Rents spike as big-pocketed investors buy mobile home parks
news.yahoo.com
For as long as anyone can remember, rent increases rarely happened at Ridgeview Homes, a family-owned mobile home park in upstate New York. When that didn't happen and a new lease with a 6% increase was imposed this year, they formed an association. About half the residents launched a rent strike in May, prompting Cook Properties to send out about 30 eviction notices.

Ward is one of the residents at Ridgeview participating in a rent strike after new owners of the park announced they were raising rents by six percent. "I moved here because it's basically the most affordable living," said Ward, who is disabled and living off of a fixed income. The plight of residents at Ridgeview is playing out nationwide as institutional investors, led by private equity firms and real estate trusts and sometimes funded by pension funds, swoop in to buy mobile home parks. …

Residents, about half of whom are seniors or disabled people on fixed incomes, put up with the first two increases. They hoped the latest owner, Cook Properties, would address the bourbon-colored drinking water, sewage bubbling into their bathtubs and the pothole-filled roads.

When that didn't happen and a new lease with a 6% increase was imposed this year, they formed an association. About half the residents launched a rent strike in May, prompting Cook Properties to send out about 30 eviction notices.

“All they care about is raising the rent because they only care about the money,” said Jeremy Ward, 49, who gets by on just over $1,000 a month in disability payments after his legs suffered nerve damage in a car accident.

He was recently fined $10 for using a leaf blower. “I’m disabled," he said. "You guys aren’t doing your job and I get a violation?”

Blackstone company towns, except they don’t make anything. Rentier class will ultimately kick off the revolution.

The Torture Never Stops…

  • Wertheimer [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    NYer article: "What Happens When Investment Firms Acquire Trailer Parks"

    Residents of such parks can buy their mobile homes, but often they must rent the land that their homes sit on, and in many states they are excluded from the basic legal protections that cover tenants in rented houses or apartments, such as mandatory notice periods for rent increases and evictions. One sign that a large investment firm has taken over a neighborhood is a dramatic spike in lot rent. Once a home is stationed on a lot, it is not always possible to move it; if it is possible, doing so can cost as much as ten thousand dollars. Most buyers aren’t eligible for fifteen- or thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages, so many of them finance their homes with high-interest “chattel loans,” made against personal property. “The vulnerability of these residents is part of the business model,” Sullivan said. “This is a captive class of tenant.” A leader of an association for mobile-home owners in Washington State has compared life in a mobile-home park to “a feudal system.”

    . . .

    Rolfe met Dave Reynolds, an accountant whose parents owned a mobile-home park in Colorado, at a mobile-home-investing conference in 2006, where both of them were speaking. Soon afterward, they created Mobile Home University, a program for potential park owners which offered, among other things, three-day seminars in Southern California and Denver, for almost two thousand dollars a ticket. (The program is currently being offered virtually.) Later, they established a partnership that invests in mobile-home parks. In 2017, Rolfe was reported to have compared a typical mobile-home park to “a Waffle House where customers are chained to their booths.” (He has said that the quote was taken out of context, and was meant to refer only to the “incredibly consistent revenue” of mobile-home parks.) Esther Sullivan, who attended one of Rolfe and Reynolds’s Mobile Home University seminars in California while researching her book, summarized the advice that they offered participants: “Look for a park that’s got high occupancy and that doesn’t need a lot of investment. Take out any possible amenity you’d ever need to invest in, such as a playground or a pool that’s going to need insurance. Make sure it’s got a nice sign, and pawn off any maintenance costs onto your tenants.”

    • OgdenTO [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      JFC

      Take out any possible amenity you’d ever need to invest in, such as a playground or a pool that’s going to need insurance.

      So not only exploit at-risk people for pensions, but also make living less convenient