The new real estate boom: Trailer parks.

[dixiegrrrrl]

Trailer Parks Lure Wall Street Investors Looking for Double-Wide Returns

Snippets:

With more of the U.S. middle class sliding into poverty and many towns banning new trailer parks, enterprising owners are getting rich renting the concrete pads and surrounding dirt on which residents park their homes.
The economics of mobile homes are particularly alluring to folks who’ve made their living in the markets. Many counties in the U.S. have banned or discouraged construction of new trailer parks because the inhabitants are poor, pay little in taxes and drain resources. Yet demand is higher than ever, new investors in the parks say, because so many people never got back on their feet after the recession.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-10/trailer-parks-lure-investors-pursuing-double-wide-returns.html

Tricon Targets Upscale Mobile Home Parks in U.S. Bet
Tricon Capital Group Inc. (TCN), the Canadian company whose profit rose five-fold last year after betting on U.S. housing in the depths of the slump, now plans to expand into upscale mobile-home parks.
“If you look at the U.S. population, it’s definitely growing, it’s definitely getting older, and it’s probably getting poorer,” Berman, 40, said yesterday at Bloomberg’s office in Toronto. “What single-family rental and manufactured housing do is they provide very affordable housing for people.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/tricon-targets-upscale-mobile-home-parks-in-u-s-bet.htm

Lest you think this is for the poor folk, I know of a mobile home park in SF area in which the homes sell for 200-300 K PLUS the lot rent is now up to 1,000 or more bucks a month, and rents rise 50 to 75 a year.... every year. Even for the people who have been there long enough to own their own homes ( many of which were built in the 70 and 80's) lot rent that high is making prices unaffordable.

[GeorgeGist]

1. When the middle class is dead ...

the whole country will be a trailer park.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. “We’re like a Waffle House where everyone is chained to the booths.”

The beauty of a trailer park -- for its owner, anyway -- is that once a tenant trucks a home to a site, then lowers it onto a pad, as it’s known in the business, and hooks up to the electricity and septic systems, he’s unlikely to leave. It costs at least $5,000 to move a home, a sum that trailer dwellers rarely accumulate more than once, Rolfe says.