Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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!
Back when I was in the billboard business, it was a well-established fact of advertising that most American consumers choose the product based on emotion, based on its appearance, based on the way it makes them feel. And then they spend the rest of their time trying to rationalize why they bought it. This is Frank Rolfe with the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about the fact, the simple fact in marketing that you have this relationship between emotion and reason and then how that relates to the mobile home park business, how to best take advantage of this reality. So the first time that you really need to focus on the way that people buy, this mentality of buying things based on emotion is when you're trying to sell homes on vacant lots in your mobile home park. So normally when you go to sell a home in a mobile home park, you're selling a dwelling, you're selling the most basic affordable housing. But to your customer, they want more than that. They don't want just a drab box with perhaps three bedrooms or two bedrooms that they can live in and have a yard at a much, much lower cost than a traditional single-family home. They want more bedazzle than that. And one great way to do that is through a show home.
Now, what is a show home? That's where you bring in a new home or you bring in a used home and fully remodel it and you sell from that home. So what you're doing now is we're gonna go ahead and take a home and take it to the next level. And then while they're in the consumer excitement of seeing the home, have a desk already prepared there and say, "Well, if you'd like to buy it, here, sit down and let me get out the paperwork on it." Show homes have been a very, very effective tool. They use them in most of your single-family subdivision developers like a Pulte Homes. They always have the show home right at the front of the subdivision. You come in and you look at it, you tour that, and if you wanna buy it, you sign the paperwork up right there. So a show home is a great way to harness their initial emotion, their initial excitement. And another time you see that in play between the emotion and the reasoning is just with any ad that says three bedrooms, because three bedrooms is one of the biggest turn-ons in all of housing. There are very few apartments out there that have three-bedroom units. Most apartment complexes, they have studio, they have one bedroom, they have two bedroom. It's very rare to have three. But if you've got a lot of kids, then a three bedroom may be just the most important thing ever. If you're a senior who wants to have an extra bedroom for an office and yet one more as a guest bedroom, once again, three bedrooms is key. You just never see that, hardly ever in marketing. And even though the reality is that those bedrooms can be very, very small in a lot of three-bedroom models, mobile homes, the kid bedrooms are very, very tiny. In fact, if you took the two kid bedrooms and combined them together, you might have the approximate size of a typical kid's bedroom in a stick-built home. But it's just the sound of three bedrooms. That's why if you ever have to fill a vacant lot and you have two floor plans that would fit on the lot, one is a three bedroom, one bath and the other is a two bedroom, two bath, you would always go with the three bedroom because having that three on the front, the emotional pull of a three bedroom is absolutely critical.
Another way you can use emotion to get things done is when you do your annual rent increase. Because when you do your annual rent increase, you don't have to present it on a sheet of paper and say, "Here's what the new rent is gonna be." You can showcase how cheap you are by giving your consumer perhaps a bar graph showing all the competitive comparable prices of housing in your market. It's not hard to obtain. All you do is go to bestplaces.net, put in the zip code where your park is located at, and right there you can learn what the average single-family home price is as well as the apartment rents. And when you show them in a bar graph, for example, what the rent is in your mobile home park, you'll have this first bar that is massive, and that's the single-family home price, which in the US is averaging right now between $300,000-$400,000. And then you could have your next one, what the three-bedroom apartments rent for, then the two, and then the one, and then this tiny little bar, a fraction of all the others, that's gonna be your mobile home park lot rent.
So what we're then doing is we're presenting all the information in a very emotionally satisfying way, saying, "Look how cheap this rent is." Because even with the rent increase, in most markets, mobile home park lot rents still are crazy cheap, but your customers do not always know this. So a great way to convey the bargain they're getting is to show them on paper, "Hey, look how cheap this is." Because again, a lot of people make their decisions with their emotions, with what they see, with how they feel at the moment. And there's no better way to convey what a great deal they have than to show them that on paper. Another thing with a mobile home park or mobile homes where you can harness the emotional pull of the way consumers really buy things is by just telling them how inexpensive the home is. Because people don't really care about energy efficiency. They don't really care about property climbing in value. What the consumer really cares about right now is can they actually pay the bill? Can they write the check? And when your home is very, very inexpensive, well, obviously that's an enormous turn-on. And if there's one thing about mobile homes which is always true, is they are, in fact, very cheap. I'll never forget at one of the mobile home shows years ago, when they first brought out the Truhome product, they put a big banner on the side of the home, almost as big as the home, that said, "3/2 from..." I think back then it was 19,500 or something. The crowd was blown away. Here was a brand-new home for less than $20,000. And even though the Truhome doesn't have all the great style and features of some of the other models, that single low, low price point, that was the emotional draw that had so many park owners lining up to order those Truhomes.
So just showcasing how inexpensive they are, that often is about the best thing you can do. And in most markets in America, mobile homes sell for less than a car. So when you let people know how inexpensive the thing is, well, then people get very, very excited about it. Another time you see emotion at play in the mobile home park business is with amenities. Because amenities rarely get used. They've done studies on them. I think they found that the average mobile home park swimming pool is actually used by the population of the park, roughly only 10% of the people have ever even been in the pool. There's this tiny fraction of regular users who walk down to the pool and use it on a weekly basis. Tiny, might be 1% or 2% of the customer base. But 90% of everyone in the mobile home park has never even set foot inside the pool enclosure. But people still like the sound of it. They like the concept that the amenity is there. It makes them feel more comfortable, there's things they could do, and it's a good way to impress the Joneses.
So in that way, it's very important with any mobile home park, particularly if you want to crack the ice into the next price point up and a different class of customer, to still have amenities. Yes, amenities cost money, and sure, it's a lot cheaper if we were to eradicate them. But that's probably not the best thing you can do based on the fact that people buy with emotion. If you've already have a pool in your park and the pool is fully legal to operate, has two drains and the correct decking and everything else, then perhaps you should leave that pool just as it is and keep it running and make the water clear and beautiful. Because that pool is a very important emotional piece of the puzzle to people wanting to live there. Same with playgrounds, pavilions, picnic tables, outdoor grills. Even though you could argue, "Well, so few people use it, should I even expend the money?" It's more than that, because all of those amenities have an enormous pull of emotion with people that are living or looking at living in the mobile home park.
But at the same time, don't forget that even though emotion is huge, there's the other side of the puzzle, and that's given reasoning. Because when you make those emotional purchases, you still have to explain to other people why you chose them. If someone goes to the car lot to buy a car for the family, they really don't want the four-door car. They really would like the two-door car. Better yet, they would really like the two-door convertible. That's emotionally the car that's the most pleasing. But the problem is they have to explain to their spouse how they came to choose that vehicle. And when you give people those points of reasoning, those bullet points, it makes their decision easier because now they buy with emotion, but then they're able to explain why they did what they did. So throughout any of the actions that we just discussed, it's always important to reinforce with points of reason why. Give people explanations of why. Continue to tell them that mobile homes are a great way to live because you have a yard and no neighbors knocking on doors or or ceilings or floors and be able to park by your front door. These points are critical in the reasoning side. But on the emotional side, don't ever lose focus that the way things look and the way they are presented is extremely important if you really want to get things sold and done. This is Frank Rolfe, with the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.