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Manufactured houses, widely known as mobile homes, are one of the most affordable options for homeownership in the United States, but they typically come with a big risk: You own the house; you don’t own the lot it sits on.
That has made mobile home parks ripe targets for investors, who buy communities and then increase the lot rents to boost profits. It’s a massive industry: manufactured homes account for approximately one in 10 new single-family homes in the United States, according to a 2023 report by the Manufactured Housing Institute trade organization.
To curb investor involvement, the state of Maine ushered in a new law last year that requires mobile home park owners to give advance notice to residents if they intend to sell, giving the community members a chance to buy it themselves.
On Oct. 10, the residents of Linnhaven Mobile Home Center, a community of nearly 300 occupied homes in Brunswick, became the first to succeed in utilizing the new law. They paid $26.3 million to buy the property from their landlord by cobbling together loans and grants from several sources, including the state and the town of Brunswick.
Now, it’s the largest resident-owned community in Maine, giving hope to other owners of manufactured homes. Several other states also have similar laws in place, including Connecticut and New York.
Housing advocates say that across the country, government intervention is increasingly necessary to create and sustain affordable housing. “The government needs to do more to correct the power imbalance between property owners and tenants, especially in manufactured housing communities where residents are particularly vulnerable to predatory and abusive practices,” said Lisa Sitkin, a supervising attorney at the nonprofit National Housing Law Project. “The recent notice law in Maine and similar laws in other states are good first steps.”
A key factor for Linnhaven residents was organization: They created a board of directors and went to work immediately after they learned that their landlord had received an offer from an outside investor to buy the park. When residents voted on the deal in August, not a single no vote was cast.
“Before starting this process, I didn’t know my neighbors well,” said Maranda Chung, a 35-year-old education project manager, who lives with her 3-year-old daughter and husband in a two-bedroom mobile home there. Now, the community “does feel closer.”
But park owners question the fairness of a law that can complicate the selling process, and some industry groups say institutional investors can be helpful for the communities. “Dedicated investor-owners have the resources and expertise to steadily reinvest in communities, driving improvements and innovation that result in consistent, high-quality management and well-maintained infrastructure, amenities and services,” Lesli Gooch, the chief executive of the Manufactured Housing Institute, said in an emailed statement.
Linnhaven residents decided they didn’t want to risk it.
Investors in, Residents Out
Linnhaven had been run by the family of Kurt Scarponi since 1954. The community, with nearby hiking trails and blueberry fields, has had a reputation for being well-kept and bucolic.
For Zach and Katie Walker, it was the best option in what felt like an impossible house hunt. Mr. Walker, a 26-year-old accountant, and Ms. Walker, 25, who is getting her master’s degree to be a school counselor, got married in 2021. “My wife and I were living with my mom for a bit because we were like, ‘we don’t have any money to live anywhere,’” Mr. Walker said.
Determined to build equity, they didn’t want to be renters. Traditional single-family homes were out of their price range so the couple moved into a two-bedroom manufactured home in Linnhaven in 2023. They’d bought it for $100,000, and pay $520 a month to rent a lot within the park.
Like elsewhere in the country, Maine has seen skyrocketing real estate costs in a housing crisis exacerbated by the pandemic. In August of this year, the median home sale price in the state was nearly $415,000, according to Redfin, but in 2019, it was around $230,000. Across the country, as construction hasn’t been able to keep up with the demand for new homes and as investors increasingly buy up available properties, the housing market has tightened, with many lower-income or first-time buyers pushed out.
Manufactured home prices have also risen significantly in recent years. Between 2017 and 2022, the average price for a mobile home went up from $71,900 to $127,300, The Times reported last year.
Investors have increasingly been buying up mobile home parks, driving rents up and residents out. Between 2015 and 2022, around 800,000 manufactured housing communities were sold to private equity investors and real estate investment trusts, more than a quarter of the total estimated number of manufactured home parks across the country, George McCarthy, the president of the nonprofit the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, found in an analysis. (Mr. McCarthy noted that not all of these sales were from family or “mom and pop” owners to institutional investors, some of the sales happened from investor to investor, also.)
In March, Mr. Scarponi informed residents that he received an offer of $26.25 million from a potential buyer for the park.
“I was kind of spiraling,” Mr. Walker said. “I was nervous as to what was going to happen because if some big company comes in and buys it out, the rent is going to go up super high, and there’s the possibility that whoever buys it could just say, ‘everybody’s got to leave.’”
