Mobile Home Park Business Plan: What Goes In It

Who the Plan Is For, and What That Changes

Three readers want three different documents. A lender reads for downside protection and evidence the property can be operated: what happens if occupancy slips, what the infrastructure will demand, and who does the work. An equity partner reads for the upside case and your specific role in producing it — what you bring beyond capital, and what happens if you step away. A plan written only for yourself should be the most honest of the three, because it is the one where flattering your own assumptions costs money rather than credibility.

The same document rarely serves all three well. Write the honest internal version first, then adapt it — the adaptation should be emphasis and length, not substance. If the numbers change between versions, something has gone wrong.

The Structure, Section by Section

Order it this way unless a lender hands you their own format, and treat each heading as a question a reader will ask whether or not you answer it. For the underlying model, see our guide to mobile home park investing.

1. 1. Executive summary

   What belongs there: One page, written last. The park, the lot count, the location, what you are asking for, and the sentence that explains why this property makes money.

   What a reader checks: Whether you can describe the deal without hedging. A summary that reads like a brochure signals the detail behind it is thin.

2. 2. The property

   What belongs there: Lot count, how many lots are occupied, how many are occupied and paying, location and the surrounding housing market, the age of the community, and the condition of the physical plant — roads, drainage, common areas, and the pads.

   What a reader checks: The gap between lots that exist, lots with a home on them, and lots producing income. Those three numbers are rarely equal, and giving only one invites the question.

3. 3. Utility infrastructure and who owns what

   What belongs there: Water, sewer, and electrical: public or private, individually metered or master-metered, and exactly where the provider's responsibility ends and yours begins. Include the age and material of the lines, any known replacement work, and the inspection or permit history of private systems.

   What a reader checks: This is the section a park lender scrutinises hardest, and where a thin plan gets found out. A private well, a lagoon, or a master meter with no recovery mechanism changes the risk of the whole deal, and a reader who cannot tell which applies will assume the worse one.

4. 4. Ownership structure of the homes

   What belongs there: The split between tenant-owned and park-owned homes, and for park-owned units, the condition and title status of each. State plainly which of the two businesses the park mostly is.

   What a reader checks: Whether you understand that a lot-lease community and a park with thirty park-owned homes are different operations with different obligations and financing treatment.

5. 5. Market and comparables

   What belongs there: Local lot rents at comparable communities, how you sourced them, the condition of those parks relative to yours, and the wider rental picture in the area.

   What a reader checks: How you got the comparables. Named parks with a date and a method carry weight; a range with no source reads as a guess dressed up as research.

6. 6. Revenue model

   What belongs there: Where the income comes from, line by line: lot rent, rent on any park-owned homes, utility recovery if a mechanism exists, and lease-permitted fees. Tie every line to the rent roll and the leases.

   What a reader checks: Whether the revenue lines match the actual leases. Utility recovery cannot simply be assumed — it requires metering and a billing process, and some states regulate it.

7. 7. Operating cost lines

   What belongs there: What the park spends to run: utilities it pays, road and grounds work, tree work, trash, insurance, management, repairs, and an infrastructure reserve. Show the source of each figure.

   What a reader checks: Plausibility. This is the section that most often sinks a first plan, and it gets its own discussion below.

8. 8. The value-add plan, if there is one

   What belongs there: What you intend to change and what it costs: filling empty lots, bringing below-market lot rent toward market on a defensible schedule, or building a way to recover utility costs. Each with a timeline and a cost source.

   What a reader checks: Whether the plan prices its own execution. Filling lots means acquiring, transporting, and installing homes — a capital-intensive business buyers routinely leave out.

9. 9. Management and operations

   What belongs there: Who does the work, on site and off: rent collection, delinquency follow-up, maintenance intake, lease administration, and the systems each runs on. Name the arrangement — self-managed, an on-site manager, a third-party company, or a mix.

   What a reader checks: A concrete answer to “who runs this and how.” Vagueness reads as a buyer who has not thought past closing.

10. 10. Risks and mitigations

    What belongs there: The real risks to this specific park, each paired with what you would actually do about it. Not a generic list.

    What a reader checks: Candour. A reader who has seen a hundred plans knows the risks already, and is measuring whether you do.

11. 11. Financing request and use of funds

    What belongs there: What you are asking for, what it will be spent on, and the equity and reserves you are bringing. Break out purchase, closing costs, immediate capital work, and working capital separately.

    What a reader checks: Whether the reserve is real. A request with no cushion for the first infrastructure surprise is the common reason an otherwise reasonable plan gets a smaller number back.

12. 12. Supporting documents

    What belongs there: The evidence behind everything above, attached rather than summarised. Listed in full below.

    What a reader checks: That the attachments support the assertions. Mismatches between the narrative and the rent roll are found quickly and are hard to recover from.

