Mobile Home Park Infill: Turning 50 Lots Into 60

Mobile home park infill — reactivating lots a community was originally platted for but no longer uses — is the cheapest way to add housing units in most markets, because the entitlement work and the utility stubs are already in the ground. Andrew Cramer’s firm, Bridgeview Asset Management, has run this playbook across roughly 40 manufactured home parks in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana, and the typical result is turning a 50-unit property into a 60-unit property.

The mechanics are specific: find the old utility connections on site, pull historical photographs and county records to document prior density, get the county to recognize the additional spaces, then size a manufactured unit to whatever odd pad shape is left over. The financing and the exit math change too, and not always in the direction you’d expect.

This guide covers how to prove prior density, why HUD-code and RVIA-label product solves pad problems that stick-frame can’t, which community capex actually moves an asset onto a lender’s radar, the FHA Title I financing gap, and the diligence filters Cramer uses before he writes a check.

From the Real Estate Pros Show

This article draws on an interview with Andrew Cramer of Bridgeview Asset Management on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Scott Bursey.

Why Old Parks Are Almost Always Under-Occupied on Paper

Start with the age of the stock. Cramer’s estimate is that the average manufactured home community is at least 40 years old, and many are 50 or 60. A property that old has almost certainly been reconfigured at least once — plenty of them started life as campgrounds or RV parks, then larger units arrived and spaces got combined, and the density the park operates at today has no particular relationship to the density it was platted for.

That gap is the opportunity. Bridgeview’s standard move is finding a 50-unit park and turning it into a 60-unit park. Ten spaces is a 20% unit count increase on an asset you already control, with no land acquisition and no entitlement fight over raw ground.

There’s so much hidden density in manufactured home parks. A lot of what we do is we’ll find a 50-unit park and turn it into a 60-unit park.

The reason this matters beyond the return math is cost per unit of new housing delivered. You are not buying dirt, running new mains, or platting a subdivision. You are reconnecting to infrastructure that was paid for decades ago. In markets across the Pacific Northwest that badly need affordable inventory, that makes reactivated spaces some of the cheapest new housing anyone can deliver.

Underwrite for it. When you walk a park, the question is not just what the rent roll shows — it is what the site was built to hold and what evidence is still on the ground to prove it.

How to Prove Prior Density to the County

The evidence trail is physical first, documentary second. Bridgeview walks the property looking for old utility connections — stubs, risers, abandoned laterals that indicate a space used to be served there. Those connections are the anchor, because they are hard for a jurisdiction to argue with.

From there the work moves to the record. Cramer’s team pulls historical photographs and county records showing the property at its prior configuration, assembles that alongside the on-site utility evidence, and presents the package to the county: this property has ten spaces here.

The sequence in practice:

1. Walk the site and locate abandoned or capped utility connections.
2. Pull historical aerial photographs and county records showing prior layout and space count.
3. Assemble the two into a single presentation to the jurisdiction.
4. Get the additional spaces recognized before you commit capital to homes.

Compare this to the alternative. Building a brand-new manufactured home park is, as Cramer puts it, the exact same thing as building a subdivision — full plat process, full approvals, full timeline. Bridgeview has done new parks and the constraint is regulatory, not technical. A streamlined approval path specifically for manufactured home communities does not exist yet. Cramer sees some headway in certain places but frames meaningful reform as a ten-year horizon, not a three-to-five-year one.

That asymmetry is the whole argument for infill. Reactivating a documented space is an administrative exercise. Creating a new one is a development project.

Let’s take something that a bank won’t look at, that a life insurance company would never look at, that an agency lender would never look at, and let’s turn it into that. How do you do that? You make that community better.

— Andrew Cramer, Bridgeview Asset Management

Fitting a Home to a Weird Leftover Pad: HUD Code vs RVIA

Reactivated spaces are rarely clean rectangles. They are small, and they are configured in odd ways — the leftovers after decades of combining pads and shifting utilities. Cramer is direct about this: the spaces you recover are usually strange, and that is precisely where manufactured product beats stick-frame.

Bridgeview works with builders to develop semi-custom small units designed to conform to the specific spaces the firm is finding in its properties. They have also built homes using shipping containers. The point is that a factory can economically produce a unit sized to your pad; a site-built contractor generally cannot.

