I don't own a park. I brokered my first one and learned more in that 90 days than a year of coursework
Getting licensed at the moment, and my first real listing was a 36-lot park a family had owned since 1978. Not my money, so this isn't my win exactly, but I sat inside the whole thing and the sequence surprised me.
What I expected: hard part is finding a buyer. What actually happened: three serious buyers inside two weeks, all of them out-of-state, all of them asked the same four questions before they'd get on a plane.
- Who owns the homes. 31 tenant-owned, 5 park-owned.
- Utilities. City water on a master meter, city sewer, park-maintained lines.
- Current lot rent versus market. $270 against comparables at $360 to $390.
- Twelve months of bank statements, not the rent roll.
Every one of them asked for the bank statements before they asked the price. That was the education. The sellers were faintly insulted by it and I had to explain, several times, that a spreadsheet from 1978 isn't evidence of anything.
Listed at $1.35M. Went at $1.28M with a survey credit for a fence encroachment nobody had noticed in forty years. Closed in 71 days. The financing was the slow part because the appraiser wanted a park-specific comp set and there weren't many in that county.
The part that nearly broke it: the five park-owned homes. Two buyers wanted them gone from the deal entirely and the sellers wouldn't separate. It resolved by assigning a low nominal value to those homes in the purchase agreement and everyone moving on, which the attorneys handled because how you allocate purchase price has tax consequences and neither the sellers nor I were the right people to be deciding that.
What I'd keep: asking a park seller for bank statements on the first call. It sorts serious listings from stories immediately, and it costs me nothing to ask.