The pitch is compelling: buy a mobile home park with vacant lots, fill those lots with homes, watch your income climb. Simple arbitrage. Predictable math.

Except it’s not simple. And the math breaks down faster than most operators expect.

In 2026, we’re watching a quiet wave of distress hit mobile home park operators who bought between 2022 and 2024. Not because the asset class is broken — it isn’t. But because infill projections made during underwriting didn’t survive contact with reality. Parks projected to stabilize in 12 months are sitting at 18, 24, even 30 months and still not there.

We’ve done infill across dozens of parks. Here’s what’s actually happening — and what works.

The Three Infill Killers Nobody Warns You About

1. The Home Sourcing Problem

New manufactured homes sound affordable until you price the full project. Structure costs have averaged $123,000, but by the time you add delivery, setup, utility hookups, and a concrete pad or runners, you’re at $150,000 to $250,000 per lot — sometimes more. That’s not cheap housing anymore.

Used homes are the smarter play, but sourcing is a grind. The best deals come from repo companies, estate sales, and owners relocating out of state. You have to build those relationships before you need them, not when a lot has been vacant for six months and your LP is asking questions on your quarterly call.

What most operators do: post an ad on Craigslist and wait. What works: proactive sourcing pipelines built before the park closes.

2. The Financing Gap That Kills Demand

You’ve found homes. You’ve got prospects who want to live in your park. Then they hit the financing wall.

Manufactured homes on leased land are almost always financed via chattel loans — and chattel loans are brutal. Interest rates between 8% and 13%. Shorter terms than conventional mortgages. Approval rates significantly lower than site-built home mortgages. One resident described it this way: “I was looking at paying $617,000 over 25 years on a $215,000 loan. That’s not a mortgage — that’s a punishment.”

If your residents can’t get financing they can actually qualify for, your lots stay empty. Period.

The fix is to get proactive about financing. Build a preferred lender list. Partner with a CDFI or credit union that specializes in chattel loans at better terms. Some operators have gone further and set up seller-financing arrangements for residents who can demonstrate ability to pay. This isn’t charity — it’s vacancy reduction.

3. Permitting Purgatory

This one catches even experienced operators off guard. Placing a new manufactured home on a lot isn’t like furnishing an apartment. It requires permits — from municipalities that often don’t prioritize this kind of work, with inspectors who may have never done a manufactured home inspection, in counties where the process isn’t documented anywhere publicly accessible.

We’ve seen simple home placements take four to six months due to permitting delays alone. Multiply that across ten lots and you’ve blown a year of cash flow projections.

The solution is permit pre-work. Before you buy a park — or immediately after close — map the permitting process for that county. Build the relationship with the inspections department. Understand what they require, how long it takes, and what common rejection reasons are. This upfront work can cut your permitting timeline by 50% or more.

The Infill Tracker You Actually Need

Most operators track infill on a spreadsheet. Most of those spreadsheets are wrong by week three.

What you need is a real pipeline: lot-by-lot status tracking, home sourcing status, financing status, permit status, projected move-in date, and actual move-in date. When you can see your whole infill funnel at once, you can identify where the bottleneck is and attack it.

If you’re managing 30+ vacant lots across multiple parks, this isn’t optional — it’s survival. Our Mobile Home Park Due Diligence Playbook includes the actual infill tracking template we use across our portfolio.

The Timeline Truth

Here’s what nobody tells you at the conference: realistic infill, done well, takes two to three years to stabilize a park with significant vacancy. Not 12 months. Not 18 months. Two to three years of consistent execution.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. A park that goes from 60% to 90% occupied is worth dramatically more — the value creation is real and significant. But if your underwriting assumed 18 months and you’re at month 20 with 40% of lots still empty, you have a capital problem, a communication problem with your LPs, and a decision to make.

Plan for the real timeline. Protect your cash reserves. Communicate honestly with your investors. And build the home sourcing, financing, and permitting systems before you need them.

What Keel Team Does Differently

After operating 50+ mobile home parks across multiple states, we’ve built these systems the hard way — by watching them break. Our infill playbook now includes:

• A preferred home dealer network across our target states
• Pre-negotiated chattel loan programs for residents
• County-by-county permit process documentation
• A lot-by-lot infill tracker updated weekly

The result is infill timelines that run closer to 18 months than 36, and LP communications built on real data, not projections.

If you’re an operator struggling with infill — or underwriting a park with significant vacancy — the systems above are what separate operators who build value from those who tread water. This is one of the most solvable problems in the mobile home park space, and the operators who crack it early capture disproportionate value.

Keel Team acquires and operates mobile home parks across the Carolinas, Tennessee, and other Southeast markets. Learn more at keelteam.com.