Pushback of the Week: November 11, 2024: Maine Rep. Traci Gere and Linnhaven Mobile Home Center Residents and Investors
“[Mobile home] communities are being bought en masse by private equity firms…. More worrisome is the fact that many new owners are buying [trailer] parks for the land and clearing them for redevelopment. What is gone when they are destroyed is often the last corner of private low-cost housing.”
~ Eduard Krakhmalnikov
In the rural state of Maine, 10% of residents live in manufactured homes (also called mobile homes or trailers), which is higher than the national average of about 6%. Many mobile home residents park their trailers in a manufactured home community, and in most such communities, residents pay a monthly fee to rent their lot from the landowner.
As in the real-estate sector as a whole, private equity interests have been moving into Maine and other states to “tak[e] positions in this previously unexplored asset class,” gobbling up several large trailer parks in southern Maine for “tens of millions of dollars each.” In 2020–2021, 23% of manufactured home purchases nationwide were by private equity, versus 13% in the 2017–2019 period.
A Maine law enacted in October 2023 gives residents of manufactured home communities some protection from the private equity invasion and the spiking costs, maintenance issues, or evictions that tend to follow (increased costs may include not just higher lot rents but also jacked-up utility and service fees and high-interest loans on trailers). Maine is far from alone in taking this action; a total of 22 states now have laws that either require or encourage trailer park owners to give homeowners the option of purchasing their land collectively. Introduced by Rep. Traci Gere (D-Kennebunkport), who co-chairs Maine’s joint select housing committee, the “opportunity to purchase” law:
- Requires landowners to give residents notice if the “land under their homes” is going to be sold
- Requires that residents be given 60 days from that time to decide whether to purchase the land themselves and form a resident-owned community (at least 51% must agree); before the law’s passage, just 10 of Maine’s roughly 700 mobile home communities were resident-owned
- Allows for a further 90 days for residents to come up with financing
Residents of Brunswick’s Linnhaven Mobile Home Center, home to 277 households, were the first to succeed under the new law, securing loans and grant money to purchase their trailer park and form the Blueberry Fields Cooperative. They attribute their win, in part, to the landowner’s desire to protect his family legacy and his grasp of the benefits of resident ownership. However, another Maine community with 350 mobile homes saw their offer rejected—even though it exceeded the competing bid—because their competition was able to pay cash up front. As a market development and acquisition specialist sympathetic to the residents’ cause noted, “There can be…stigma or bias against the residents being credible, legitimate, [bona fide] buyers.”
The Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry trade group, disputes the benefits of resident ownership, arguing that homeowners may not see a financial return on their purchase of the land, but the rep of an organization that helps create resident-owned parks counters, “[O]wners generally don’t buy their parks with hopes of a big financial return. They do it to…ensure stability over the long term.”
Nationally, as the median age of first-time home buyers hits a record high (38 years of age) and first-time buyers (as a percentage of homes sold) hit record lows, mobile homes are coming to be seen as “the last bastion” of unsubsidized affordable housing. In Maine, the median price of a single-family home rose from $230,000 in 2019 to around $415,000 as of August 2024—a trend that independent journalist Eve Ottenberg describes as “confiscatory inflation.” It is, therefore, worth tracking the success of future resident-ownership efforts in Maine and elsewhere.
Related:
Brunswick Residents May Be the First to Use a New Maine Law to Purchase Their Mobile Home Park
New Law Hopes to Keep Investors Out of Maine’s Mobile Home Parks
To Save Affordable Housing, States Promote Resident-Owned Mobile Home Parks
New Tool Tracks Private Equity Ownership of Manufactured Housing Communities Across U.S.
What Rights Do Mobile Home Park Tenants Have?
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Trailers on the Edge
Why Mobile Home Parks Are the Most “American” Form of Housing
6 Rules to Address for Your Mobile Home Parks
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