COBA7® presents Blog # 362 via community-investor.com Copyright 23 August 2015
Perspective. ‘Land-lease-lifestyle Communities, a.k.a. manufactured home communities and ‘mobile home parks’, comprise the real estate component of manufactured housing.’
This blog posting is the national advocacy voice, official ombudsman (press), research reporter, & online communication media for all LLLCommunities in North America!
To input this blog & or affiliate with Community Owners (7 Part) Business Alliance®, a.k.a. COBA7®, use Official MHIndustry HOTLINE: (877) MFD-HSNG or 633-4764.
COBA7® Motto = ‘U Support US & WE Serve U!’, & Goal of its’ print & online media = to ‘Not only inform &Y opine, but to transform & improve our MHBusiness model!’
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INTRODUCTION. This week = three questions. Latchkey to Increased MHSales? Gauge this book by its’ cover? (&) Wanna Get Pissed a Little? Learn, Anticipate, & Vent.
I.
$ = Lynchpin or Linchpin? Spelled Either Way, it’s Latchkey to Increased Manufactured Housing Sales!
Ken Rishel, of Rishel Consulting, in the August issue of his online newsletter MANUFACTURED HOUSING CHATTEL FINANCE, did a yeoman’s job (‘attendant’ to the MHIndustry) making the case for ‘Customer Finance (being) the Key to Recovery’ for the manufactured housing industry! What follows here, is a paraphrase of one small part of what Ken had to say to all of us. The question is: ‘Who will listen intently, then be proactive expanding present sources of home financing and cultivate new ones?’
Which ‘of many’ sources of home financing we use for prospective homebuyer/site lessees, does not matter! The source can be an independent third party lender like 21st Mortgage, Triad, or CU Factorybuilt; even emerging regional lenders like PEP, Alliance, or Park Lane Finance; as well as local lenders getting back into the business model – or starting anew. The source might also be ‘captive finance’ firms owned by land-lease-lifestyle community owners or independent (street) MHRetailers; private investors providing lease-option funding, even joint ventures between HUD-Code home manufacturers and community customers and depository institutions, not to forget working relationships between ’Lonnie dealers’ and (oft) smaller owners/operators. The latchkey is, there must be sufficient and robust accessible home financing available to qualified customers who want to buy manufactured homes to be sited within LLLCommunities, or we simply do not have a functional business model!
Well put. Can’t make that critical matter any clearer. And your source(s) of home finance?
II.
Can You Tell a Book by its’ Cover?
This time Yes!
Here’s What this year’s
‘Directory of Attendees’, soon to be distributed at the
24th Networking Roundtable (9-11 September) tells us about that event:
Celebrating ‘National LLLCommunity Week’,
during 2nd year of ‘NEW ERA of Manufactured Housing’,
featuring the ‘New Breed of MHRetailers & Lenders’,
all at the beginning of this new ‘DECADE (2015-2025) of __________________’(to be announced at the Roundtable)
Wow! And that only scratches the surface of this historic convergence of disparate events, individuals, and firms:
• 200+/- land-lease-lifestyle community owners/operators (a.k.a. manufactured home community), of all sizes, from throughout the U.S. & Canada! And yes, Canadians are already registered to participate.
• Executives from more than a half dozen of the largest manufacturers of HUD-Code Community Series Homes in the U.S., actively selling homes into LLLCommunities! Anyone who’s anybody in manufactured housing is coming.
• Executives from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Manufactured Housing Institute, & possibly MHARR. Also National Buyers Group, ROC USA, & more.
• At least a dozen lenders originating commercial (real estate-secured) and retail (chattel capital) $ mortgages for LLLCommunities & manufactured homes respectively! Roundtable $ sponsors will man the popular Lenders Panel Friday morning.
• Two dozen freelance consultants and experts with specialty knowledge, all willing to share the inner workings of their respective fields, to the betterment of everyone present! Learn about FFF, housing economics, CSH Models, MHGives, and much more.
• All the national real estate brokers specializing in marketing LLLCommunities! Dozens of LLLCommunities listed ‘for sale’, a real smorgasbord of investment properties.
• And everyone present will receive a copy of the commissioned treatise titled: Manufactured (Affordable) Housing: ‘From Factory to Family; a Bold Look into the Future of Housing & Community!’ This alone is worth the price of admission to this stellar educational, networking, and deal-making event!
