Listen on Apple Podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kevin-bupp-16-years-of-mobile-home-park-investing/id1520681893?i=1000723889861

SHOW NOTES

Welcome back to The Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, hosted by Andrew Keel!
In today’s episode, Andrew sits down with industry leader Kevin Bupp, Founder & CEO of Sunrise Capital Investors.

If you’ve been tuning in for a while, you might remember Kevin’s appearance back in Episode 18 (2021). Now, he’s back to share fresh lessons and new perspectives gained from four more years of growing a nationwide mobile home park portfolio.

With more than 16 years in mobile home park investing, Kevin Bupp has become a recognized voice in the industry. His firm, Sunrise Capital Investors, manages communities across the U.S. while also expanding into parking facility investments. Beyond operations, Kevin is the bestselling author of The Cashflow Investor and the host of the top-rated Real Estate Investing for Cash Flow Podcast.

In this episode, Andrew Keel and Kevin Bupp dive into Kevin’s mobile home park investing journey and the lessons learned in the field, including:

• The mobile home park deal that got away — and what it taught Kevin Bupp about risk, discipline, and timing.
• How Kevin’s mobile home park underwriting and approach to private utilities has evolved over time.
• The story Andrew Keel uncovers about Kevin Bupp’s very first mobile home park acquisition in Lovejoy, GA, and the challenges that came with it.
• Kevin’s mission, discussed with Andrew Keel, to break the stigma around mobile home parks while providing affordable housing solutions.
• Why Kevin Bupp is diversifying into parking garages and parking lots as part of his long-term investment strategy.
• A fun, rapid-fire Q&A round where Andrew Keel puts Kevin Bupp on the spot with questions generated by AI ChatGPT.
  

Whether you’re exploring passive investing in mobile home parks, looking for insider insights into mobile home park syndication, or simply curious about what it takes to scale in this niche asset class, this candid conversation between Andrew Keel and Kevin Bupp is a must-listen.

About Andrew Keel
Andrew Keel is the owner of Keel Team, LLC, a Top 50 Owner of Manufactured Housing Communities with over 3,250 lots under management. His team currently manages more than 50 manufactured housing communities across 15+ states.

Andrew specializes in turning around under-managed manufactured housing communities by implementing proven systems to maximize occupancy while reducing operating costs. His expertise includes:

• Bringing in mobile homes to fill vacant lots.
• Implementing utility bill-back programs.
• Improving overall management and operating efficiencies in mobile home parks.
  

These strategies significantly boost both asset value and net operating income. Learn more at keelteam.com

Check out Andrew’s FREE e-book: “The Top 20 Things You Need to Know Before You Start Investing in MHPs” — available on our website: https://keelteam.com/top-20-things-learned-from-mobile-home-park-investing/

Andrew has been featured on some of the top podcasts in the manufactured housing space. Listen to his most recent interviews here: keelteam.com/podcast-links.

To successfully implement his management strategy, Andrew’s team often relocates on-site during the first several months of ownership. Find out more about Andrew’s story at andrewkeel.com

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Want to see mobile home park projects in progress? Follow us on Instagram: @passivemhpinvesting for photos and videos from our latest acquisitions.

Talking Points:

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

02:25 – Kevin Bupp’s mobile home park deal that got away

07:25 – 16 years of mobile home park investing — expensive lessons Kevin has learned

10:00 – Private utilities and how Kevin got comfortable working with them

12:21 – How “back-of-the-napkin” math has changed over the years

15:10 – Gut versus spreadsheet

17:35 – Kevin’s first park in Lovejoy, GA

23:58 – Making a dent in the housing crisis and changing the stigma around mobile home parks

30:55 – Investing in parking garages and parking lots

31:45 – Florida vs. New York, busting mobile home park myths, clean mobile home communities, and mobile home park investing underwriting

33:46 – SCI Growth and Income Fund 4

35:35 – Conclusion

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

Links & Mentions from This Episode:

Kevin Bupp’s Official Website: https://www.kevinbupp.com/

Kevin Bupp on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbupp/

Sunrise Capital Investors: https://sunrisecapitalinvestors.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. I’m your host, Andrew Keel. Today I’m excited to welcome back Kevin Bupp, founder and CEO of Sunrise Capital Investors.

