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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!
About 20 years ago, elections were very different. The presidential election typically was a night which you looked forward to. It was kind of exciting, like watching the Super Bowl on TV. And we all knew by the end of the night who won, but regardless of who won, we weren't that upset about it. America was more homogenous back then. And now what's happened is we've kind of separated into two teams. You have the red team and the blue team. And you hate the other team. That's just the way it is today. So everyone is all stressed out on the election because they don't know if their team will win. And they're not sure they can live under the regime of the competing team if their team should lose. This is Frank Rolfe with the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk you off the ledge. We're gonna explain to you why you can survive elections night regardless of who wins. You're gonna be fine. And we just want to give you a little insight, a few thoughts as to why it's all gonna be okay. First off, you have to give a little bit of humor to life. You can't take things too seriously.
And for some reason, this election cycle has been taken more seriously than most others. And there's kind of a sense of humor that's been sucked out of the system. So to get a little humor on the election, let's turn to that humorist of the past, Sir Winston Churchill from England, the guy that saved England during World War II. Here were his thoughts on democracy in America. His first quote was, to lose confidence in democracy, all you have to do is spend five minutes with a voter. And I think we all know that's true. So the average knowledge of the voter in America today is not very impressive. If you engage someone in conversation, if you say, who are you gonna vote for, and ask them some questions, none of it really ties together. They have no idea. They're maybe voting for one group or the other 'cause they like their signage better. It's really that trivial. So don't be thinking that whether your team wins or loses, that that was an official doctrine, that it was some kind of affirmation that you are on the wrong side. No, the average voter has no idea what they're doing. And then in particular, about America, Churchill once said, Americans do the right thing after they've exhausted all other options.
So we make lots of mistakes. We're not perfect in our system. We don't always vote for the correct team. So you just kind of look at this and say, okay well this is one more election in so many elections. But it doesn't necessarily mean if you lost, you can't just take it personally, because the system is, in fact, extremely flawed. And it's just the way it works in a democracy where you have voters making the decisions that are often poorly informed. Now, one key reason you don't have to be too stressed out about what happens in the election is it's unlikely that either side will have a strong enough majority to get anything accomplished at all. I've heard nobody who believes that the blue team is gonna sweep it, that they're going to have the president and the House and the Senate. And there's many people who believe that the red team, even if they win president, that they will win both Senate and House. And unless you have that majority, it doesn't mean a lot. And even if the red team should win president, House and Senate, you still have the issue of the filibuster. And nobody is saying there'll be enough majority to overcome the filibuster.
So what does it mean when we have a divided government? Well, that's what the Constitution was really after, to try and make sure that one party doesn't prevail over the other. So what it means is all these initiatives you've heard about during the election season, giant changes in taxation and various giveaway programs, none of those are gonna happen. You know that. They're never going to get passed. It's never gonna be accomplished. You saw that very clearly during the last four years with the Biden administration's desire to forgive student debt. And how much of that was forgiven in the end? The answer is almost none. You just can't get things accomplished in America today when things are so polarized because nobody has the votes to get things passed. So all those things you heard about during the election, all the promises that were made, all the things you say, well, I can't live in a country that would condone such activity or do such a thing. Well, don't worry. It's not gonna happen. No one's gonna have sufficient numbers of votes to really get most of those platforms approved.
And then you have the issue of the Chevron doctrine reversal by the Supreme Court. It didn't get a lot of attention at the time. Most people did not really fully understand what it is. But what it means is that government agencies can no longer just impress their wills on the people internally. They actually have to get every line item approved by Congress. And since Congress is absolutely impossible to get anything accomplished in today, that means really nothing more will ever happen. And the Chevron doctrine reversal also allows anyone to re-litigate all the many things that have been passed by these agencies really since the beginning of time. In the mobile home park industry, more than likely, hopefully, we'll have some state mobile home association file suit for greater clarity and to revisit such topics as HUD installation standards and the fact that mobile homes can't be taken off their boat trailer chassis upon arrival and many other items. So you're gonna have just this entire stagnation of all these new rules. None of them will ever happen. One person I talked to is one of the better authorities on government things and getting things put into action. They predict it will take 10 years going forward to get something done, to get a law passed in the reversal of the Chevron doctrine.
So really that just takes a whole lot of power away from the federal government. And some say that the combination of the Chevron doctrine and just the way things are working out, we're really gonna have kind of an internal cold civil war where the states are really going to just focus on the state. And they're not gonna really listen to or enact anything based on what the federal government says. You already see that now when it comes to the legalization of marijuana. The federal law is it's illegal, but some states have said, what the heck? We like it. So we're gonna go ahead and make it legal in our state. Well, you can't do that. You've got a federal law that doesn't match up with the state law. So the states are basically thumbing their nose at the federal government. Well, I assume going forward, they're gonna do that on literally everything. And anything they don't like, they're just gonna re-litigate through the Chevron doctrine reversal. So I'm not sure the federal government going forward is gonna be that big a deal. I think all the states will share with the federal government on defense. We need that on Medicare, on Social Security, on those kinds of items.
But I think the states are gonna say, look, we're our own state. We have our own values, our own beliefs, our own norms, and we're not gonna listen to you, federal government. So get out of here. It'll be basically kind of a state by state ignoring of federal policy. Also, remember, we're probably gonna have a recession for those who say we're not going to. I just urge you to do a little bit of research on recessions in America and how very cyclical they are in nature. We've never had a period ever this long without one. So more than likely, it's going to happen. It's gonna happen soon, probably post-election. We will finally get into the dreaded arena of the recession. So maybe if your team doesn't win, maybe it's a good thing. Because whoever is gonna be leaders at the time of that recession, they're gonna own that recession. People are gonna say, that's the party of that recession. And there will be great wrath, whoever that falls on. So it may just be fine if your party doesn't win. You may say, man, we sure avoided a real pitfall there because our name won't be attached to the recession. And therefore, the next election, we'll win and win big.
And then finally, remember that mobile home parks are so incredibly well-situated for all of the American megatrends. This election isn't gonna change that one iota. We're still gonna be a country with $35 trillion of debt on a path to $50 trillion in only about 10 years. We are completely broke. And we're a nation in which all of our residents, our fellow Americans, are also very, very strained financially. And that makes the demand for affordable housing higher than it's ever been. We live in a country where the average home is $400,000. The average apartment is $2,000 a month. And yet we offer the dollar tree of housing, a plethora of value for only typically around a US average of maybe $300,000 to $400,000 a month of lot rent. We are the hottest commodity that exists in real estate. Our funds are gonna ring off the hook no matter who wins in the election. And our business model is so easy to use and so sound because we just rent land. We don't have to fix buildings or worry about roofs and foundations and all of those type of things. So we escape all those capex issues which always harm the apartment industry. And then finally, we're a business where we have so much room to grow rents and grow occupancy and be more efficient on the cost side.
Because we're buying typically from the original mom and pop in a condition that allows for much greater expertise and professionalism. So when you add it all together, don't freak out about the election. Take a breather. Don't stress out. Everything is going to be fine. I promise you. This is Frank Rolfe the Mobile Home Part Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.