'Demand is through the roof': inside America's trailer park boom

Byron Sellers had wanted to get into real estate investing for years, but the deals he came across were always prohibitively expensive. One day in 2017, he was listening to a real estate podcast while driving for Lyft when he heard about something different: flipping mobile homes.

"I was like, 'Wow, she's saying it just takes $3,000 or $5,000 to start?'" Sellers remembers. His passengers wanted him to switch to music, so he texted the podcast to his wife, Sharnice, asking her to give it a listen. "When I came home, she was excited. It was like: 'Hey, you want to do it? I want to do it. Let's do it.'"

The Sellerses did some research, took out a $10,000 high-interest consumer loan, and began poring over Google Maps to locate trailer parks near Chicago, where they were renting an apartment. Then they hit the road. After checking out more than 40 units for sale, they spotted the right deal. The manager of a mobile home park 90 minutes outside the city had some units he was trying to unload. "Make me an offer," he said. They suggested $4,300 for the two they were interested in. He bit. Byron and Sharnice were now the proud owners of two mobile homes, their first real estate investment.

One of the units was move-in ready; the other needed work. With help from Sharnice's father, the couple put in new flooring, refurbished the bathroom, replaced the appliances, and painted the interior. Then the Sellerses sold both units, netting $10,000 for the turnkey mobile home and $9,500 for the one they flipped. All told, they'd gone from finding to buying to flipping to selling in under 60 days.

This is mobile home investing, an unsexy, little-known sector that happens to be recession-proof, meeting a nearly bottomless demand, and earning some of the best returns in the housing industry. Its low price of entry is allowing an entirely new crop of entrepreneur — many of them Black, as the Sellerses are, or coming from very modest backgrounds. (A 2021 survey by the National Association of Real Estate Investment Managers found that 73 percent of industry workers are white males.) With housing costs rising across America, many mobile home flippers are finding the opportunities so plentiful that they're now training other wannabe real estate moguls in the practice, earning a significant chunk of their income from mentorships and tutorials that help more people like them enter the field.

While they don't get a lot of attention, mobile homes — "manufactured housing" per marketing and policy wonks, or "trailers" in other circles — are the country's biggest source of unsubsidized low-income housing, providing shelter to 21 million Americans. As the nation's housing crisis grows, they're becoming increasingly attractive to people who can't afford a traditional site-built home. Between 2014 and 2024, the number of new manufactured homes shipped across the country increased by over 60%, according to census data.

"Demand is through the roof, supply is barely catching up, rents are accelerating, and occupancy is as high as it's ever been," a report from the industry publication Multi-Housing News noted in December. "They are the lowest cost of homeownership in nearly every market in America."

They're cheap in part because the selling price rarely includes land; most buyers pay only for the structure. They're also factory-built, benefiting from economies of scale. And unlike stick-built houses, mobile homes are classified as personal property, like cars, which results in lower property taxes and home insurance costs. Historically, they've also depreciated like cars.

But that's changing in today's housing market. A few months ago, LendingTree reported that between 2018 and 2023 the average sales price of new mobile homes went up by almost 60%, to $124,000 from $78,000. And the Urban Institute found that while there's more volatility in the manufactured housing market and location matters, the homes generally appreciate much like site-built properties, at about 5% a year.

About 30% of mobile home residents live in parks where they may own the home but lease the land underneath it. In those cases, park managers are motivated to fill vacant units so they can continue to collect rent on the lot. Investors use that to their advantage. They might spend hours in the communities, cultivating relationships with managers and looking for homes that are available for purchase. Like more traditional real estate investors, they call it "driving for dollars."

"We basically drive through these parks and if they look abandoned, we take note," says Mersadez Joseph, an EMT in Columbia, South Carolina, who flips mobile homes on the side with her husband, Devon. "Then we follow up with the manager. We kind of pitch it to them to let them know, 'Hey, we can make you all some money and get you a tenant in there, if you allow us to fix it up.'" Over the past four years, the Josephs have done about 20 deals and have earned about $250,000. They look to sell every home for double what they put into it.

Other investors spend time in rural areas, spying out vacant mobile homes on private property. The houses are often considered so worthless that many landowners will sell them for a song.

"They'll say, 'Hey, I got a mobile home and I want to get rid of it,'" says Michael Wiley, an investor in Dothan, Alabama. "Sometimes they might put a decent little price on it, but most of the time they just want to get rid of it." Wiley acquired one for a dollar; for another, a double-wide, he paid $1,000 and then sold it for $30,000. Wiley worked in a factory and did graphic design before getting into mobile homes. "We hit six figures in that first year."

The work does require a lot of elbow grease. Some units just need a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint; others have rotted subflooring, old insulation, and broken windows that all need replacing. After that, the investor will have to market and sell them on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, either outright to a buyer or wholesaler, or through seller financing. Investors say the downsides of the mobile homes business aren't much different from those of other real estate fields: homes that turn out to be in worse condition than the buyers had thought, difficult tenants, unscrupulous contractors.

