Occupancy was 94 percent on the rent roll and 81 percent on the ground

Happens more than people admit, especially on seller-provided T12s with no third-party verification.

What I'd want: when were those pads last inspected for utility stub condition?

Pad-count delta is literally a separate line on the appraisal grid for a reason.

The infrastructure question is the one that kept me up when I was modeling a park in eastern Ohio last year, 47 pads on paper, drove it myself and counted 39 with homes on them, and the seller had a similar "relocated" story. What nobody tells you until you're already in the weeds is that a vacant pad where a home got dragged off sometimes means the utility stub is compromised, the skirting anchor points are gone, and if it's a septic system park, the lateral might have been damaged during removal. Getting a home back onto that pad isn't just a lot-fill cost, it's potentially a 4,000 to 8,000 dollar rehab on infrastructure you thought was ready to receive. At a 6.8 cap on phantom cash flow, the buyer is essentially paying for occupied lots that are actually broken ground.

The thing I'd want to know that you didn't mention, what was the water and sewer setup? If it's a municipal pass-through and those eleven pads still had meters running, there's a utility bill trail that should reconcile against the rent roll and expose the vacancy in black and white. A seller who can't produce 24 months of utility invoices on a park that size is telling you something. I've been building my own underwriting sheet off actual utility consumption per pad as a cross-check on occupancy, and the spread between claimed and real gets uncomfortable fast once you run those numbers side by side.

Eleven "relocated" residents is a specific kind of fraud because it's defensible in court, they didn't fabricate tenants, they just left expired leases on the roll and called the lot rent collectible. I've seen note sellers do the same thing with performing status on loans where the borrower hasn't paid in four months but the cure window hasn't technically closed.

The 5.4 is probably still optimistic if those empty pads have been dormant long enough to need utility reconnection fees or engineered setback re-certification before a new home can go in, and in some counties that alone runs $8-12k per pad.

Passed on one in Laurel, Mississippi in late 2023 where the gap was only six units but the math was almost identical. Seller had a 7.1 cap on paper and I got to a 5.8 after the site walk. What made it worse was that two of the "relocated" residents had actually signed new leases at a competing park two miles up the highway. So the story wasn't just inflated occupancy, it was that the market itself had shifted and this park was losing to someone with newer infrastructure. The T12 was 18 months stale by the time it hit the broker package, and nobody flagged that the trailing period predated the competitor's ribbon cutting.

The thing I would want to nail down before anything else is the vintage of the water and sewer lines under those empty pads. On the Mississippi deal we pulled permits and found that the pad cluster with the highest vacancy was also the section with cast iron laterals from the late 1960s. Rehab cost on that alone was going to eat two years of lot rent on every pad in that zone, occupied or not. A 6.8 cap built on phantom units is bad. A 6.8 cap built on phantom units sitting above failing infrastructure that you now own is a different category of problem entirely.