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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!
Despite the best efforts of all mobile home park owners, there may be times when you cannot deliver simple utilities to your residents. You may lose power, you may lose water, sewer, gas disruption. And when these things happen, of course, the residents of the mobile home park become extremely annoyed, extremely agitated. But there are some things you can do to mitigate that problem. This is Frank Rolfe with the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about what you do when utilities should go out. Now, the first thing you have to know about utilities is that they are prone to outages. You can have power go out due to weather events. You can have power go out because a squirrel may bite into the wires on a transformer and blow a transformer.
Any number of reasons why things happen that are beyond your control. And when it happens, from the utility company's perspective, they try hard to get it back on, but there's not a lot that you can do to the utility company. Because if you read your agreement that you have with the utility provider, in most cases, they don't have any set playbook on what they have to do. When, for example, your water goes out, let's say the city's main water main breaks and they can't get any water to your house, and what are your rights? What can you do? Well, pretty much nothing. You can just wait until the water is turned back on, but that's it. But in mobile home park world, the residents typically want to hold you to a higher standard, a standard beyond what the utility companies have to work under.
So, the first thing you need to know as a mobile home park owner when it comes to utility disruptions is what are the state laws? What does the state say you have to do as the park owner, and in what time frame do you have to restore your utility? And if you read up on most states' regulations for the park owner, you will see that typically you're not supposed to have an outage that lasts more than one to three days. But if you read up the same rules regarding the actual utility company, there's no time restriction at all. The only requirement for the utility company is that they make reasonable effort to get the utility restored. And it's this word, reasonable, that I think is key when it comes to any utility issue, because if you ever had a really big problem and had a problem then with the city correspondingly to your utility being out, we know what's reasonable in life and not reasonable.
And clearly, if your water was out for a week, that's not reasonable. There's no way people could conduct a normal kind of life if they had no water out for a week. But most of us have experienced in our own single-family homes water being out from the water utility company for a day. That's seemingly reasonable. Two days would be stretching it, but you might be able to say that's okay. But as in most things life, people have to be reasonable. Park residents have to be reasonable. Park owners have to be reasonable. And here's some things you can do to make them more susceptible to being reasonable. Number one, give your residents plenty of advance warning. A lot of times where utilities go out in the mobile home park is because you as the owner are trying to fix something. You've got a leak, for example, and you can't get the leak fixed unless you shut the water off to the whole park.
If you shut the water off to the whole park, then and only then can you make the repair. And let's say you're gonna have to take the water and shut it down for six hours to get this repair done before you turn it back on. You don't just want to spring that on people, because if they have advance warning of when the utility will be out, they can plan accordingly. So the first thing you need to do is give your residents plenty of advance warning, if you can. If you can't, if what's disrupting the utility is beyond your control and they didn't give you any warning, well, certainly you can't then extend that to the residents. But if at all possible, particularly if it's you hiring a vendor to shut the utility off to make the repair, give them plenty of advance notice.
And also choose a time to make those repairs that kind of accommodates the average American schedule. When is the highest moment of water consumption for the average American household? It's in the morning. That's when everyone's getting ready for work, getting ready for school. You gotta have the water. You can't take a shower, you can't go to the bathroom, you can't have a glass of water. So try not to turn the water off when everyone's getting up for the day. Even if your plumber says, "Well, it's most convenient for me to shut the water off at 7:00 a.m.," that's not really gonna work for the residents. So let's wait a little later. Let's maybe shut the water off at 10:00 a.m or 11:00 a.m to try to be more considerate of your residents and what's going on in their life.
Also, give residents continual updates and let them know that you're trying to get the utility restored. This is particularly true when something comes up that's beyond your control. Maybe suddenly there was a big windstorm and a tree branch fell off and hit the power line and knocked the power out. Don't just assume that they know the status, because you probably do. You're talking directly to the power company. The guy came by in the power company truck. Your manager talked to them. Let people know what's going on. People don't like going into situations where they have no visibility. Kind of like riding a roller coaster. If you close your eyes on the roller coaster, the sensation is far worse than if your eyes are open. If your eyes are open, your body can kind of adjust to the dips and the turns in the coaster, but when your eyes are closed, it's a thousand times worse.
So try and give residents continual updates on exactly what is going on. Also, if the utility has gone out in the mobile home park and it's something that's either beyond your control or even if it's your own equipment that broke and you're trying to get it fixed, it doesn't hurt to call the city and let them know what's going on, because they'll definitely be getting calls. A lot of park residents, the first thing they like to do when there's a utility outage is actually call the city and report it to them, hoping that they'll put the big squeeze on you, the park owner, to get it fixed more rapidly. And once again, keeping them apprised of the situation, giving them updates makes it easier when residents call to let them know what's going on. Plus, it won't get the inspector as incensed because he'll know that you're doing a good job and you're keeping him on track of what in the world you're doing.
Also, if your water is out particularly, it always makes sense to provide water bottles to your residents, because people have to drink water. Water's a part of life, part of good nutrition, and you cannot expect people to function in the park long without the ability to have water. And a lot of people in your park often are not mobile. You may have people in the park who are unable to go out and get water. They don't have a car, perhaps, or whatever the case may be. So providing them with bottles of water has always been a good gesture. Also, these are times in which your manager's people skills are essential, because a good manager can go throughout the park and explain what's going on and update people and you won't have any pushback from it.
I once lost in my very first park, Glenhaven, I lost all of our natural gas in that park. And people did not have, all the residents as a communal group did not have their heat back on or the ability to have hot water or to cook for a month. Now, you would think I would be in a heap of trouble over that. It was beyond anything I had to deal with. I bought a park that had gas lines that were fully corroded and had to go, and we had to redo the entire park into propane tanks. But in that interim period, we had no big pushback because I had a great manager with great people skills going around to residents, telling them what was going on and sometimes making games of it. They would build little bonfires, they would provide hot dogs for people to cook on the bonfire, they would bring in giant amounts of pizza for people.
As soon as one home got the propane on and was working, they would tell residents, "Hey, go over that person's house and hang out there and get warm." In fact, I think people were kind of disappointed when we got the gas turned on back to the residents through the propane tanks. They were having so much fun with the manager. And your manager, a good manager can actually go out and proactively fix a lot of these different problems. The bottom line is if you just use your street smarts, if you use common sense, if you want to treat people as you would want them to treat you and follow the golden rule, you should not have any problems with utility disruptions. If, however, you hide from the fact, don't keep people informed, treat them poorly, choose times which are completely inappropriate to shut utilities off to make repairs, you are definitely asking for trouble. This is Frank Rolfe with the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.