Deck says lot rent goes from $265 to $425 in 24 months. What breaks first?

What I can't square: the thesis is that residents can't leave because moving a home costs thousands. True. But that logic cuts the other way when the home is worth $4k. Walking away is cheap for them and expensive for the park.

Every park deck I've read models the gap to market and none of them model the collection rate moving. If the sponsor won't put a stressed collections case in writing, that tells you how much thought went into it.

Two towns on my list passed lot rent stabilization ordinances after a buyer pushed rents hard. The risk arrives after the increase, not before it, which is the wrong order for anyone underwriting.

Get the signed leases rather than the rent roll. On 60 lots I'd expect maybe 40 executed documents, several expired and rolling month to month, and a handful where the current occupant isn't the person who signed. Notice periods for increases are set by statute in most states and some require 90 days or more, sometimes with limits on how often you can increase. That alone can stretch a 24-month plan into 30 before you count anything else.

Basic one: if someone just leaves the home sitting on the lot, does it become yours?

rigging, it becomes your problem first. There's an abandonment process under state law before you can get title or dispose of it, and then you're paying $3k to $8k to demo and haul depending on distance and what's in the walls. And on the construction side, the minute you raise rent $160 residents start pointing at the potholes and the water pressure, and they're right to. Resurfacing a loop road is dollars per square foot at a scale that eats a year of the increase.

I ask for a 12-month ledger showing billed rent next to collected rent, month by month, per lot. Sellers volunteer the first column. The spread between the two columns is the underwriting.

On the debt side that $425 buys you a refinance conversation in year three if it actually holds. It buys you nothing at closing, since sizing runs off in-place collections with a vacancy and credit loss haircut. Anyone modeling proceeds against pro forma NOI has a funding gap they haven't found yet.

I'm looking at a 41-lot park where 6 lots are 60-plus days behind and the seller has been carrying them for a year without filing anything. Raising rent there doesn't produce revenue, it produces empty pads and six court dates.

Two practical things from managing this kind of property. Lot rent evictions move at whatever speed the local court moves, and at the end of it the home is still physically sitting there. And if you submeter water at the same time as an increase, residents experience the whole thing as one increase, so sequence those apart by a year unless you want both fights at once.

I'd stage it. $30, then $30 twelve months later, and spend visible money on the road and the entrance before the first notice goes out. Slower, but you keep the rent roll you paid for.

lantern, before you sell management as a service, check whether that state requires a broker license to manage property for a fee. Some states exempt on-site resident managers and some don't exempt anyone, and the commission will tell you in writing if you ask.