This is the last week, during which, it makes sense to register – to be sure of being included in the aforementioned Directory of Attendees. Why is that important? This is the widely touted ‘Best Directory of MHIndustry & LLLCommunity Business Contacts Available Anywhere Anytime’! You wouldn’t believe how many copies we sell after the event…
So, to register, visit community-investor.com, use brochure attached to this BEBA (Blast Email Blog Alert), or phone the Official MHIndustry HOTLINE: (877) MFD-HSNG or 633-4764. You’ll be glad you did!
III.
Wanna Get Pissed a Little?
In a recent issue of TreeHugger (online pub), answering the question, ‘So, Whatever happened to Katrina Cottages?’, two insightful, though discouraging, observations were made. In the first instance,:
‘To the question of why didn’t the Katrina Cottage (‘KC’) idea sweep the nation: Heck, the idea didn’t even sweep Coastal Mississippi. The Tolar-Cloyd-Dial neighborhoods took seven years to (reach) critical mass, while proposals to do something similar in other locations were blocked by local planning boards, elected officials and neighbors, even when units could be had for free or for greatly reduced costs over building on site.
People wanted things they way they were.
Car-dependent, suburban-style neighborhoods with homes three or four times the size of KC designs were the normal most folks were anxious to return to. To many, ‘smaller’ implied settling for less; and manufactured housing, no matter how sophisticated the design or the quality of materials, translated to ‘trailer park.’
In the end, tiny houses work best as part of a (land-lease-lifestyle) community.”
And how ‘bout this as a not-so-glittering generality, describing where we’ve been, as factory-built housing providers, during the past 100 years:
“It’s been the better part of a century since well-crafted bungalow, cottages, and other small-scale dwellings defined ‘home’ to most ‘Americans – and since designers and builders produced them on a large scale. The metrics of housing value tend to be about size and price per square foot, with big being better and small being for losers. ‘Affordable’ translates to either ‘subsidized’, which in turn translates to ‘projects’ or to ‘mobile homes’, which implies ‘trailer trash.’ Either way, anything small and affordable threatens to lower market values. While this cannot persist as a permanent mindset, it’s nevertheless a perspective that continues to corrupt conversations about community planning and development.”
To the latter point, I ask: ‘Why can’t the ‘Big Box = Big Bucks’ mindset persist?’ While backburnered somewhat, for the time being, where HUD-Code manufactured housing is concerned – due to lack of easy access to chattel capital for new homes sited in land-lease-lifestyle communities; one just knows it’s going to come roaring back as the national economy improves. Why? Because we’re constantly reminded how homes, besides being an income tax break (i.e. mortgage interest deduction), are how most Americans ‘build wealth’, enabling them to move-on-up among their peers, and or increase the $ nest egg that’ll sustain them during retirement. And new tiny homes simply won’t cut it.
Again, as stated earlier, ‘In the end, tiny houses work best only as part of a land-lease-lifestyle community.’
To that end, we’ll always have land-lease-lifestyle communities! Yes, we’ve already turned one corner, now siting up to six different types of housing, rather than just the traditional two, being pre & post HUD-Code manufactured homes. Next step in the evolution? I know what I think it should be: siting and use of ‘park model RVs’ as housing. But also know there’s opposition to this application at the highest level (i.e. HUD’s Department of Manufactured Housing), within our sister industry, the recreational vehicle folk (Afraid of being pulled into HUD oversight), and of course, the relatively high (per square foot) price tag of the units themselves. So, where does that leave us for the time being? In housing occupancy limbo; with ‘housing’ we can’t utilize (yet), and occupancy that continues to suffer as an estimated 250,000 rental homesites nationwide, remain vacant.
There’s an irony hidden in the previous paragraph. Think of the HUD-coined term for ‘tiny house’. It’s long been, Accessory Dwelling Unit, or ADU in short. And in everyday parlance, ‘tiny houses’, besides being supposed darlings of Millennials (Which I’m not at all sure I believe is anything but a passing fantasy, a fad), are just as often, if not more so, referred to as ‘Granny flats’ – indicative of their utility as shelter for the single person. So, let’s stop fighting about ‘Why park model RVs’ don’t work in the community environment’, and find common cause making this nonsubsidized form of ‘affordable housing’ an everyday staple in LLLCommunities from coast to coast. Anyone listening?
More important. Anyone doing something about this matter? Further ask yourself,
‘Where does my national advocacy body of choice stand on this timely, vacancy-filling subject? There lies ‘the rub’….
Hint. COBA7® is all for ‘park model RVs’ being approved for routine siting within land-lease-lifestyle communities, large and small, nationwide, especially filling long vacant functionally obsolete rental homesites!.
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