this book called Traction by Gino Wickman. I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it before. It’s all about creating systems really for startups. I think it’s largely meant for startups. It’s how to create scorecards to make sure you’re watching the right data, setting the right goals for the year, the quarter at the individual level or company level, how to run even efficient meetings.

I’ve been in Fortune 100 companies my entire career for 15 years now doing corporate finance, cross-functional project management roles. I’ve been in thousands of meetings. Learning how to run a meeting differently was good for me. That has helped us (I think) tune in and make sure we’re focusing on the right thing, because you can’t be in every single detail of the business. But if you’ve got the right data and you can see the trends, you’ve got the right leading indicators, and you can ensure you’ve got the right people, I think that really helps you avoid some of those painful lessons.

Andrew: I totally agree. Brett, maybe you can share a little bit about your background a little bit more and how you got into mobile home park investing and real estate from the tech background.

Brett: Sure, yeah. Just quickly, I think this probably relates to a lot of people. I’m just an early teenager, probably 12 years old. I’m in a seventh grade class and our history teacher, of all people, was talking to us about time value of money. He would take a pencil and draw on the walls in the room. I just thought he was the coolest teacher.

It really stuck with me because he was drawing out these charts that if you invest $10 a month for the next 10 years, this is what it’s going to grow to. I really caught it, so I just really love the finance world. That’s when I went to finance undergrad MBA with focus in finance.

All along, I was reading books like Rich Dad Poor Dad, Cashflow Quadrant, things like that. Stock market investing is pretty great, but it’s not going to scale as fast as I want to. I started with single family rentals. I did a few of those and I was realizing, okay, this isn’t going to scale, either, because you need a new loan for every one of these. You only have so much equity that you’re building up per home. There’s only so much cash flow per home.

That’s when I discovered the world of commercial investing and syndications. Honestly, as an LP, that’s where I first got started as an LP and junior GP. I was getting better returns on my investments that had zero work than I was on my single family rentals. It was crazy and just mind-blowing to see how that can work.

That took me to the commercial space, at least. Ryan had to come in to be a tad about the mobile home park space. Once I started learning the unique upsides and strategies you can do with mobile home parks, it wasn’t too hard to sell.

Andrew: Fantastic. And you still have your day job, which is in tech and finance. What characteristics do you think carryover from that into what you’re doing now as the CIO of Suncrest?

Brett: Obviously, a lot of the finance background that I’ve got helps a ton, because I do a lot of the financial modeling and forecasting, and then also analyze our current performance. I also have done, just over my career, a lot of project management. I’ve done Six Sigma Black Belt, if you’re familiar with that. It’s just really hyper-focused on specific types of project management.

That helps a lot when you get turnaround projects there or the type, which I know you like to buy a lot of value-add projects, too, that are a ton of work. It’s lots of moving pieces. When you’ve got even just one compounded by, we’re at 13 parks now that we’re working on with 7 more—like you said, closing in the next couple of months—there’s a lot to keep track of. That has translated a ton over to the mobile home parks business.

Andrew: I love it. Ryan, maybe you can tell us a little about Suncrest, what your strike zone is for mobile home parks. Where do you see the opportunity in the marketplace?

Ryan: We like the value-adds, as Brett was alluding to. Sixty to seventy percent occupied below market rents. We’re looking at MSAs; a lot of people are. We like over 100,000 population, but we’ll look at 50,000 and just depending on location of where it’s at. Most of ours are in the Midwest right now.

We’re creating larger portfolios, example in Springfield. The six parks under contract right now will be added to the four that we already have under ownership and operation there. It’s really helping compress cap rates on the sale of the overall portfolio.

The infill piece, Brett likes to use the analogy of an apartment building. You buy an apartment building, but it’s hard to add floors to an apartment building. But in the mobile home park space with these vacant lots, it’s a similar idea that you’re able to add these additional units to a property that you’re looking to improve. Those are the two main ways, the infill piece, which is a ton of work. There are a lot of moving parts.

