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Welcome to the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast where you will learn how to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform due diligence on, finance, turn-around and operate mobile home parks! Your host is Frank Rolfe, the 5th largest mobile home park owner in the United State with his partner Dave Reynolds. Together, they also own and operate Mobile Home University, the leading educational website for both new and experienced mobile home park investors!
The United States Postal Service is one of the worst run businesses in the United States. We're talking a group that loses roughly $9 billion per year. In the private sector, you wouldn't last a day. You'd be thrown into bankruptcy, but here in the good old US of A, what happens when the Postal Service loses this nine billion annually? Well, of course, the government chips in another nine billion to let it go for another year. And if there was anyone out there who is the least qualified to tell a mobile home park operator how to work their mail, it would be the Postal Service. This is Frank Rolfe, with he Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about the Postal Service and all of its bad advice and things you should push back on regarding how the mail gets to your customers. Now, if you go to AI and you look up what your requirements are as a park owner, you'll see that the post office recognizes three defined delivery methods as being acceptable. One, cluster mailboxes. Number two, curbside mail delivery. And number three, park distributed mail. So what are those three? Well, cluster mailboxes are those big old aluminum things you see out in the front of many mobile home parks today. They've got locks on each individual box, but you probably have noticed most of them are missing the doors on them.
That's because customers will invariably forget their key and then try and jimmy them open with a screwdriver, thereby breaking them off. And they're virtually impossible to fix. So in many mobile home parks, the ugliest, the worst looking thing in the entire park is, in fact, something right at your entrance, namely these very poorly designed, poorly thought out cluster mailboxes. Curbside, you see that in many mobile home parks. It's the old bread basket looking thing on a pole, and the Postal Service comes through and they put the mail right in that little bread box looking thing and shut the door. And for park distributed, is kind of a rarity, but we've had it before, we've seen it before. The mail comes to the mobile home park as basically a group thing, and/or the mailman puts it in the slots, but typically it's not locked, but it's locked inside of a building. So basically you have access as a tenant only during office hours to get to the mail. Or in some cases, the tenant has a key that gets him to the mail, but the mail itself is unsecured once you get in the building. And of those three mail delivery services, the one that's the worst always has been cluster mailboxes. This was an issue all the way back when I got in the business back in the '90s. Even back then, people knew it was a bad product.
Old-timers would tell me, whatever you do, don't put a cluster mailbox in your mobile home park. You will regret it, and the key reasons are, number one, of course, very, very high upfront cost. They're very, very expensive. But number two, now, in a cluster mailbox, it's a relationship between you and the tenant regarding the key and the condition of the box. So the Postal Service has basically thrown its responsibility over to you, a hot potato no one really wants to grab, and now you have to basically become a mini postal service yourself. Now, why is the Postal Service so affixed on cluster mailboxes? There's always been the rumor, probably true, that there are people inside the government that have their hands in the till with the companies that make those things because they come on a little way too strong trying to push you into converting your currently probably performing with no issue mail delivery into something that costs a whole lot of money and is truly bad. I don't know exactly what the reason is why many postmasters push for these things so dearly, but here are some thoughts of what happens when the Postal Service comes to you and tells you, oh, I'm sorry, you can't do what's been working for all these decades. We want you to stop your current mail service and convert over to cluster mailboxes.
Well, the first thing you have to do is, you have to say, no, I'm not gonna do that unless this is required by law. Because in a lot of the ancillary services to owning a mobile home park, such as a fire department, they give you all of these recommended ideas, but they're not actually legally required. We've had fire departments tell us, oh, well, you need to put fire hydrants throughout your entire mobile home park. To which we say, well, that sounds really great and everything, but that's obviously insanely expensive. Show me in the law where I have to do that, and then they backtrack and say, well, you don't have to do it, but we recommend you do it. It would be so great if you would do that. The same with the mailboxes. If someone wants you to go out of pocket thousands and thousands of dollars to change your mail delivery, I would kind of want to see why you have to do that. Show me that in writing. Don't just take the word from some low-level postmaster or even just in a postal employee on what you should do. You'll feel really dumb if it turns out you were, in fact, not required to do that. And even if they get it stronger and tell you, oh, no, you must do this, but yet they can't come up with the rule of law, I would push back and say, no, I don't want to do that.
I'm happy with the way the mail is set up right now, and I have no desire to make the change, and I am not going to make the change unless you show me where, by law, I have to do so. Now, another option you would have, if you have a current cluster mailbox, is I would go to your postmaster and change the entire relationship around and say, hey, postmaster, I'm not doing this cluster mailbox anymore. It's not working out. The people pry the covers off. It's impossible to fix. I don't want to be in the mail delivery business anymore. We're gonna convert the whole park back to the good old curbside delivery. I'm gonna buy, with my 50-space mobile home park, 50 of the old-style mailboxes. I'm gonna put them on posts and put them right out by the parking pad of each of the homes, and then see what they say. If they can't prove to you why that's legally impossible to do, then maybe you should do that conversion. So maybe put the shoe on the other foot.
Why are they so obsessed with this whole idea of locking mail? Because most of the mail, 99.9% of all US mail, is not delivered into a locking box. Why are we suddenly, as a nation, obsessed with having locks on the mailboxes? We own many mobile home parks where it's the curbside delivery. There's no locks on those curbside deliveries at all, and yet we never have any problems with it. So what's really going on here? Well, you will find, as usual, in a 100-space mobile home park, there's always that one crackpot tenant, at least there normally has to be. And they're the one doing all the agitation, going to the postmaster, claiming that people are stealing all those zillions of highly valuable checks, of course, out of their mail, even though they're completely unemployed and have no income that is of any significant measure. And as a result, they need to be protected. They need to have locking boxes. If that's the issue, if the problem is we have just one or two or three people who just have this bizarre concept that somebody is taking their mail, well, I have a solution for them. They can go get a PO box back at the mail service. Every mailbox in America, every mail center, to my knowledge, has PO boxes, which anyone can rent if you just simply pay the fee, which is charged every six months to a year.
Now we've gotten back out of the mail delivery. Those who want locking mail can certainly get it. Just go pay for it. Now it's between them and the Postal Service. They lose their key? That's the Postal Service's problem. They try and jimmy the door open with a screwdriver? It's back to being a Postal Service issue, but this is going to provide them with that locking mail that they so desperately desire, but save the other 97% of the tenants from having to go to one central location and don't forget the key. The bottom line to it all is when it comes to mail, don't be a pushover. You've got to fight back. We have enough problems as landlords right now with all the government groups. We had to survive the eviction moratorium during COVID, constant attacks from groups like MH Action, all kinds of nitwit media journalists pushing for rent control and issues like those. We're not going to take on the mail. It's getting ridiculous out there with landlords and the government. But again, as always, you have to comply with the law, but don't let people push you around when the law does not say what they want you to pretend or believe to be the truth. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.