The sector's high returns are often characterized by desperation. Facing a lost spouse or job or some other hardship, sellers are often willing to dispose of a home cheaply because they need the quick cash. Buyers are hungry for something, anything, they can afford. They aren't looking to build equity; they're seeking shelter, at a time when both conventional homeownership and rentals have soared out of reach for many. Mobile homes exist in an alternate reality, one where a home purchase can be completed in a day without the help of attorneys or appraisers, where the cost of a used unit floats depending on its actual value to the buyer and seller.

"If you put a message on Facebook Marketplace saying 'I have a home to sell on payments,' you'd be overwhelmed," says John Fedro, an investor in Austin. He's been in the field since 2002 and now owns several mobile home parks. Like the other mom-and-pop investors interviewed for this story, he sees himself as providing an important and helpful service. The demand is so great, Fedro says, that people will happily buy retrofitted homes built before 1976, the year the Department of Housing and Urban Development began regulating mobile homes. The earlier homes were more shoddily built, with cheaper plumbing and electrical systems, but many are still around.

Not everyone views the work through the lens of service. In the past few years, private equity firms have discovered how lucrative mobile home parks can be. "In 2020-21, institutional investors accounted for 23 percent of all manufactured home purchases, up from 13 percent in 2017-19," the Private Equity Stakeholder Project wrote in a recent report. Mobile home parks have a 22% annual compounded return, the highest in the real estate field, the report said, and firms like Blackstone are spending millions to acquire communities around the country. Many subsequently raise the rent on the parks' mobile home lots, and residents, who usually can't afford to move the units, are stuck.

Small-scale investors say they're watching the phenomenon as rents climb, but so far, it's not affecting their business.

The Instagram video starts with a drone shot that descends from above and lingers on a couple in matching black T-shirts who are standing in a mobile home park. "Allow us to reintroduce ourselves. We are Byron and Sharnice Sellers, founders of Mobile Home Elite Investors," read the captions, accompanied by Jay-Z's "Public Service Announcement." "We currently have five mobile home parks. Follow us for mobile home and mobile home park investing."

Byron and Sharnice have done very well since that aha moment in 2017. Sharnice left her job with a Chicago gas company, Byron stopped driving for Lyft, and they began investing all their time in finding and selling mobile homes. First they flipped them, then they dived into seller financing, and then they started buying parks. Last year, the couple moved to Florida, in part because the mobile home market there is so strong.

Pretty early, Byron realized they could make money teaching others how to do it, too. "It kind of just took off," he said.

It's not a brand-new idea. For over a dozen years, Mobile Home University has been offering trainings to aspiring investors that currently start at $550. But it's focused on teaching people how to buy entire parks — and then raise the rent on tenants.

Fedro for years has also been offering trainings and tutorials in buying and selling individual homes; right now, a one-on-one mentorship throughout the client's first three deals is almost $3,000. But the Sellerses were some of the first mobile home investors of color to begin showing others how to get into the field. Now there are many, including Mersadez, who posts TikTok videos under the moniker Mobile Home Bae; Wiley's Flippin' Mobile Homes; and Mobile Home Gurl. Each has a slightly different model, but they often include a mix of free social media content covering some basics, paid online courses outlining the details of how to find and sell homes, and one-on-one mentoring to respond to specific questions.

Byron and Sharnice — who are now earning more from the trainings than from their actual investments — estimate they've taught more than 17,000 would-be investors. Virtually all of them have been Black. "I feel like it gives them the confidence to say, 'Hey, if they can do it and be this successful, I know I can do it too,'" says Sharnice.

Real estate investing requires an aggressive drive and a hustle, and not every student has thrived. But some have. Jenisha and DaVon Nelson took the Sellerses' online course in 2020 and began implementing their lessons shortly afterward. Jenisha, a nurse, grew up in a mobile home and was intrigued by the concept.

"It was as simple as taking doughnuts to a park manager to introduce ourselves, get our faces out there," she says. But their business didn't really take off until they moved from Arizona to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where Jenisha is from. Since then, they've done about 13 deals, and they wear T-shirts sporting their logo wherever they go, as a conversation starter. "It's a way of life now," says Jenisha.

This current moment might not last, however. Many housing advocates have begun eyeing mobile homes as a solution to the country's housing shortage — after some key protections are enacted, that is. Arica Young, who leads the Innovations in Manufactured Homes Network at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, says her organization is focused on "addressing issues in the sector, including quality, efficiency, tenant security, finance, and land use." Local zoning laws, for example, explicitly ban manufactured housing in communities all over the country — even though many modern units are indistinguishable from traditional homes. And the classic image of a mobile home smashed to bits by a tornado isn't wrong; older homes or those that aren't securely fastened to the ground are vulnerable to extreme weather.

More protections would most likely mean higher prices, though, and could eventually lead to these investors being priced out of the market. For now, however, they're aiming to connecti buyers with what's becoming, in the US, a scarce resource.

As Byron Sellers puts it, "Where else in America are you going to find a move-in-ready house for less than $30,000 to $50,000?"

Amanda Abrams is a freelance journalist living in Durham, North Carolina.