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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!
Woody Allen, the comedic filmmaker from the 1970s and '80s and still makes a few films today, once said, "80% of success is just showing up." And he was referring to the fact that in Hollywood, many stars would not make their appointments to start the movie. They wouldn't show up on the dates they were supposed to start, so they would be cut from the film. And so he was explaining that if you really want to succeed in Hollywood, all you really have to do is just show up to play. But unfortunately, many mobile home parks, many, many mobile home park managers fail to show up. This is Frank Rolfe with the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about the issues with managers and showing up to play, and what you can do to try and fix those problems. Now, let's start with the first one, which is managers that just literally don't show up for work. Kind of like this Hollywood actor, for whatever reasons, personal problems, personal struggles, they just don't show up. They're supposed to be there at 10:00 AM on a certain day to open the office, and lo and behold, they don't show up at 10:00
They don't show up at 11:00 or noon. In fact, they don't show up at all. So what can we do on that one? How can we make managers actually show up on the days and the times that they're supposed to be there? Well, like any good employer, the first thing we have to do is create accountability. We have to know when they show up as opposed to when they're not there. You can't leave it open where you just tell your manager kind of on their own honor, "Okay, show up at this time." No, instead you have to do a little more of the Ronald Reagan approach of trust but verify. So how do we verify if a manager is actually in the office or not? Well, if you use a group like ADP to do your payroll, they have applications you can use to allow you to have the manager log in that they're there and then log out that they're not. But there are still ways to cheat the system typically. I don't know anything in the world that you can't find some loophole in to work around. So another way you could basically do it is if you mounted a security camera on your office, which has a reasonable reason to be there, because you don't want anyone to break into your office, steal your equipment or whatever.
But it would also allow you to then see, theoretically who is going in, and going out of the office, including your manager themselves. But the first problem with many managers simply is they're not showing up for work. And when managers don't show up for work, many bad things happen. You can't really sell homes, you can't really collect rent. You can't mediate tenant disputes. You can't even report when there's a problem with the park. So, we got to make people show up. That's rule number one. And another problem you have is when the managers do show up, they often don't show up on the right days and times. Not because that isn't when they were set up to show up, but because as park owners, if you really want to get homes out the door, and I'm talking at this point from a home selling perspective, you have to be open at least sometimes on nights and weekends because your customers work, or you hope they do, you hope they work during the day. So how in the world are they going to come by and look at a home for sale on a Tuesday at 10:00 in the morning?
And the answer is they're not. And why do we have these hours? When you have homes for sale, knowing your customers can't show up during regular office hours, considered by many to be 9-5, then how are you going to get them in there? And the answer is you've got to have the manager be open at least one or two nights a week, and then at least part of one weekend day. I would think the most effective you would have, would be to be open late, let's say on Tuesdays and Thursdays and then open part of the day on Saturday. Now your manager is going to absolutely hate this idea. They are going to fight it. They're going to say no, that's an invasion of my personal life. I don't want to do it, I can't do it. They'll try and rationalize it and say customers never come by at those days and times. But we all know that's completely untrue. If that were true, then why are most of your major retailers open until 9:00 PM at night and Saturday and Sunday? So don't let the manager not show up and, and damage your ability to sell home simply because it's convenient for them.
Their convenience is not your concern. You're in the business of trying to get these mobile homes out the door and you've got to get them to show up on days and times in which customers can look at the homes. And even though that's against their desires, you have to force them then to be open late at least a couple nights a week and then at least part of one weekend day. You're much better off, to be honest with you, being open on a Saturday and closed on a Monday, having the manager's off days being Sunday, Monday, than you are Saturday, Sunday. Particularly if you have homes to sell, it's really going to damage your ability to get those homes out the door. The next time we have managers that don't show up, is they don't show up to literally answer the phone. Now, years ago, we started tracking because we were trying to figure out how to amplify the speed in which we could get a home sold. And we utilized a service called Who's Calling. So we ported our number through Who's Calling. You basically forward it through. And what it does is every call that comes in is tracked.
