When people think about real estate investing, they often picture people with deep pockets buying up homes and apartment buildings. However, there’s much more to real estate than single or multi-family properties. Mobile home investing is a niche in real estate that allows people to grow wealth without taking on massive amounts of debt or risk. Even if you’re just looking for housing, you can use a mobile home to greatly improve your financial position.
How Can You Invest in Mobile Homes?
There are different ways in which you can invest in mobile homes. Here’s a closer look at the ways in which you can get involved:
Buying and Living in a Home
One of the easiest ways to get involved in mobile homes is to buy a home yourself. If you’re a renter, you’re probably tired of throwing away thousands of dollars each month on housing. And you may not be able to afford or qualify for a traditional home with a mortgage. This is where mobile home living comes into play.
Rather than rent a home, you can purchase a manufactured home for low money down. Even though you have lot rent to pay, you’re still developing equity in your home. After a few years, you can sell the home and use that money as a down payment on a larger property. If you bought a fixer upper, you might be able to get even more for the home than you paid for it.
Flipping a Manufactured Home
In single-family real estate, you can buy a home, fix it up, and sell it for a profit. However, this process isn’t as easy as it sounds. Most people don’t have $200,000 to buy a home and a spare $50,000 to fix it up. While the majority of investors use financing to fund their deals, there’s a high risk involved and obtaining financing is difficult.
Fortunately, you can take the same approach to mobile home investing. The advantage to flipping a manufactured home is the lower risk and lower capital. If you take the effort to find a good deal, you can source a home for around $5,000 and put minimal money into. Then, you can turn around and sell it for a profit or rent it out.
Buying a Mobile Home Park
As a final approach, you can buy a mobile home park. Obviously, this is something you need capital for. But it’s also a way to cash flow easily. You can purchase a park, clean it up, and use third-party management to run it. With this method, you may be able to achieve passive income.
There’s a lot that goes into buying a park. Before you even consider the purchase, you should spend some time researching how to acquire parks, analyze deals, and fund the purchase. For the fast track, you might want to take a coaching program or course.
Wholesaling
Wholesaling refers to finding a property, placing it under contract, and then assigning that contract to another buyer. This approach is great for those who don’t have any money to put down towards a new home. If you wholesale, you can earn money from a few deals and then use that money to buy a property.
Once again, this might sound simple but can be quite complicated. If you don’t use the proper procedure or contracts, you could find yourself in legal trouble. Before you start wholesaling, find a mentor or experienced acquaintance who can help you.
How Much Money Do You Need to Start Mobile Home Investing?
This is a loaded question because you can enter this industry with no money to thousands of dollars. The amount of money you need depends on your goals. For instance, you don’t need any money to wholesale. With that said, you may want to spend some money on marketing materials, a course, or social media advertising.
To renovate a home, you need to have several thousand dollars and the ability to pay for repairs on credit. There are creative ways to do this, so you can technically flip a mobile home with no money in the bank. The same is true of buying a park. Typically, you should have money to invest along with access to other funds.
If your goal is to simply buy a home for yourself, then you need some money to put down. Although not all sellers offer financing, some of them do. You could buy a home on financing for as little as $1500. Alternatively, you can buy a fixer upper for as low as $1000.
Doing the Math
Before you start shopping around for a home or community, you should have a general idea of how much money you have available. Doing so gives you a firm budget and ensures that you won’t overextend yourself.
If you’re not sure of your monthly income and spending, keep track of your income and expenses on a spreadsheet. After about two months, you should have a rough idea of how much money you can afford to spend or invest.
When you’re deciding whether you want to pay cash or finance a home, you need to consider the monthly payments and the interest rate. Paying cash costs less, but it also ties up all of your money. If you are financing a home, make sure you can afford the monthly home payment and the lot rent.
Are You Ready to Get Started?
Mobile home investing is something that can change your life. If you buy a manufactured home, you can do all of the following:
Save money
Grow wealth
Start your own business
And it’s as easy as researching and then taking action. Don’t let analysis paralysis take over, but research your options and go in with a game plan. Then, you’re ready to get started. Feel free to comment below to share your story or to ask questions. Mobile homes can be your gateway to a much better lifestyle.
Written by Danielle Hicks, owner of themhlife.com
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