We feel like we’re honing in on the strategies and the systems for that to make it efficient and to fill faster. Ordering new homes and sourcing quality used homes, having rehab crews, kind of tacking that in a variety of different ways. We’re not afraid of private utilities. We have parks with sewers, with lagoons, with wells. A lot of those, we do try to convert over to city utilities.

As Brett was talking about with the project management piece, he’s done a great job in taking leadership with those projects, which is a ton of work. Just to connect to the city utilities or any right outside your park, there’s so much to it. Brett’s done a great job diving in with our engineers, and the city teams, and our general contractors on the ground, getting those things organized so that we can improve those properties and compress cap rates for us and our investors too, which is super cool.

Andrew: Definitely. Let’s go back and talk about the infill, because we’ve had many guests on the show and whenever I asked them, hey, what’s the hardest value-add component in mobile home parks, and they always say it’s infill. Again, it’s not very complex, right? You need to find a home, you bring it in, you put it on a lot, you get the utilities hooked up, and you sell it or rent it out. It’s definitely not that easy, right? It takes a lot of elbow grease to really make this happen.

Maybe you can shed some light. Before we started recording, you were saying that you have 100 infill lots in Iowa that you’re working on infilling. Then you have approximately 50 infill lots in Missouri that you guys are working on infilling. Maybe tell me a little bit about that strategy. That has to be super challenging, given the current economic climate and the ability to get used homes and new homes. What have you guys done to overcome that?

Ryan: We have a number of strategies. One is we have a team of VAs. They comb Facebook marketplace and in radius around the markets that we’re in finding used homes. We have a series of questions that they’re doing the preliminary work with the owners of those homes, and then they hand it over to us to kind of finish the deal, so to speak.

Really making sure that homes can be moved out of properties is important. We’ve gotten burned on a couple of those, where they probably could have been moved out, but we also didn’t want to burn bridges with other owners and operators, so we ended up selling those homes back. We discovered that little nuance is key. We do work with some wholesalers here and there that are looking at homes for the used homes. We just put in an order of 47 new Legacy homes that will be delivered starting in about six months.

Andrew: Tell me about that. Tell me about the six-month, because I have an order right now with Legacy. They’re not giving me those homes for 12 months. What type of magic did you pull off there?

Ryan: In this business, relationships are super important just really everywhere. We were able to develop a relationship with the owner of Legacy and one of the board members as well. There is an option they give to some dealerships. We have dealerships in all of the states that we operate in. They hooked us up essentially with the option to pay a slight premium on each one of those homes to move up in line, so that we’re able to get those new homes.

Brett: We actually made the connection really quickly with one of the sellers in Springfield and knew the owner and board member for Legacy. That’s how we got the introduction through all that, so that worked out pretty well.

Andrew: Very nice. Yeah, it talks about the power of networking. You said it was just under $2000 per home to expedite and save you six months, where otherwise, you would have gotten these homes in the dead set of winter and you couldn’t have done anything with them. Now you’re getting them in early fall so you can get them occupied and you do not have to be stuck with vacant homes sitting there or paying the gas bills on homes all winter. Very smart on your guys’ behalf.

How did you guys get the baseline knowledge? Maybe you could speak on this, Brett, of mobile home parks. How’d you get educated on it?

Brett: Ryan had two years. Ryan, you were researching the space before you made your first buy in 2019. Since 2016–2017, Ryan’s been researching it. I started researching it in about 2019. I had the benefit of partnering with Ryan, though. I came in and knew a ton about the commercial real estate space and how to do the legalities of syndications, raising money, operations, and things like that. But having Ryan with the expertise and really great network already of other operators helped me a ton to get up to speed.

I would say for me anyway, the way I’ve learned every asset class has been partnering with somebody who’s done it before. Whether it was an LP or junior GP coming in and just learning, I think that’s, in my mind, the best way to do it. I’m hands on. I think as an LP, you can ask a ton of questions throughout.

For me, I love meeting with our investors and answering questions. We have some that really like to get into the details. There are some really fun conversations. Honestly, we get good feedback too with those conversations. I think that’s the best way to learn.