This is Kevin’s second time on the show. He first joined us back in episode 18 in 2021, so we’re thrilled to have him back. Now that it’s August of 2025, Kevin comes with over 16 years of experience in mobile home park investing. He has built a nationwide portfolio that includes mobile home parks and parking lot facilities. He’s also the host of the top ranked Real Estate Investing for Cashflow Podcast, and he’s the bestselling author of The Cashflow Investor. Get your copy at kevinbupp.com. Welcome back to the show, Kevin. How you’ve been?

Kevin: Andrew, my friend. Appreciate you having me back now. I can’t believe it’s actually episode 18, you said, 2001. I feel like it’s been such a long time. It has, right? The whole world has changed in those last four years.

Andrew: So much has changed. It’s so crazy. I’m just thrilled to have your friendship. I know we’ve spoken probably once a quarter for that whole four year period, so I appreciate you.

Kevin: Agreed, man. Yeah, I appreciate you as well. It looks like you’re doing great. Life is good for you up in North Carolina now, so congrats on the move and just the change of scenery. It’s always a good thing.

Andrew: It is, yeah. We’re loving it up here. I did something a little different than all my other podcasts for this one. I went into ChatGPT yesterday and I typed in, what questions should I ask the famous mobile home park investor, Kevin Bupp, and the response it gave me, Kevin, just blew my socks off. It was all these answers, all these really good questions. Then at the very bottom it said, if you prompt me again, I’ll create a list of curve ball questions to ask.

Obviously I started there. I just said, hold on, we’re going to just scrap all these other ones and go straight to the curve ball questions. If you don’t mind, if you haven’t seen Kevin’s first interview, he talks a lot about his background and his story back in 2021. In this episode, I’m going to try to catch Kevin off guard with some curve ball questions about mobile home park investing. First question on the list was, what’s a deal you still think about at night not because you bought it, but because you passed on it?

Kevin: Boy. Yeah, I know which one immediately comes to mind. There’s a number of them. I’m sure you probably feel the same way. Looking back, we’ve been buying since 2011. The world was very different back then. You could buy parks a lot cheaper. If we weren’t buying things at 10 caps, we would pass on them even great properties. Looking back, I wish I’d have bought. Probably not everything that we passed on, but probably 90% would’ve worked out incredibly well even when I thought they were overpriced 10 years ago.

There is one, and it was actually the first park I ever got under contract. It’s interesting how it all played out. This is when I got introduced to the niche. I was excited about it. Looking at a lot of deals, making offers. This one actually came up on LoopNet.

It’s 2011, it was here in Florida. It was up in Palatka, Florida, which is up near St. Augustine area over on the other coast. It was listed by a broker. I forget how many sites, it’s been so long now. I think it was 90 sites. It was listed at $599,000.

I went and visited the property and it’s like your typical story. Mom and pop owner for 45 years. Literally had all the keys hanging in his office. His desk was literally a massive pile of papers. I think there was maybe about 15 vacant homes in the community. It was city water, city sewer. It was right in the middle of town, so it was a great location. I got it under contract. It was owner financing, I think 20% down.

Andrew: Did you say 599 like $599,000?

Kevin: $599,000.

Andrew: That’s it?

Kevin: Yeah.

Andrew: For 90 lots.

Kevin: This is 2011. This wasn’t a popular niche at that point. Maybe it was 80 lots. It was somewhere between 80 and 90 lots. It was under a hundred still. I think it had maybe seven or eight vacant lots. It had 15 vacant homes that are in really rough shape, I mean literally have leaky roofs for many years. Installation’s falling down, basically demos. Maybe a few that were salvageable, but these were old homes already. Trying to pump $15,000-$20,000 back into them, you’d have probably lost.

I got it under contract, great owner financing terms. It was a hundred grand down or somewhere along those lines. I think it was 20%, so a hundred grand down. Some attractive terms and I got cold feet. I got cold feet for a number of reasons. The main one was the lot rents in this park were I think $180 a month.

Theoretically understood the business model. The market rents in this area were $350, at the time. Now they’re probably $700, but they’re $350 at the time. Theoretically understood that basically. All I really had to do is get the rents up to $275, and this thing was a knock-it-out-of-the-park home run. I wouldn’t even had a rehab or do anything with those vacant homes. This thing would’ve been just a crush, 20% cash for cash return type stuff. Basically what Frank and Dave were teaching at the time. I was just trying to follow their model.

