By Andrew Keel | KeelTeam.com

If you’ve owned a mobile home park for more than three years, you already know what I’m about to say.

Your insurance renewal came in and you nearly choked on your coffee.

We’re not talking about a modest 5% increase. I’m talking 40%. 60%. In some cases, doubling overnight — and that’s if you could find coverage at all.

This isn’t a niche problem. It’s one of the most disruptive forces hitting mobile home park operators right now, and most of the investing community isn’t talking about it honestly. Let me change that.

The Numbers Are Brutal

Across our portfolio of 50+ parks — concentrated in the Southeast — we’ve watched insurance premiums evolve from a manageable line item into one of the most unpredictable variables in any acquisition underwriting. Parks we acquired with $25K–$35K annual premiums are now renewing at $55K–$80K+. New acquisitions in NC and TN face quotes that simply don’t pencil at the cap rates we modeled.

And it’s not just us. Talk to any active mobile home park operator in the Southeast and you’ll hear the same story. Some brokers are getting just two or three quotes — from carriers who used to eagerly compete for this business — and watching qualified parks get declined entirely.

Why Mobile Home Parks Are Getting Hit Harder

Insurance markets are repricing climate risk across the board, but manufactured housing communities have specific characteristics that make us particularly exposed:

1. Wind/Hail Vulnerability — Manufactured homes, especially older HUD-code homes built before the 2000s storm standards, perform worse in high-wind events than site-built structures. Insurers know this and price accordingly.
2. Aging Infrastructure — A park built in 1972 likely has electrical pedestals from that era. Old aluminum wiring, ungrounded panels, aging meter bases — fire risk, pure and simple. Insurers are increasingly surveying properties and adjusting premiums based on infrastructure age.
3. Reinsurance Market Tightening — What happens in Florida doesn’t stay in Florida. Global reinsurance losses from 2023–2024 catastrophic events forced reinsurers to raise rates across the board, which flows directly into carrier pricing for our asset class.
4. Liability Ambiguity — In a park-owned-home (POH) situation, or even a lot-rent community with older tenant homes, insurers struggle to define liability lines clearly. That ambiguity gets priced in as risk premium.

What We’re Actually Doing About It

Here’s the honest playbook we’ve developed across our portfolio:

Go specialist, not generalist. Most operators are still calling their local commercial insurance agent. That agent has zero leverage with carriers for mobile home parks. You need a broker who writes 50+ mobile home park policies a year, who has actual carrier relationships in this asset class, and who can advocate for your property on a risk profile basis — not just a blanket category. Ask every mobile home park investor you know who they use. Build that list.

Reduce your risk profile before renewal. Don’t wait for the renewal letter. Six months out, document every infrastructure upgrade you’ve made. New electrical pedestals? Get it in writing with photos. Replaced aging gas lines? Same thing. Installed wind-rated tie-downs on older homes? Document it. Underwriters respond to evidence of active risk management.

Adjust your lease to clarify liability. Work with a mobile home park attorney to ensure your lot lease clearly delineates responsibility for home condition, debris removal, and structural compliance. Clean liability documentation reduces your exposure profile.

Portfolio-stack where possible. If you own multiple parks, a blanket policy across the portfolio can often produce better rates per-park than individual policies. Portfolio scale gives you leverage in negotiations that a single-park operator simply doesn’t have.

Build insurance cost scenarios into acquisition underwriting. This is the most important one for buyers. Model three insurance scenarios in every deal: current in-place cost, a 30% increase, and a 60% increase. If the deal doesn’t work at +60%, your margin of safety is too thin. Period.

The Hard Truth for Acquisitions

We’re seeing insurance costs become a legitimate deal-killer in markets they never used to be. Parks in eastern NC and western TN that sit in tornado corridors are now getting insured at rates that compress returns to unacceptable levels, or aren’t getting insured at all.

This is creating real pricing pressure in those sub-markets — sellers who don’t understand why their asking price no longer makes sense, buyers who can’t close at acceptable returns. The gap is creating friction, and in some cases, real opportunity for operators who’ve already solved the insurance problem on their own portfolio.

The Opportunity

Operators who understand the insurance landscape — who have the right broker relationships, have mitigated their risk profiles, and have built realistic underwriting assumptions — are going to out-compete the operators still treating insurance as a known, stable line item.

The next great value-add play in this industry might not be sub-metering or filling lots. It might be walking into a park where the prior owner was paying $90K in insurance premiums on a park that should cost $45K — and knowing exactly how to fix it.

That’s the edge. And right now, most operators don’t have it.

Andrew Keel is the founder of Keel Team Real Estate Investments, owning and operating 50+ mobile home parks across the United States. He writes about the operational realities of mobile home park investing at KeelTeam.com.