It tracks the phone number that came in and then whether the phone was answered or not. And if it was answered, it then recorded what was said. And we were appalled at how few managers ever answered the phone. We had properties in which the manager was not answering the phone, oh, 80, 90% of the time. And you cannot sell a mobile home unless you answer the phone. You cannot resolve a problem with a tenant unless you answer the phone. In fact, if you don't answer the phone, the whole job of the manager kind of goes out the door, because almost everything begins with telephonic contact. So what's the solution? Well, you can use a service like Who's Calling. If you have Rent Manager, you have a service embedded into Rent Manager called VoIP. But every good park owner needs to have mastery of the calls coming in to make sure they are being answered, and on top of that, to listen to what's being said on those calls. So even if the manager does show up on the right days, and the right times, and they are sitting in the office, many of them elect not to answer the phone.
They find it a bother, or maybe they're too shy or afraid to answer the phone. And that's a huge problem for your business. And then even when they do answer the phone, often it's not in a professional manner. So you can conquer that with listening to those recordings and tracking how many calls are being answered. And then we have the problem with managers not showing up for showings. So there's a general rule in our industry. We call it the 9-3-1. We need three calls for one showing and three showings for one application and getting lots of calls, unless you can translate those into the phone being answered and then therefore showings being set up and the manager showing up at the showings, nothing gets sold. But how do we make the manager show up for showings? How can you do that? Well, one option would be to mystery shop it. You can go on any number of online services such as Craigslist and get somebody who will go ahead and maybe go over and pretend to be a customer for $50. And you can mystery shop if the manager actually shows up for the showing and, in fact, what they what they do when they show up.
But another way you can do it, which may be easier, and more cost effective, is simply to do exit interviews on all those calls that you got in. If you remember back on the concept of the services like Who's calling that track calls coming in, you had those people's numbers. You can call them later and say, "Hey, I'm curious. I know you called about our home. What happened? " And you will then hear the sometimes bitter truth that the person showed up for the showing and the manager didn't show up. They showed up for the showing and the manager was drunk, whatever the case may be. But you've got to get a handle on whether or not those managers are showing up for showings. If you have a situation where, with a park, where you've had 20 calls and no applications, clearly something is falling apart between the phone call and the application process. If you have 20 calls using the 9-3-1 formula, you should have at least 2-3 applications. If you have none, it's a clear indication probably there's something terribly wrong regarding showings. And then you have the issue of managers who just don't show up with their A-game.
They just don't seem to care. They're just a warm body in a chair. It's not doing you really any good, and certainly the opportunity cost is terrible because another manager would do far better than they are. So what do we do when we have managers who just don't mentally show up? Well, the best way to find this out is utilizing not only those exit interviews, but but also your helpline. Now, every park today should have a helpline. The helpline is nothing more than a phone number and an email address. We like to give out refrigerator magnets that say, "Need help? ", and a phone number and an email address, because we want to hear from our customers without it being distilled and diluted through the manager. In a lot of parks, if you don't have a helpline, you rely on the manager to tell you what's going on. But what if the manager is not reporting the news accurately, then what happens? The tenants could be miserably unhappy, super mad, and you wouldn't know because the general flow of the org chart, is tenant to manager, manager to you. You have to find a way to allow those tenants to get around the manager.
And the helpline allows you to do that. And with the helpline, you'll be able to see very clearly if the manager is bringing their A-game. But the final item, the final person who does not always show up is you, the park owner. Now, what happens is, on all the items we just talked about, the manager is flailing, they're failing, they're not working out in the job, but you don't show up to replace them. That's the problem. I know many park owners who will tell me, "Yeah, well, this manager's not very good, but yet I don't really want to replace them. It's such a pain. I got to find somebody, I have to train them. It's always unpleasant firing people." That's a problem. That's one of the biggest problems, because the manager who doesn't do well is ruining your business. You're the one who really takes the impact from that. The manager does not. They get paid the same whether they do a great job or a terrible job, but you don't. So the one key item is, as the owner, you have to manage the manager. You have to recognize when it's not working out.
You have to track them. You have to know what they're doing and when they're not doing well, it is up to you to get them out the door. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.