I got cold feet of what was going to happen because what might happen when I raised the rent, basically a hundred dollars. Even though they were paying half of what the market was, I was still going to bring it up to below market. I got cold feet because I thought there would be a mass exodus.

Back then, even though Frank and Dave had a community, there wasn’t a lot of resources. There weren’t other park owners for me to really talk to, get comfortable, and just get me comfortable in the fact that other than Frank, that no one’s going to leave. If you lose somebody, they probably should have gone anyway. You’re going to basically retain the majority.

I passed on it. Within two weeks, I was like, eh, this is not going to be a good fit for me for X, Y, Z reasons, whatever excuse I gave. I backed out of the deal. Two weeks later, I woke up in a cold sweat and had the realization that I’m an idiot. I called the broker back up and it was under contract, and that person closed on it.

Funny enough, just in a roundabout way four years later, I told the same story on my podcast, and a guy emailed me. Basically, it was the guy that bought it. He’s the guy that bought it, and I interviewed him on the show. We talked about the business model and what he did, and he had just sold it. He had just turned it around and then sold it.

If I recall, I don’t remember all the numbers, but I think he sold it for $2.7 or $2.8 million four or five years later. Again, he bought it for $600,000. He basically had the same terms I had. He put probably a few hundred grand into it. I probably put $300,000, so he was into it for a million bucks call. He sold for $2.8 million, and then he traded again. I followed it thereafter. Traded again for I think $4.5 million maybe just four years ago, give or take.

Anyway, that one, thankfully I let that one go. I realized it two weeks later, but I was too slow. I shot myself in the foot, but we got another one tied up. Life turned out well, but I regret that one.

Andrew: Wow. That’s awesome. It sounds like Frank’s Glenhaven that he talked about, the one in Dallas, except he actually did buy it, but no. The first one, you weren’t ready yet. It’s okay. It took a little bit. The next question’s really good here, Kevin. Which lesson in your career cost you the most money to learn?

Kevin: Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s probably a lot of them, but I’d say one of the bigger ones is underestimating the cost and complexity around a large infill model. There’s a lot to it. It’s not just, hey, man, all you got to do is call up Clayton or call up whoever and order some homes, truck’s going to drag them in there, you call up the local setup crew, pick from one of the three that are out there, and they’re going to show up on time. They’re going to treat you well, treat you fair, and they’re going to do the job right. Life is good, right? You’re going to sell that home shortly thereafter and get at least what you have into it, and now you got this new person living there and paying full market lot rent. That’s how it’s pitched.

Andrew: It seems easy.

Kevin: Yeah, right. I think that’s the lesson. It’s not easy. It’s not easy at all. I wouldn’t say we ever lost money by buying something and actually paying for the future value based on us actually being successful with the infill. We actually, for many, many years, up until probably three years ago, we really steered clear of major infill projects. For that reason, we probably left a lot of money on the table, deals that we passed on that we should have bought, that we could have probably actually knocked out of the park.

We were pretty late to the game with putting the emphasis and the focus on building out the team and the infrastructure necessary to run a successful, large scale info model, which I know you guys have been great at. You actually were probably one that I would lean back on as far as, this is how you do it right. I know you took it into your own hands because a lot of the frustrations as you were trying to do infills, trying to find reliable, setting crews and transporters, and you went and bought trucks. You took the prob and found the solution for it.

A big lesson learned there. Again, we never really lost money because we bought something or overpaid for it and then just failed miserably at the infill, but we left a lot of money on the table because we passed on deals. That would’ve been a great opportunity.

Andrew: Thank you for the kind words. Yeah. Infill is still tough. We still make mistakes. We still have hurdles. We bought a park in Georgia, had 16 homes we infilled, and we put decks on all of them. The city came back and said, hey, we’re not going to issue the certificate of occupancies because all of your decks don’t meet the code of how they require it. You got to redo all the decks and everything. It’s like the little things that you’d think that at this point you’d have ironed out, but every municipality’s a little bit different. It’s difficult, but it can be very fruitful, very beneficial when you get that occupancy up.

Here’s the next section. It’s called Unpopular Opinions. What’s a belief you hold about mobile home parks that most other successful investors would disagree with?

Kevin: I don’t know that they would disagree with, but I know that there’s a number of groups that steer clear of it. It’s private utilities. I know there’s a few groups specifically that literally will not buy anything that have private utilities. That’s just their business model and it’s not right, it’s not wrong. Early on, I got really comfortable with understanding private utilities, waste for our treatment plants, septic systems, wells, and I think getting comfortable with that.