Obviously, there’s a ton of really great podcasts, including Doors that have great information, too. We’re obsessive about all of them. We share links all the time to specific episodes. There is some great stuff out there, for sure.

Andrew: Definitely. Ryan, you were a little ahead of Brett. How did you get educated?

Ryan: I think, initially, it was just websites and some Google searches. But then I got connected with Ryan Narus, and he has his Mobile Home Parks In Real Life podcast, as he was just starting that. I consider him a mentor. I was probably one of his first mentees. I was able to call him, ask questions, and find a deal. He’d helped me kind of analyze it.

Finding a mentor in this space is really important. As Brett alluded to, there are some really great podcasts out there. I’ve listened to probably every single one of them all the episodes. We’ve reached out. I think the key is we’ve reached out to people after listening to some of those podcasts in different regards of the business to build relationships and to gain insight on how we can improve our business. That’s been fun.

Brett and I really enjoy meeting with our investors or potential investors and answering those questions. I didn’t realize that it would be so enjoyable when I first started. That’s been really fun, to make those connections.

Andrew: Very nice. So neither of you went to the MHU boot camp?

Ryan: No.

Andrew: That’s one of the things that we’ve just kind of seen a recurring thing of a lot of operators attending that. That’s cool that you guys used the more podcast route and networking route, which is great. Tell me, what has been the toughest hurdle for you guys, thus far, in mobile home park ownership?

Brett: We might answer that differently. For me—I think Ryan alluded to this—I would say the massive capital projects. You mentioned infill being one of the hardest parts. I feel like infill is easy compared to the private utility to public utility conversions. We have three of those in progress right now at three different communities. One community, we have all three utilities that are getting converted—water, sewer, electric.

Having been someone that’s ran multiyear cross-functional projects, these are complicated. They’re complicated because you’re working with several city utilities. One of ours, for example, is just on the fringe, so it’s technically not incorporated in the city. But water is the city utility, sewer is county, electric is city. You’ve got so many different departments, you’ve got fees that you have to pay to each one of them, connections, inspections, permits. There are all these esoteric processes involved in it. It’s complicated.

I think now that I’ve done a couple of them, I know what to look out for and I would know a little bit better what questions to ask upfront. Learning something like that and, frankly, there are not a lot of people in the space that have done that before. There really weren’t a whole lot of resources for me to go learn. You have to kind of be the person that’s okay asking dumb questions and feeling dumb, which I am totally okay being that person on some of these calls. Anyway, that’s probably been the hardest thing for me.

Ryan: I’d say on the infill side, there are so many dominoes that have to fall in order for it to get to the finish line, from the lot prep, from breakdown to your totter. We’ve taken control of some of those efficiencies. I was just telling you Andrew, before we started, we’re actually moving on to our very first home with our very own totter today, which is very exciting.

In the past, you’d have to wait for availability of the transporter, and then things come up and that pushes the timeline. Make sure your lots are prepped and ready to go for that home. The sales process of the home, there are just so many moving pieces to that start to finish of getting a new tenant into a quality home. That’s been challenging and taking a lot of time to figure that out.

Andrew: That’s a big undertaking, yeah. That was one of our pain points, too, finding reliable third-party transporters that we can trust to show up on time and deliver the homes on time. We started our own transport company as well. It’s cool to see that you guys are doing the same thing, because at a certain point you have enough scale where you’re going to be moving enough homes and it just makes sense. I totally get it on that. How many homes have you guys actually moved into communities and got set up and sold?

Ryan: The moving into communities is a higher number than the sold, for sure, right now as we’re working on the rehab. We’re over 23–24 homes or so we’ve transported in since this last fall. It’s when we started in earnest on that project. We’ve sold about three or four so far.

We’re utilizing some different financing companies to help people with bad credit or no credit, and get homeownership through a mortgage that can help their credit in there. Sourcing those financing options for people have been interesting and pretty cool to be able to get people into a home that didn’t think they could ever own their own home.

Andrew: Maybe you could share now some of those companies of who you guys use, because I think other listeners may find value in that.