Ownership entity and filing treatment belong in a plan, but they belong to your CPA — write one line saying the structure has been prepared professionally and attach it, rather than improvising. If the plan is for a community you intend to build rather than buy, the entitlement sequence changes the whole document; see how to start a mobile home park.

The Section People Get Wrong: Operating Cost Lines

Almost every weak park plan is weak in the same place. The revenue side gets built carefully from the rent roll; the cost side gets assembled from optimism. The items that go missing are consistent enough to list.

• Infrastructure reserves. Water lines, sewer laterals, and electrical pedestals have long replacement cycles and no small version of the repair. A plan with no reserve line is claiming that civil infrastructure lasts forever.
• Road and drainage maintenance. Recurring and easy to underestimate, because the seller may have simply stopped doing it.
• Tree work. Mature trees over homes and lines are a periodic and occasionally urgent cost that almost never appears in a first draft.
• Vacancy during turnover. Turnover is low in a park but not zero, and an empty lot produces nothing while still costing something.
• The cost of filling empty lots. The most expensive omission. Empty lots look like free upside until you price acquiring, transporting, and installing a home on each.

The instinct behind understating these is to make the park look efficient. It does the opposite. A reader who has financed parks before knows roughly what a community of that size and vintage costs to run, and implausibly low costs read as inexperience rather than discipline. Worse, it contaminates the rest of the document: once a reader stops believing the cost lines, they have no reason to keep believing the revenue lines.

The fix is sourcing rather than arithmetic. Real figures come from the seller’s actual records — bank statements and paid invoices, not a summary sheet — from written contractor quotes, and from local comparables for anything the park has not spent recently. Say where each number came from, next to the number. While you are assembling the raw figures, a simple property tracking spreadsheet is enough to hold them, and establishing what the local market supports is the same discipline applied to the revenue side.

Risks and Mitigations

This is the shortest section that most improves a plan, and the one first-time writers are most tempted to cut. A plan with no risk section reads worse than one with a candid section, because the absence tells a reader either that you did not look or that you decided not to say. Name the real risks for this park and pair each with what you would do.

• Private water or sewer systems. These can require work on a timeline you do not control. Mitigation: an engineer’s assessment before closing, a funded reserve, and a stated position on eventual municipal connection.
• Non-conforming zoning. Many parks survive as legal non-conforming uses and cannot be expanded, and sometimes cannot be rebuilt. Mitigation: written confirmation from the municipality of what is permitted, plus insurance sized to the rebuild position you actually have — see landlord insurance.
• A single employer dominating the local market. If one facility supports most of the resident base, its fortunes are your occupancy. Mitigation: name the concentration and show what occupancy the plan still works at.
• Regulatory attention on rent increases. Lot rent increases draw local press, resident organisation, and legislation. Mitigation: an increase schedule defensible against local comparables and paired with visible improvements.

Verify each of these before you write it — the due diligence checklist covers how, and how to buy a mobile home park covers where each verification falls in the transaction. Where park-owned homes are part of the deal, park-owned versus tenant-owned is the risk framing to borrow.

Supporting Documents to Attach

The attachments are where a serious reader spends their second hour. Assemble them as you write; the gaps in this list are usually the gaps in the plan.

• The current rent roll, lot by lot, showing occupied, vacant, and delinquent lots
• Copies of the lot lease and the park rules residents sign
• Utility bills covering a full year, so seasonal swings are visible
• Permits, inspection reports, and agency correspondence for any private water or sewer system
• A list of park-owned homes with condition notes and title status for each
• A survey showing lot boundaries, easements, and the community layout
• Photographs of roads, drainage, common areas, and a representative sample of lots

If the park’s leases are informal or inconsistent, say so plainly and attach what exists rather than describing it. Our mobile home lot lease agreement template shows the terms a lot lease normally carries — a useful comparison when the ones you inherit are missing half of them. For what sits inside the charge, see lot rent. The SBA’s guidance on writing a business plan covers the general-purpose structure this outline adapts.

The Operations Section: What to Actually Say

A lender asking “who runs this and how” wants a concrete answer, and this is the section where a specific one is easy to give. Kelpic® is unit-based property management software, and a lot maps onto a unit directly: each lot carries a resident, a lease, and a recurring monthly charge, so lot rent is collected online rather than chased, and delinquency shows as who is behind and by how many days rather than as a memory. Maintenance requests arrive through a resident portal instead of a phone number, applications capture screening consent under FCRA, and multiple parks sit under one login. Utility billing, if the park does it, runs on separate systems — say that plainly rather than implying one platform covers everything.

Whatever you use, name it and describe the routine it produces. See the mobile home park management software for how lot-based management works, rent collection for the payment side, and pricing if the plan needs a software cost line.

Frequently Asked Questions