Earlier on, we bought some great opportunities that others maybe passed on or we just didn’t have as much competition because the private utilities were in place. I think that changed quite a bit today. I think there’s such a limited supply of opportunities out there that groups that may have historically shine away from private utilities have now reconsidered that in order for them to continue growing or expand their footprint. They need to really look hard at private utility makeups and find a way to get comfortable with them if they want to continue growing their business.

We did that early on. I think the second park or third park we bought was at least on private sewer. Today we own a handful of parks that are on either wells, wastewater treatment plants, or septics. We got plenty of others that are on public utilities. In a perfect world, Andrew, everything would be on public utility. Everything would be direct billed. We wouldn’t even have to go do submeters, do bill backs, or anything like that. Again, I think you got to get comfortable with the wide variety and wide spectrum of utility makeups. The only thing that we don’t own and we’ve never owned, and I’m not opposed to owning it, we just haven’t had the opportunity to buy something that’s got a lagoon set up.

Andrew: Yeah. That’s good to know. We started only buying public utility stuff. Over the last few years, very similar to what you’re saying, we had to buy some stuff and pivot. We have some septic and wells now. No lagoons or treatment plants, but again, it’s just getting comfortable with them and understanding the systems. It was just part of our criteria. We just didn’t even look at those deals because we didn’t have that experience. That’s awesome. What’s one rule of thumb in mobile home park investing that you think is dead wrong?

Kevin: I think the back of the napkin math has changed significantly over the years. I know probably back when you were going through some trainings, trying to run, if it has public utilities, use a 30% expense ratio. If it’s got private utilities, run on a 40% expense ratio. I think that still floats around out there today. I see brokers that just do quick and dirty writeups on maybe an off market deal. To this day, maybe I’m wrong, maybe we’re running things too rich on our side, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything in our portfolio that’s operated less than the 35% expense ratio. If you’re doing everything right and you’re putting money back in, you’re setting aside necessary operational reserves and repairing things when they break.

Again, I’ve never seen anything that’s operated on some of these crazy low operating expense ratios that get pitched. I’ve even seen some come out that are in the twenties. I’m like, okay, I don’t know how you get there. Factor in tax reassessments, factor in recapture loss on water and sewer bill backs. There’s a litany of things that go into the equation, the cost of payroll. I think the cost of having onsite managers has risen significantly over the years.

I remember back when you and I were going through training. It’s like, hey, all you really need is a greeter. You give them free lot rent and they’re fine. That might exist in some parks, but we pay our folks a living wage. They have opportunities for benefits, healthcare, and things like that. You’re not getting that for $7 an hour or minimum wage. You got to pay a living wage to these folks.

Once you start adding all that up, the expense ratios tend to veer more in the 40% to 45% range. Sometimes maybe even higher if it’s a weird anomaly where there’s high real estate taxes or something like that. Anyway, that would be my answer to that one.

Andrew: Yeah, you’re exactly right. In Illinois, we have the same property in North Carolina. We’d have $6000 a year property taxes. In Illinois, it’s $30,000 a year. It’s crazy. Every property’s unique. You can’t just put a blanket expense ratio on it. I agree. That’s a really good rule of thumb that a lot of people teach, the expense ratio piece.

Kevin: I think if you do that, you’re going to either get deals accepted that once you actually dive deep into underwriting, you’re going to realize that you’re not able to pay the offer that just got accepted. Just to avoid that situation, try not to use the quick and dirty. Unless you already own something nearby and you’re very comfortable with the operational expenses of your other park is, then that’s a different story. But if it’s a new market, it’s new to you, just dive deeper into the analysis and don’t make offers on back of the napkin.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good tip there. All right. Gut calls versus spreadsheets. Tell me about the last time your gut told you one thing, but your spreadsheet told you the opposite. Which one won?

Kevin: Yeah, I think the gut always wins. We just had a deal. It was last year. We own in Maryland, and this was a really expensive submarket. I’m not going to give the exact details, but median home price, $380,000, two-bed rents, $2000, just all the demographics that we look for, where there’s a huge need for affordable housing. It was a fragmented park, so it’s 300 spaces and we were buying 170 of them. It started out as a subdivision 40 years ago.