Ryan: Sure. We’re approved through 21st Mortgage, like a lot of operators. The one that works well for clients that have lower or no credit is PEPs (Performance Equity Partners). They’ve been great to work with. They’re very fast. We can get an approval and a closing within usually about 10 days or so. They have to make enough money, obviously, on their job, but they can get approval with pretty low credit. We’re getting approved through Triad. Barron’s is one that we’ve worked with in the Midwest. I don’t think they’re in every state, but they’re in a few there. Brett, do you have some others top of mind?

Brett: Yeah, I know. To Ryan’s point, PEP has been our favorite so far, just because they’re in most of the states we’re in. They’re not in every state. I think that they’re willing to expand as long as there’s scale to where they’re going. If an operator is interested in bringing them in, I think it’s so worth the conversation.

One of the things I’ve liked about PEP is that they’re more flexible in the home, too. Obviously, these lenders care about the buyer, but also the home. PEP just makes it a little easier with that.

We’re looking at a few other shadow lenders that are just a little bit more regional. One of the banks we use quite a bit for our acquisitions in Springfield, Missouri, has expressed interest in lending on homes for us. Obviously, Legacy too. We’re using their financing program to do the acquisition of the homes.

Andrew: Very nice. Thank you for sharing those. I appreciate that. Brett, let me ask you this one, and then we’ll go and ask the same question to you, Ryan. What are the most important things that passive investors—we’re talking to LPs here—need to look out for when investing into mobile home parks?

Brett: Great question. I can think of a thousand different things here. Where to start? I would say finding someone that’s got a lot of experience in what they’re buying is really crucial, and just making sure that you really vet the operator. Every time, I’m surprised at how many people we’ve had invested with us that aren’t actually interested in meeting me. I reach out and I make sure we meet ahead of time.

There are a lot of people that are just comfortable in just, oh, hey, I’ve heard this is good, I heard you guys are great. I love meeting with investors. I think it’s important to have conversations with the operators as an investor to come in prepared and ask really hard questions of the operator like, what’s your plan? What’s your experience? Have you done this part before? This really complicated thing you guys are trying to do here, have you actually done that before? And if not, how are you going to get the experience or the mentorship or how are you going to make sure that you cover that gap that you’ve never done before?

Don’t be afraid to reach out and meet with several operators, and make sure that you understand and trust, and have a good idea of what they’re going to be doing.

Andrew: One word you said was mentorship and reaching out. I think that’s huge, reaching out to other more experienced operators, even if you don’t know how to handle a certain scenario. Have people you can reach out to that have done it before. Very nice.

Ryan, what do you think are the most important things passive investors need to look out for when investing into mobile home parks?

Ryan: I think just making sure that values align well with the operators that you’re choosing to go with and the principals. As you know, there are some operators out there that their business model might be to go in, buy a community, and raise rents extremely high and maybe not at an affordable rate for the current residents. We don’t believe in that model.

We find value in infilling and gradual rent increases, because we believe in taking care of the residents that live there and improving the communities that they live in, because they’re going to become more sticky in that community, and see the value of what they’re paying us is going towards a better community. That’s not necessarily the case everywhere. Just making sure, if that is your value that you want to take care of affordable housing and support affordable housing, that you’re finding people that do that as well.

One piece that Brett and I do is that we’re with Verivest, a third-party company that they put the sponsors through a due diligence process. They do ongoing portfolio monitoring as well. We’re verified through Verivest. It just adds kind of an additional level of confidence for investors that we’ve been background checked.

They’ve looked through our own personal financials and they can look at our business model as well. Every quarter, we have to agree to adhere to a code of conduct that they have in place just to ensure that we are taking care of the investors and the money that they trust us with.

Andrew: Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. Brett, I’ll ask this one to you. What does the perfect mobile home park look like in your eyes, and why?

Brett: I would say at least 75 lots, preferably more, all city utilities. I like having some vacancies. We have some upside, like we talked about before. Probably 70% occupied, no more than that, in a big metro that we’re already in. Springfield, Missouri, Kansas City. Des Moines are kind of our big markets right now and high cap rate, of course.