But under the new law, which went into effect late last year, park owners must give residents and the Maine State Housing Authority a notice of intent to sell. An owner cannot accept an offer for the sale of the park less than 60 days after the notice was sent out. They are also required to disclose the price, terms and conditions of the outside offer received. In that time, the residents of the park are able to organize and make an offer to purchase themselves, and the owner is then required to negotiate with them in good faith. If the residents’ offer is accepted, they have 90 days to put together the financing for the sale to proceed.
Mr. Scarponi, who declined to comment for this article, previously told a local news outlet that he was hoping to sell the park before the new law took effect, but that the deal had fallen through.
“Homeownership in Maine has become unaffordable for many, and preserving what you have has been difficult,” said Janet Mills, the state’s Democratic governor. “We’re concerned about the hundreds of residents of many of these parks who risk losing their security, their home and their financial wherewithal by out-of-state corporations offering big money to buy up these parks.”
‘Control Your Destiny’
Even before Mr. Scarponi informed residents of the outside offer, Linnhaven residents had met with the Cooperative Development Institute, a nonprofit focusing on creating cooperative businesses and communities, to learn about what becoming a resident-owned cooperative would entail.
By early May, the residents had created a board of directors, including Mr. Walker as the treasurer, Ms. Chung as the secretary and Thomas Benoit, 70, as the vice president.
Mr. Benoit, who spent 20 years on active duty in the Navy, moved to Maine from Connecticut for his retirement. “We always came to Maine no matter what for our vacations. We just love Maine, we love the rocky coastline, the atmosphere,” he said. Though it was easy to fall in love with the state, finding a home was difficult. “Honestly, the only way we could really move up here was to find an affordable housing community,” he said. He moved to Linnhaven with his wife in 2021, and they had paid about $62,000 for their two-bedroom mobile home, which sits on a lot with a monthly rent of around $560.
When he heard about the owner potentially selling the land, Mr. Benoit was overcome with worry. “You keep reading all these affordable home communities getting bought up by corporations and they’re jacking up the rent hundreds and hundreds of dollars and basically making them non-affordable,” said Mr. Benoit.
Ms. Chung helped with the tedious task of keeping residents informed.
There were obstacles to distributing information to hundreds of households. “I’ve done a lot of door-to-door sharing information and flyering,” she said. “Not everyone in our community has reliable internet access. And so we do have an email list, but that’s not always the most effective means of communication.”
She and her husband bought their unit for nearly $43,000 in 2018 and pay $580 a month in rent. At times, she said, she’s felt the stigma around manufactured homes. “The response when you tell people you bought a house, it’s like this huge congratulations. When you tell people you bought a mobile home, it’s sort of a mixed bag.” But for Ms. Chung, Linnhaven has been an ideal place for her young family. “We’re close to hiking and beaches and parks and playgrounds,” she said. Getting involved in the community and moving to purchase it felt like “a chance to control your destiny,” she added.
Toward the end of May, the residents submitted an offer of $26.3 million, which was accepted in early June. Then, they had to vote on whether to proceed with the purchase. To cover costs, rents would initially go up by $100, which was a smaller increase than what many residents were expecting — but it could still be a deterrent. Yet in August, they voted to move forward.
‘Ready to Sell’
While Maine’s new law has been helpful for these residents, it’s also made the selling process more difficult for some owners.
Sandra Hinkley’s parents owned two mobile home parks, encompassing over 350 tenants, in Maine that they were eager to sell. Her parents are in their 80s, “so they were ready to sell,” said Ms. Hinkley, a board member of the Manufactured Housing Association of Maine.
They received multiples offers for the communities, and “we chose the buyer that we thought was the best fit for the community, not necessarily the highest price or the best terms,” said Ms. Hinkley, 51. Because there were so many residents to get in touch with, “the whole process of notifying the tenants was very time consuming and cumbersome,” she said.
Ms. Hinkley’s family ended up selling the two properties to the original buyer they had in mind for $22 million, but because they had to wait the required 60-day period, she felt that the process was dragged out. “So the buyer, they’re not really committed to you because they’ve got to wait for 60 days so they could still be shopping around for other properties in other states where these laws don’t exist,” she said. “So from a seller standpoint, it’s a horrible, horrible experience.”
Ms. Hinkley also felt that the process violated confidentiality. In the case of single-family homes, “you can pick who you want to sell it to” without having to share any of the details of the offer, Ms. Hinkley said. But with the sale of mobile home parks in Maine, “if you have a buyer for your property, you then have to share that information with all of the tenants, like every single little detail except for the buyer’s name.”
But for the residents of Linnhaven, now that their purchase has gone through, a widely felt sense of relief and freedom has taken over.
Mr. Walker said he’s been basking in “the security that we’ll never have to worry about what’s going to happen in the future.” He added that continuing to use the land for housing for years to come would be “great for future generations way down the line.”
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