I don’t know the entire story, but basically the original developer started selling lots, and now it became a fragmented. Half the community owned their own individual deed lots. Literally the people that owned the mobile homes, and then the other 150 or 158 that we were buying, they’re spread throughout the park, some side by side, but others  spread throughout the park.

On paper, this thing looked like a home run. Just no way to lose. As we drove it, we realized there’s a couple of factors there. (1) The quality of the individually owned properties, 70% were a train wreck like trash everywhere, yards overgrown, just a mess. We would never be able to control those individuals. This small town, it was a small little village, didn’t have their own code enforcement. There’s like two police officers in this town. They didn’t have the budget. It wasn’t even a big enough town that they have code enforcement.

There was no way to ever even get the support of the local township to help clean this mess up. There was a homeless encampment back in the woods behind some of these homes. It was a mess. The spreadsheet told us that we were going to make a killing. My gut told me and just visually seeing it that that would’ve been an uphill battle. I don’t think we would’ve ever made it to the top. We’d never been able to plant the flag at the top and say, we won. This thing was a great deal and was worth the time, energy, and effort. We moved on and passed on it.

Andrew: I think that’s a good decision. We had one of those similar deals, and it was fragmented like that. I think you just can’t control the odd ones if they have dogs or they have fences. It’s just an odd one. The financing too was what ultimately made us pull the plug because the agency lenders didn’t like those type of fragmented parks. That’s good.

There’s one on a war story. Which problem or war story in your portfolio made you lose the most sleep? And how did it end?

Kevin: Yeah, war story. I don’t know if I lost sleep on this one. This is the beginning stages of it, but I’ll share it because I think it’s a pretty cool story and it’s got a cool outcome. It was the first park that we ever bought. It was in Georgia. It was in the Atlanta, MSA. It was in a little town called Lovejoy. It was an incorporated little town. They had their own mayor and their own chief of police. The population was 10,000-12,000 people, but it was inside of the Greater Atlanta, MSA.

We bought this property. It was an REO. When I went to see it, literally, it had 34 lots, 29 homes inside this park. Of those 29 homes, only one was occupied. All the rest had been managed by the receivership for two years. For whatever reason, they vacated the units and literally got rid of all the decks and all the stairs. I don’t know the strategy behind it, but there was one person left in here living in there. They’re paying $450 a month. It was just a rental. These had all been park-owned rentals.

We were buying it. I was excited about the basis we were buying it at, so I was super pumped about it. Before we got into contract and while we were in due diligence, the mayor’s office had just built this brand new office. It was where the chief of police and their staff reside as well as the mayor. It was literally cattycorner to this park. They would have to drive past this community every day to get into their office.

As part of our strategy normally, we like to go meet the local town council, especially if it’s a big turnaround. If we feel like it’s got a bad reputation, we want to share the strategy, how we’re going to improve upon it. We’re here to support the local community and just want to make sure you guys have a direct line to us. If you had any questions along the way, you’ll feel free to reach out.

Anyway, we scheduled a time. My partner and I scheduled a time to go meet with the mayor. We thought it was just going to be the mayor. He brought literally the entire staff. There was nine of them in there, chief police was in there. They were in there when we got into his office. We sit down and we look around his office. He had a stuffed box on the wall, he had a rifle hanging, just a bunch of odd ornaments around the office.

This guy rolls in. Mayor Bobby Cartwright is his name. He’s 6 ‘3”, bald, big in a handlebar mustache, very threatening figure. It was very fitting. I saw rifles and stuff, foxes on the wall. He sat down and introduced himself, shook our hand, and he said, what do you got? Just basically go ahead and give us your sales pitch. We went into it because I was excited, just excited about all the great things we were going to do, the money we were going to inject back into this blighted community across the street that they had to look at every day.

He let us ramble on for10 or 15 minutes and then we stopped. I was like, we’d love to answer any questions you have. He looked at us and he said, Mr. Bupp, I just want to let you know that it’s been my God-given duty for the last five years to try to shut that park down. It’s been a blighted part of our community for many, many years. It’s been vacant now for three years. It’s a cause of a lot of crime. It’s a drain in our resources. He just went in this whole diatribe of like how bad this place was and that literally it was his God-given duty to make sure that this thing never opened back up again, was never repopulated, and that he was going to shut it down for good.

