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!
Shotgun, horseshoe, grid. We have many different labels and names for the road systems in mobile home parks. And in fact, in a mobile home park, one of the most basic features we all see are the roads. But we rarely talk about the more granular detail of the size of those streets and what the importance is of that. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. We're gonna be talking about road widths, how wide a road should be in a mobile home park. Now, let's start off with the assumption, which is true, that all automobiles are designed to be not greater than 8 feet wide. Now, there may be some that you push the limits width, push the envelope, the addition of mirrors to stick out really far. But in general, in America, our road systems are based on the idea that cars are basically 8 feet wide. So that means normal city street in America, the normal lane on the highway ranges from about 10 to 12 feet, giving you the ability to maneuver your car within those lanes and the car next to you within their lane, always maintaining at least 2 to 4 feet of space between you.
But mobile home parks are a little different than that, because typically, mobile home park streets are on private property. And when you get on private property with your streets, there really are no rules. So when we are on streets that are owned and operated by the city or the county or the state or the federal highway department, they have oodles and oodles of regulations on everything pertaining to those streets. But when you put a street into a piece of land that you own, that you then rent out parking spaces for mobile home zone, that road doesn't have any burden to be regulated by anybody. So often, mom and pop did some crazy stuff because at the end of the day, they didn't have to answer to anyone for it. Now, if you go out in Florida, for example, you will find that some of the roads are unusually skinny. Those roads often are not even 8 feet wide. It's a miracle that people can even drive down them and keep their tires on all sides of the lane, and that's because that mom and pop back in the day, they didn't wanna spend much on the paving, so they paved it to the absolute bare minimum that cut every corner. They said, "Hey, Mr. Paver. What's the absolute least width I can build that the car could actually theoretically go down?" And they said, "Oh, well, I guess maybe 8 feet," and that's what it became.
And that's a problem in a lot of those parks because the road system today, when viewed by a banker, a buyer or an appraiser, it looks awfully odd. It doesn't look like it's really going to work. So in most cases, the minimum width you need to have on your park streets is, in fact, 10 feet. 10 feet is a good baseline width. But then you have the next problem, which is parks are not all built the same as far as the format function of those streets. In some parks, the street just serves to allow cars to go down it. But in other parks, you have to also allow for parking, because some mobile home parks were designed to have on-street parking. So if we have on-street parking, now we have a new dilemma. We have to have enough room for cars to park and to be able to drive down the street. So if one of the side of the park is where you park to access your home and then we have a travel lane next to that, then that means our street needs to not be just 10 feet wide, but in fact 20.
And some of the parks we own also have parking on both sides of the street. That can bring you more to 30. And if the roads are a little wider than that, I've seen parks with roads as much as 40 feet wide. Now, it's unique, it's unusual, but it did have a purpose, and that was to accommodate people wanting to park on the street. However, in some parks, what's happened over the years are people have two cars and one car parking pads and yet they own three cars. And the guy down the street, he owns four cars. So they just start parking on the street, even though they're not supposed to. Now, most of your park streets are not one-way. Most park streets are, in fact, two-way. So the big issue you then have is, Alright, well, the park is... The roads are two-way, and someone parks on the street. Well, guess what, that road basically now becomes one way, but it's not really designed to be one way. So a lot of times, the width of the streets also is gonna tie to how the parking is going on, because having too many cars in mobile home parks has been a pretty common theme now in the industry for a while. And what you have to watch out for is, can cars get down those streets, even when people are parking on them?
Back in my very first park, Glenhaven, minding my own business, trying to do my best to do things right, I had an issue. If someone had a heart attack, they called 911, the ambulance came down, and ambulances are a little wider than a car, significantly wider. They couldn't get the ambulance down the streets at Glenhaven because people were parking on the streets. So after much discussion with the city, I was required to put in a fire lane down the street to allow emergency vehicles to get down it. So when you're looking at the width of your streets, you gotta make sure you have enough width to allow a car to go down it, enough width for cars to go in both directions down it, enough width to allow for on-street parking, if that's the plan, but additionally, make sure that you can also get emergency vehicles down it. And if the answer is, "Well, I can't get emergency vehicles down it 'cause people are parking on both sides of the street," you'll probably have to pick one side and make that immediately into a fire lane to allow people to make it.
You also have to worry, with mobile home park roads, about the big item of the business model, and that's the mobile homes themselves. Mobile homes are wider than 8 feet. The least wide home I can buy new or even new-ish in the used market is 12 feet, and those are called FEMA homes. Those are built by FEMA for emergency situations. But the usual mobile home we all know is either 14 feet or 16 feet, or even in some cases, 18 feet wide. That is not going to fit down a 10-foot street. And while most parks don't have the homes move in very often, you still have to have the ability to do it, or otherwise, you can't refill your lot. Now what to be a real problem is in the curving of the streets, that turn radius of those big old mobile homes and getting down them. Now, I have seen mobile home movers get things into wonderfully odd positions. That's for sure. I've seen things that did not look possible. You could stand there and say, "There's no way mathematically that mobile home is gonna get into that space," yet if you watch them, they put the home on casters so it can be turned in any direction. There's these little robot half-track mover things they mount on the sign. They're remote controlled, and they are brilliant at getting wedging homes into spaces that do not, to the common eye, look theoretically possible.
But even then, there is some degree of math and science involved, and they are not going to successfully get that 14 by 76 foot home down the street that's got a turn that is so abrupt that a car can barely make it. It'll never be able to happen. So you also have to make sure, when you look at the streets in your mobile home park and the width and how they're constructed, that you do have the ability to get homes in and out. If you're in due diligence and questioning, "Gosh, can I get homes into the back of this mobile home park?" I would pay to have a mover meet me out there and look and eyeball it and tell you their opinions.
Also, be very careful your entrances. Many parks will build decorative fences. We do it also because it looks great, and it tells everyone, "Hey, this is a well-run park, and it's therefore worthy of living here and worthy of assigning great value to it, Mr. Appraiser and Mr. Banker." But don't forget that when mobile homes come in, they again, have to navigate those turns. It's a rookie error where you run your decorative fence so tight to the end of the street that they can't actually bring a mobile home in. You always want to not take it all the way to the very edges of the entrance. You wanna take it significantly towards it by giving yourself plenty of swing room for the home to make it down the street.
The key ingredient to all of this is that every mobile home park is, in fact, unique, it is individual, is a customized creation, and you have to make that the roads can service the needs of your business model, that not only cars can get in and out and drive down the streets freely, but the mobile home can, too. This is Frank Rolfe, the Mobile Home Park Mastery podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.