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Buying a park

Your first 30 days after closing on a mobile-home park

By · Published May 6, 2026 · 9 min read

The first month you own a park decides how the next few years go. Residents are watching to see what changes. The old owner's loose habits are still in force. Whatever routine you set now is the routine you will be stuck with, so set a good one on purpose.

Here is a first-30-days plan that experienced buyers run, in the order it should happen.

Week 1: Tell residents you own it, and where to pay

Your first act is a letter to every resident. Send it before anything else, and keep it to one job: introduce the new owner and say exactly where and how to pay rent from now on.

A good new-ownership letter names the new company, gives an address and phone number, states the payment methods you accept, and tells residents where to send or bring rent. This is also the moment to close the on-site cash door if the old owner left it open. A common line, straight from park owners, is that from this day forward the park accepts only checks and money orders, or online and store payments. Cash handed to a manager is how money goes missing, and week one is the cleanest time to end it.

One rule about this letter: do not bundle a rent increase into it. If you plan to raise rent, send the ownership notice first, let it land, and send the increase separately about a week later. A "hi, I'm your new owner and your rent is going up" letter starts the relationship in a hole, and in most states the increase needs its own 90-day notice anyway.

Week 1: Take control of the money before you touch anything else

Before you improve a single thing, lock down the flow of rent.

Open the park's bank account and set up how rent comes in. Confirm where deposits land and who can see them. Get the rent roll the seller gave you and start checking it against reality, tenant by tenant, as payments come in this month. The pro forma you underwrote is a sales document. What hits the account in your first cycle is the truth.

Do a first reconciliation the moment rent starts arriving. What residents were billed, what came in, and what reached the bank should tie out. If they do not, you want to know in week one, not at year-end.

Week 2: Read the meters and find the water problem

If the park is submetered for water, get a full set of meter reads early. If it is master-metered, pull the utility bills and see what the park is paying against what tenants are charged. Owners routinely discover in month one that they are eating thousands a year in water because the old owner never billed it right, or never billed it at all.

A sudden spike at one lot on the meters is worth chasing now. It is usually a running toilet or an underground leak, and a leak you find in week two is a lot cheaper than the one you find on next quarter's bill.

Week 2: Gather the paper the seller was fuzzy about

Collect the operating records the old owner half-explained during due diligence:

You checked most of this before closing. Now you own it, so confirm every item is in your files, not in the seller's memory. If you have not built a buyer's checklist yet, our mobile-home-park due-diligence checklist covers the items worth verifying line by line.

Weeks 3 to 4: Deal with management, then write the plan

If there is an on-site manager, the first month tells you whether to keep them. Weak management is the most common thing new owners fix, and the longer you wait, the more the manager's habits become the park's habits. Watch how they handle collections, how they talk to residents, and whether the numbers they report match the deposits.

Then write a plan. Not a vision statement, a plain list: the three or four things that need fixing, in order, with a date on each. Park turnaround advice from experienced owners comes down to the same idea. Make a specific written plan and execute it in small steps. A park does not turn around in a heroic month. It turns around because someone did one thing a week for a year.

The month-one goal is not to fix the park. It is to see the park clearly and control the money. Clean rent collection, honest meter reads, and a written punch list beat a burst of repairs you picked before you understood the place.

Set up the three things you will watch from home

Most park owners do not live at the park. Manufactured-home communities house around 20 million people across roughly 43,000 communities, and a large share of them are run by owners hours away. Remote ownership works when you watch the right few numbers instead of visiting constantly.

Set up three habits now:

Track rent collected against last month. A simple daily or weekly number, this month versus last, tells you fast if collections are slipping. Enforce the same standard for everyone. No pay, no stay, applied evenly.

Watch the property without driving there. A cheap mounted camera or a manager's phone photos can show you condition without a four-hour round trip.

Run a monthly money check. Compare every line item, budgeted against actual. Some owners call it a budget-to-actual report. When a number drifts, you see it and ask why, which is also how you catch theft and surprise costs.

The end-of-month scorecard

Thirty days in, you should be able to answer these without calling anyone:

If you can say yes to those, you have done the hard part of month one. The park is now something you can see and steer, not a black box you inherited.

Lot Sidekick sets a new park up fast: your rent roll loaded from a spreadsheet, a map of who has paid, meter-read entry, and receipts on cash and money orders, so week one is about running the park instead of building a system. You can stitch this together from a spreadsheet and a bank login too. Either way, the first-month order above is what matters.

Sources

General information, not legal or financial advice. Confirm notice rules, lease enforceability, and permit requirements for your state and locality with a local attorney and your accountant.

Lot Sidekick loads your rent roll for you, so you see who is really paying on a live map before your first billing cycle. Send your spreadsheet and I'll set up your park, or see the live demo, or call (425) 405-0734.