He suggested that we take our investment money and go find another community in town to go invested in. Not the receptive audience I thought it was going to be. That ended the conversation. I literally did not know. I did not have a rebuttal. I was not prepared for that. We graciously shook his hand, thanked him for his time. We walked out. This was our first park.

I was pretty broke back then. I had lost everything in 2008. I had to make this deal work. This was the first property that was going to rebuild what we’ve ultimately been able to build today. I looked at my partner. We were both putting $75,000 of our personal money into this deal. It was a $20,000 park. It was like, what do we do? I’m like, I don’t know. I still think that if we just do what we say we’re going to do, why in the world would they ever shut this down? If we actually follow through and do what we say we’re going to do, we make this nice and we attract good people here. We did that.

We just gave the code enforcement officer our direct phone number and said, hey, I get this thing’s been a drain. We’ve had squatters in here, we’ve had people dumping stuff. Just call us if you see anything. The chief police said, just call us and we’ll work with you. We’ll be here to support you guys in this initiative to clean this up. We did that. I never heard from the mayor. I thought we were going to get a lot of pushback. We just went on with our plan, did our thing, cleaned it up.

A year later, I get a call from the mayor. I didn’t have the number saved on my phone. He was like, Mr. Bupp, this is Mayor Bobby Cartwright, Lovejoy, calling to basically apologize and let you know that I’m sorry for the way I treated you a year ago. I apologize for the conversation and altercation that we had in my office. I thought that mobile home parks were the problem. I’ve come to realize after this past year of watching what you guys have done that that is not the problem. In fact, we’ve got some great residents living there. In fact, one of my staff members actually lives in your community.

Complete 180, and I actually got him to write a recommendation letter on letterhead, basically saying as much. We’ve used that on a number of occasions where we’ve had a pushback from other communities that we were going in trying to buy parks that were run down and needed turned around. Anyway, I know that was a long-winded story, my friend, but I thought it was very fitting for deep.

Andrew: No, that’s awesome. Yeah, I love how you remember his name, Mr. Bobby Cartwright.

Kevin: That’s right. I still have the letter, man. I don’t think I’ve used it recently, but we used it for many years. Again, we didn’t lose, but that was a deal. Maybe I lost sleep back then. That had to work. That was literally my only money I had that I carried through and salvaged from the wreck of 2008. I had it worked. Literally it could not work, so we still took the chance, took the risk, and pushed forward. It was a huge win.

Andrew: Kudos for you because I think a lot of people would’ve walked away. We have parks where when the city says that it’s going to be really hard to infill and things like that, and now I want to inspect every home or I’m not going to approve it when you move it in. Sometimes we shy away from that instead of just going at it. Kudos to you, man. That’s awesome.

I want to make sure we get to these other questions because there’s some really good ones in here. Legacy and big picture When you retire, what would you want the headline about your career to be?

Kevin: That’s a great one. I think that one of our big hair audacious goals internally is to make a dent in the affordable housing crisis and basically do that by serving 15,000 families with home ownership. We’re on our way there. We say make a dent because to think that we can solve the affordable housing crisis that exists in the country is full hearted, but I know that we can make a dent in it. I think that by helping 15,000 families buy their home, whether it’s their first home or their second home, but buy an affordable home in a clean, safe, and quiet community where they can raise their family in peace and send them to good schools, I think that’s us helping to make a dent in the affordable housing crisis. Some variation of that in the headline I think would be a pretty cool thing.

Andrew: Yeah, 15,000 is a ton. That’s an awesome goal. If you could magically change one thing about the mobile home park industry overnight, what would it be?

Kevin: I think the negative stigma that still exists. I think it’s gotten better over time. As you and I both know, a lot of municipalities all lump us in the bad bucket. Especially you and I, we buy communities and they’re in great markets, but a lot of times they just haven’t had any capital to put back into them. They haven’t had love. They hadn’t had that capital injection or any anyone that really has cared for it for a number of years, sometimes even decades.

For that reason, I think we almost always just get lumped in that bad bucket, just we don’t want you here anymore, you’re the wrong element, you attract the wrong people to our community and to our neighborhood. Again, I think it changed. Having professional operators like yourself, our group, and many others out there that have come and actually put the money, the love, and the care into these communities has gone a long way. But still, there is a negative stigma. I’m sure that you see it all the time as well. I wish that would go away.