The big reason for that is that we’ve got a community as small as 21 pads. I think our largest one is 110 right now. The 110, honestly, is just as easy/hard to manage as the 21-lot. I hear that all the time. People say that, and it’s very true.

Having to see the utilities is a big deal, especially if they’re direct build, because it just takes a huge headache out. I really like it when they’re not direct-build because that’s another upside. When we purchased our communities in Iowa, one of the reasons we liked it is there was a lot of infill. But the bigger upside and the quicker upside was adding Metron meters and being able to submeter utilities very quickly. That was something that just took us a few months to get everything installed and quick upside right there.

We like to centralize our parks into those pockets for scale purposes. We use a lot of same contractors, same managers. But also when we go to exit, we can exit all of those at once as kind of one package sale, which helps compress the cap rate, which obviously improves the intrinsic value of the overall portfolio versus the underlying assets, which is another big deal for us, obviously. That’s my perfect box. I have yet to see exactly that, though.

Andrew: Ryan, would you add or take away anything from Brett?

Ryan: Everything Brett said and one that is in the Boise, Idaho market. It’s close to where we live.

Brett: We’d love to find something in Boise.

Ryan: So we don’t have to jump on a plane for a half day to get to our properties.

Andrew: Sure. Let me ask you, Ryan, tenant-owned homes or park-owned homes, which model do you guys prefer?

Ryan: I definitely prefer the tenant-owned homes. It’s just less time intensive to deal with. We have a number of parks that have a healthy percentage of park-owned homes that we’re working hard on converting over to tenant-owned homes. Those finance programs that we talked about or at least a lease option to purchase (LTO) or something like that.

Andrew: Cool. Awesome. Brett, this one I’ll direct to you. What does the future of mobile home park investing look like? How do you see mobile home parks fitting in with the direction the economy is going? A lot of people that I follow are saying we’re heading into a recession. How do you think mobile home parks are going to weather the storm?

Brett: I think they’re going to be fantastic. You hear a lot of times, people say that mobile home parks are recession-resistant. I think the best example or explanation for that, or at least the simplest anyway, is that as people have income come down or at least the gaps right there are going to move down in housing, where mobile home parks are sort of the last niche for affordable housing, especially for home ownership. It’s sort of that last safety net for people to come to. I think it’s a very safe asset class from that perspective.

As far as interest rates going up, obviously, I think a lot of people are concerned about the interest rate climate right now with what the Feds are doing or kind of the rumors of what the Fed may do over the next year or so. Something I think that people are quick to forget is that as interest rates go up, inflation goes up, which is not necessarily a good thing, but from a rent perspective, we have some rent growth with inflation as well. From an investment perspective, I think that can help protect your asset, where you can lock in rates of today. As the interest rates continue to go up, we have some of that rent buffer that we have from that inflation as well.

Andrew: A little bit of a hedge.

Brett: Exactly.

Andrew: Ryan, do you have any comments on that at all?

Ryan: I think the consolidation of mobile home parks by bigger companies, funds that are purchasing them up, that will continue, obviously. It’s not such a secret niche anymore. There’s still room. There are still plenty of them out there. I think there’s only been about 10% or 15% of them brought up through syndications, funds, or investors like us.

There’s still a lot of opportunity out there for people to purchase and find them. We’re still sourcing our mobile home parks through cold calling efforts and things like that. There are still some deals out there to be found. We’re still excited about that.

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

Bret: I think the easiest way to remember at least is our website. It’s just suncrestcap.com. We have quick contact info there for each of us, but our email addresses are just brett@suncrestcap.com and ryan@suncrestcap.com. We’re both on Facebook and LinkedIn, so reach out anyway that you’re convenient. But again, I think the website is probably the easiest to remember.

Andrew: Awesome. Thank you, guys, so much for coming on the show and sharing a little bit about Suncrest.

Brett: Absolutely. Thanks for having us.

Ryan: Thanks.

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