The improvements have wheels. The value does not.
I have never owned a mobile home park.
However, I grew up in one.
Guernsey, Saskatchewan. Small rural town. First thirteen years of my life, in a mobile home, in a park, in a place most Canadians have never heard of and never will.
And I want to say this before I say anything else, because the rest of this post is going to sound like a knock on a place I love.
That town gave me a childhood I would not trade.
Bread bags stuffed down inside your rubber boots so your feet stayed dry. Building rafts that had no business floating. Going frogging in a slough with your buddies until somebody’s mom hollered down the road. Shooting rocks with a hockey stick until the blade was chewed to nothing.
Every kid in town, together, outside, all summer. Nobody’s parents knew exactly where anybody was and nobody was worried about it.
I crave those days more than I let on.
But here is the thing I did not understand until I had a couple of decades of reps behind me.
Nobody in that park ever thought about the dirt.
Not one conversation. Not once, from anyone, in thirteen years. We thought about the homes. Whose was newer, whose had been fixed up, who did what to theirs. The improvements were the entire universe.
The ground underneath was invisible. It was just where the park was.
I drove back through a couple of weeks ago
Summer of 2026. Made a point of it.
Ghost town.
That is not me reaching for a dramatic line in a blog post. It is what it is. Tumbleweeds actually rolling down the street, which I would have called a cliché if I had not watched it happen.
I stood on Main Street for a while. The buildings that are left are mostly the shape of buildings. The places that anchored the whole town in my memory are just gone, or worse, still standing and empty.
And the memories came at me hard, right there on the street. Kids on bikes. The store. The rink. Voices I have not heard in coming on fifty years now.
I had to swat them away like the thousand mosquitoes that had come out to greet me at the same time.
That part was sad. I am not going to dress it up.
Then the lesson landed on me backwards
I have spent years telling investors that in a park deal, the land is the real asset.
Guernsey is the proof, in reverse.
Because if somebody had bought that park, and run it beautifully, filled every pad, tightened every expense, replaced the aging infrastructure, kept the tenant base solid, done absolutely everything right…
It still would have been a nightmare.
Not because the operator was bad. Because the dirt was in a town that was dying, and no amount of operational excellence has ever saved a piece of ground nobody is moving toward.
The pads and the homes are the business. The land is the asset.
Say it slowly, because almost everybody buys it backwards.
Guernsey gave me an incredible childhood. It would not have given an investor a nickel. Both of those things are true at the same time, and being able to hold both is most of what this business asks of you.
And there are thousands of Guernseys across this country. Thousands of parks sitting on ground with no future, cash flowing today, priced on a cap rate, and quietly going nowhere.
Let me say the quiet part first
I have never wanted a park.
That is not a knock on the asset class. It is viable, it is legitimate, and in the right hands it is very profitable. I know people running them extremely well. Different courses for different horses.
It is just not for me. And I will be honest, some of that probably is not analysis at all. Some of it is a kid from Guernsey who does not feel the pull.
So take what follows as a pattern I have watched from outside the fence, from operators I have worked with who figured it out mostly the expensive way. Their experience. I am passing it along, not claiming it.
What people are actually underwriting
Walk into a park deal and here is what gets analyzed. Pad rents. Occupancy. Lease-up potential. Utility recovery. Deferred infrastructure. Management drag. Whether the tenant profile holds up.
All of it real. All of it necessary. None of it the point.
The affectionate industry name for the homes is “deals on wheels.” That name is telling you something. Those improvements depreciate, they need constant attention, and they can physically leave.
The dirt cannot leave. Which is wonderful when the dirt is in the right place, and fatal when it is not.
The operators who did well treated park operations as break-even plus a little surplus. Not the prize. The holding cost, paid by somebody else, while the real position matured underneath.
The big win came from one of three doors. Change of use. Selling the land position to a developer. Or becoming the developer themselves.
Buy by the yard… sell by the foot.
Six words. Twenty six years of watching deals work and watching deals die, and that is what it comes down to on the ground.
The reframe
You are not buying cash flow with a land kicker.
You are buying land, with a rent-paying tenant attached that pays you to wait.
Flip the order of those two sentences and every number in your model changes meaning. Occupancy stops being the goal and becomes the carry. A tired park in the path of development beats a beautifully run park an hour from nowhere, and it is not close, even though only one of them looks good on a spreadsheet.
Which means the question at the top of your underwriting is not “what does this produce.”
It is “what is this allowed to become, and who will want it when it does.”
Guernsey answers that question in about four seconds. Nothing, and nobody. You just have to be willing to ask it.
This is not a mobile home park lesson
That is why I am writing it, and I do not own one.
The same split runs through half the asset classes in this country. The tired fourplex on a wide lot in a neighbourhood that just got upzoned. The aging strip mall with a parking field worth more than the building. The single family house in the path of development that everyone keeps valuing as a rental.
Anywhere the improvement is worth less than the ground, you are in the same trade.
The park is just the cleanest version of it, because the improvements literally have wheels and nobody can pretend otherwise.
Most investors never run the split. They underwrite the business, they buy the business, and they inherit the dirt by accident. Sometimes that accident makes them rich. Sometimes that accident is Guernsey.
Betting your retirement on an accident is not a strategy I would recommend to anybody.
Which brings it back to the three pillars
What you buy. Where you buy. Who you rent to.
Twenty six years and I have not found a deal those three do not explain.
In this asset class, WHERE does the heavy lifting. You need a tenant profile that works for the area, absolutely, and I will not let anybody skip that. But a strong economic region with real employment, sitting in the path of new development, with room to add pads, is the whole game.
Get that wrong and no amount of operational excellence saves you. You will just run a very tidy park in a place nobody is moving to.
I know exactly what that looks like from the inside. I lived in it until I was thirteen, and I went back and looked at it again this summer.
Straight talk on the cash flow
Every operator I have talked to says some version of the same thing. The big win is in the dirt, not the monthly. And if durable, low-drama cash flow is genuinely what you are after, there are asset classes with far less friction, hassle, and drama than parks.
If you want the monthly, go get the monthly somewhere easier.
If you want the land position and you are willing to run a business to hold it, now we are talking about something worth the trouble.
Just be honest with yourself about which one you are buying. Most of the pain I have watched in this business came from people who bought one thing while telling themselves they were buying the other.
Run this on your last deal tonight
- Pull up the most recent property you underwrote. Any asset class.
- Split the value in two. What is the raw ground worth today, and what are the improvements worth today. Do not blend them.
- Pull the zoning and the municipal plan. Write down what that dirt is allowed to become in ten years.
- Find out who is building within two kilometres. Not who owns. Who is building.
- Now run the operations again, but as the carry instead of the prize. Does the deal still work when the business only has to break even plus a little?
If the answer changes when you flip the order, you were underwriting the wrong asset.
Better to find that out on paper than in year seven.
The Guernsey test
Before you ask any other question about a property, ask this one.
Is this dirt in a place people are moving toward, or a place people are moving away from?
Everything else is a rounding error next to that. The cap rate will not save you. The lease-up will not save you. Beautiful management of a great business on dead ground is just a slower way to lose.
I did not learn that from a book. I learned it standing on Main Street in the town that raised me, swatting mosquitoes, looking at a whole lot of nothing where my entire childhood used to be.
I am grateful for that place. I would not have bought it.
Look at the dirt.
Keep writing offers. You are closer than you think…
In your corner,
Russell Westcott
#Inspire #Encourage #Love
P.S. If you are looking at something where the ground and the building are telling you two different stories, that is exactly the conversation I like having. Book a call here.