I always use the comparison of, for those that aren’t familiar with mobile home parks and that don’t realize that not all these communities are on the wrong side of the tracks, we’re no different than apartment complexes and single family home neighborhoods. You go to any city in this country where you live, where I live now, and there are apartment complexes that are in the wrong part of town where you don’t want to go to during daylight hours. There are also apartment complexes that are in the good, hardworking parts of town, just blue collar folks that want to send their kids still to good schools, they want to pay their bills on time, they want a clean, safe, and quiet place to live.

You’ve got class A stuff, white collar stuff that are in urban core areas, high rises, they got multiple swimming pools, amenities. Same with single family home neighborhoods,you got all three elements there. Mobile home park’s the same thing, you got all three elements. For some reason we all get lumped into bad one, unfortunately. I hope that goes away at some point in time.

Andrew: Yeah, that would be nice. I think with the new capital coming in, people are more interested in giving the benefit of the doubt, but there’s still some of those that are just  rundown. It’s just nature of the beast. Like you said, any asset class. If you look at apartments, there’s still those lower tier, just the bad landlords that aren’t taking care of them, so that’s good.

Next section says, risk and resilience. Which deal in your career looked like a surefire win until it wasn’t?

Kevin: Yeah. There’s one that comes to mind that we sold a couple years ago. Honestly, I’ve looked back on it and I’ve tried to reevaluate it many different ways using data, using gut feel, and I think I would’ve bought it again. For the life of me, everything went wrong in the community. We had a major poaching problem of our homes leaving the community over a period of three years. We lost 150 space community, give or take. I think we had 25 homes, maybe even a little bit more than that over a period of three years that left the park. Even trying to stop it was very difficult.

Andrew: Was it one individual or was it just a bunch of different scenarios?

Kevin: It was for the most part. Long story short, they had a piece of land on the outskirts of town, and it was individually deeded lots. Someone had inherited it, they went in and started selling off these lots for  $20,000 a piece, and they were zoned for mobile homes. They literally put an emphasis.

I’d say that we had the biggest negative impact of folks leaving compared to other parks nearby. That kicked our ass. There was a litany of other things, infrastructure. We had major challenges there with infrastructure. The city was very difficult to deal with on the water. We had a main water meter at the front of the park that it literally broke on a couple of different occasions, the primary meter. It literally took like a day or two to get it shut off, especially the equipment was required and our bill each time was $60,000. All these things that just stacked up, that continued happening over a couple of years.

Looking back, it was inside the city limits. It was literally two miles down the road from Oklahoma State University. There’s 60,000 students there. The demographics are strong. It’s an hour and a half North Oklahoma City, city water, city sewer, nice layout. Everything pointed direction of like, there’s no way that we can’t be successful here, but it kicked our ass nonstop over and over and over. It was a big breath of fresh air when we finally sold that property and just like, let’s move on. Let’s cut the losses, call it a day, and move on.

Andrew: Isn’t it crazy? Sometimes the person you sold it to may have a completely different experience. We sold a couple properties and we’re the same way. Things just  went wrong, then we sold it, and they’ve had a good experience with it. Haven’t had the turnover we had and stuff. It sounds like that was just a bad luck situation right there.

Kevin: Yeah. This is not to put the blame anywhere because I think it was just a tough community in general, not from a resident standpoint because the residents were good for the most part. It wasn’t high crime or anything like that. It was just your typical run the mill, down the fairway, blue collar, hardworking folks. It had a nice pool, had a nice clubhouse. It had a lot of the elements.

We have a team that’s worked for us, community managers. They’ve literally worked with me for 11 or 12 years now. They’ve  become our traveling rovers. They’ve been operating the one community for four years now that we put them in. Historically they had always been the ones. Whenever we had something that needed fixed, let’s put the best managers that we have. The wife is the manager. The husband is the do it all. He can do everything. He’s good at running crews.

We sent them there and they lived there for two years. They’re like, I don’t know what to tell you, we don’t have the solution here. This is an uphill battle. We can’t get it going the right direction. That was a tough one.

Looking back, I’m like, I don’t know what the hell the problem was there in that town. We had a hard time selling homes. We couldn’t even give brand new homes away. It was so weird.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s a tough one. If the mobile home park asset class suddenly disappeared, how would you make your next $10 million?

