The capital improvements line in a park deal is worth reading against the deck
A 66 lot park makes a clean illustration of why the sources and uses matters more than the deck. Tenant owned homes on all but four lots, master metered water with a submeter conversion planned in year one, lot rent of 310 going to a stated target of 375 over three years. The deck says 120,000 for water infrastructure. The sources and uses inside the actual agreement shows 120,000 total for capital improvements, with submeters, road patching and the four home rehabs all drawing on that same line. Asking for the submeter bid separately is what breaks it open. On a park that size the installed bid commonly lands near 61,400 for 66 lots plus the master vault work, which leaves under 60k for roads and homes on a property whose entrance potholes are visible to anyone who walks it. A sponsor is not obliged to change the deal over that, and most will not. What a good one does instead is add a written line about funding overruns from operating cash before calling capital, then answer every follow up in writing. That response is the real test, and it is a sound basis for sizing a commitment at 35k where 50k was planned. The reporting that follows tells the rest of it. Four quarterly distributions arriving on the date stated, at the rate stated in the agreement, is the baseline anyone should expect. Water recovery starting in month seven, later than the plan said, disclosed in the quarterly letter before anybody asks, is the part that actually carries information. The trap is skipping the sources and uses because the deck summary looks like the same numbers. Often it is not the same numbers. The habit worth keeping is asking for the underlying bid on any single capex line running over about a third of the budget.
