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On top of rent increases, residents complained of being inundated with fees for everything from pets to maintenance and fines for clutter and speeding - all tucked into leases that can run upwards of 50 pages. One resident, Cindy Newman, told The Associated Press her monthly rent went from $117 to nearly $400 over a year and eight months - equal to the increase over the previous 20 years. Jon Tester of Montana, speaking at a Senate hearing this year, recalled tenants complaining of repeated rent increases at a Havenpark development in Great Falls. In Minnesota, park purchases by out-of-state buyers grew from 46% in 2015 to 81% in 2021, with rent increases as much as 30%, according to All Parks Alliance For Change, a state association. “It led almost to a political awakening.” “Many of the folks living in the park were on fixed incomes, disability, Social Security, and simply were not going to be able to keep pace,” said Kornya, who met with about 300 angry mobile home owners at a mega-church. Iowa Legal Aid’s Alex Kornya said another park purchased by Impact Communities saw rent and fees increase 87% between 20. In Iowa, Matt Chapman, a mobile home resident at a park purchased by Utah-based Havenpark Communities, said his rent and fees had almost doubled since 2019.

Soon after investors started buying up parks in 2015, the complaints of double-digit rent increases followed. Since 2014, the Lincoln Institute estimates Freddie Mac alone provided $9.6 billion in financing for the purchase of more than 950 communities across 44 states.Ī spokesman for Freddie Mac countered that it had purchased loans for less than 3% of the mobile home communities nationwide, and about 60% of those were refinances. He was among those singling out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for guaranteeing the loans as part of a what the lending giants bill as expanding affordable housing. George McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, said about a fifth of mobile home parks, or around 800,000, have been purchased in the past eight years by institutional investors.

“You combine it with an idea that we can just keep raising the rent, and these people can’t leave.”

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“You went from an environment where you had a local owner or manager who took care of things as they needed fixing, to where you had people who were looking at a cost-benefit analysis for how to get the penny squeezed lowest,” Bellus said. There’s also a growing industry, featuring how-to books, webinars and even a mobile home university, that offers tips to attract small investors. Many aggressively promote the parks as ensuring a steady return - by repeatedly raising rent. “You’re putting people in a snare and a trap, where they have no ability to defend themselves,” he added.ĭriven by some of the strongest returns in real estate, investors have shaken up a once-sleepy sector that’s home to more than 22 million mostly low-income Americans in 43,000 communities. But it’s not affordable,” said Benjamin Bellus, an assistant attorney general in Iowa, who said complaints have gone up “100-fold” since out-of-state investors started buying up parks a few years ago. “These industries, including mobile home park manufacturing industry, keep touting these parks, these mobile homes, as affordable housing. Owners are forced to either accept unaffordable rent increases, spend thousands of dollars to move their home, or abandon it and lose tens of thousands of dollars they invested. The purchases are putting residents in a bind, since most mobile homes - despite the name - cannot be moved easily or cheaply. Critics contend mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are fueling the problem by backing a growing number of investor loans. The plight of residents at Ridgeview is playing out nationwide as institutional investors, led by private equity firms and real estate investment trusts and sometimes funded by pension funds, swoop in to buy mobile home parks. “You guys aren’t doing your job and I get a violation?” He was recently fined $10 for using a leaf blower.