Kevin: Yeah, that’s a good question. Hopefully it will never disappear. I think that it will be here for many, many decades to stay. For those that don’t know, we do invest in one of their asset class, not as long as we’ve been investing in mobile home parks, but it’s parking, so parking garages, parking lots. That makes up a decent portion of our portfolio.

We love that asset class for some of the same reasons why we love mobile home parks. It’s very fragmented. It hasn’t been consolidated yet. There’s still a good bit of inefficiencies in that sector with the advancement of technology, dynamic pricing models, and things like that. We’re really bullish on that sector. If mobile home parks just vanished overnight, I would just probably put a hundred percent of our resources and efforts into growing that side of the portfolio.

Andrew: Awesome. All right. I got a little lightning round here with five questions I want to ask you, and I just want you to just say the first thing that comes to mind. Is that cool?

Kevin: Okay. Yeah.

Andrew: All right. The first question is, if you could own every mobile home park in one state, which one would it be?

Kevin: Florida.

Andrew: One state you’ll never buy a mobile home park in and why?

Kevin: New York. Regulatory restrictions and just tough to do business in.

Andrew: Biggest mobile home park myth you want to bust in one sentence.

Kevin: That rentals are great.

Andrew: When you hear mobile home park, what’s the first image that pops into your head?

Kevin: A community full of single wides. Nice clean, nice sign, trees, playground, happy families.

Andrew: That’s good. If lot rent caps become law, what’s your move?

Kevin: I think just to underwrite to it, that’s all. If I like the state, we like the market, and we can buy it knowing that we can still hit whatever metrics we need to hit with the caps in place, then we’ll buy it. If we can’t, we move on.

Andrew: All right, that’s the end of the lightning round. That was pretty harmless, right?

Kevin: Yeah. Good questions though.

Andrew: At the end, it was like, if you want me to, I can make these spicy. It was like, do you want spicy lightning round questions or do you just want lightning round questions?

Kevin: Were they spicy or not?

Andrew: These were not spicy. The other ones were too much. That’s all I had for today, dude. I hope you enjoyed coming on. This was great. I really appreciate your time coming on the show. It’s always good just learning from you and hearing about your experiences. I appreciate you.

Kevin: Yeah, same brother. Always good to catch up with you and appreciate you having me on. I know you’re just getting back to the swing or having a great summer and just spending time with the family. Hopefully this was a good warm up to get the show up and rolling again.

Andrew: Definitely. Would you mind just sharing a little bit about how our listeners could get ahold of you and then maybe about your growth and income fund four before you drop off, if you don’t mind?

Kevin: Yeah. If you want to learn about our current offering, it’s called SCI Growth & Income Fund 4, you can learn about it by going to our website. It’s investwithsunrise.com. We’ve got webinars and case studies. You can see what deals are currently in our current fund. That fund will be wrapping up here at the end of this year, probably towards the end of Q3 here. We’ll be rolling out a new fund Q4 of this year, which will be SCI Growth and Income Fund 5.

Our funds are pretty, again, down the fairway with the only exception that the last couple funds we’ve done have been a mixture of parking and mobile home parks. Typically there’s one, two, sometimes three parking assets inside of respective fund. It’s normally overweighted with MHC, so it’s  an MHC fund with a little bit of parking. The growth a lot of times comes from the mobile home parks because there’s a lot of value add stuff we do, whereas a lot of the parking or cash flowing day one. They are core plus type assets that are throwing off distributions from day one. They’re really the income side of the equation, so it’s a really nice complimentary mix there.

As far as finding me, you can track me down, again, through investwithsunrise.com, that website. I’m pretty active on social, more specifically LinkedIn. If you want to just reach out to me through LinkedIn, you normally can get a hold of me there. My last name’s unique and I’ve always joke and say that Andrew, my last name is pretty unique in that if you just go to Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn and type in Kevin Bupp, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one that comes up.

Andrew: You’re unique in that aspect. You and Bobby Cartwright, those two names are pretty easy to remember.

Kevin: Everyone’s going to go look him up. He should look him up. Look at the image on Google when you type in that Mayor Bobby Cartwright, Georgia. Tell me if I was accurate in my description.

Andrew: The handlebar mustache. I’m going to look for it. That’s it for today, folks. Thank you all so much for tuning in. If you got value outta this episode, please consider leaving a review. It helps us get more listeners and helps more listeners find the show. Yeah, that’s it. Thanks.