The structural advantage is the code path. A manufactured unit is inspected and certified at the factory under its own standard — a HUD label, or in some cases an RVIA label, which is the RV standard. Once the unit carries that label, it arrives as a fully inspected structure. You are not running the plan review, foundation plan and framing plan cycle that a new site-built home requires. New construction technology is improving, but any new site-built product still has to go through that same review sequence. The label encapsulates it.

On quality, Cramer is unequivocal that HUD-standard and IBC homes are different standards but functionally equivalent on safety and structure. The stigma attached to manufactured housing traces to pre-1976 product, before the HUD code existed, and he argues it has not been valid for a long time. Practically, that stigma is a marketing problem for your infill homes, not an engineering one.

Community Capex: The Spend That Doesn’t Add a Lot but Adds the Exit

Paving roads, installing a playground, adding locking mailboxes and building a community center generate no rentable units. Cramer spends the money anyway, and the reason is the exit.

Bridgeview’s entire path has been taking a property that a bank won’t look at, that a life insurance company would never look at, that an agency lender would never look at — and turning it into one they will. Community improvements are how that conversion happens. Better lending unlocks a wider pool of prospective buyers, and a wider buyer pool is where the value actually shows up for investors.

The resident-side return is real too, and cheaper than people assume. Locking mailboxes are transformative for an older resident population that receives medication and Social Security checks by mail — those get stolen from open boxes. No resident is auditing whether you spent $35,000 on the playground or more. They are registering that someone is taking an active interest in their community.

That triggers a dynamic unique to this asset class: the residents own their homes. Cramer’s analogy is a subdivision. If your house is the nicest one on the block, you have little reason to invest in it. When the surrounding homes get rehabbed and a new unit lands on an infill pad, people paint their siding, clean up their yards, fix their decks. Tenants co-invest when they see the operator investing.

Cramer’s caveat is timing. This does not happen in a two-to-three-year hold. It has to be cultivated, and you have to give it time.

Financing the Homes You Place: The Title I Gap

FHA Title I lets a buyer get a full 30-year mortgage on a manufactured structure sited on rented land. For a park operator selling infill homes to residents who will lease the pad, that is exactly the product the market needs.

The problem is distribution. Cramer’s estimate is that maybe two brokers in the entire country are actively underwriting those loans, because demand hasn’t materialized. His framing: the government took the first step and the private market hasn’t received it yet. Treat Title I as something that exists on paper and requires you to go find the one person who will actually write it, not as a financing channel you can route buyers into casually.

Plan your sales process around that friction. Bridgeview’s home sales take at least three distinct engagements — a preliminary showing, then at least two follow-ups before a meaningful deposit — and then a financing step has to happen before anyone moves in. That sequence is where buyers get lost.

A few things to build for:

• Assume hand-holding between initial contact and move-in is part of the job, not an exception.
• Identify your financing source before you list the home, not after you take a deposit.
• Instrument the gap between deposit and move-in so you know where people drop.

Cramer rates his own conversion on the home sale side as the weakest link in an otherwise working funnel. If an operator running 23 properties finds this hard, budget for it.

Underwriting the Operator or the Deal: Cramer’s Diligence Filters

Cramer applies two separate filters depending on what you are buying into.

Investing in a housing-technology company. Go look at the product in person — it’s worth the plane flight to the factory. Then verify two things. Is someone actually living in one of these, not just walking through a showroom? And can the company legally place that product on a lot and call it a domicile? Cramer has toured a dozen new housing technology operations and says virtually none of them had cleared that regulatory step. It sounds basic. It is the most commonly skipped item.

Investing with a park sponsor. Be cautious of anything that sounds like superficial research. A pitch built on MSA-level statistics — the St. Louis market has this, market rents are that, the property is 40% vacant and we’ll have three dealers bring homes in — is a red flag. What you want to hear instead: when we drove this park, when we walked through this vacant unit, when we called this framer and this excavator. Ask for the few-block radius around the property, not the metro. If the answer sounds like it came from ChatGPT, it did. Too many third parties between the sponsor and the work is its own warning.

Two structural points to weigh. Oregon and Washington both have statewide rent control, and Cramer still finds substantial opportunity inside it — but a strategy of buying at $500 rents and pushing to $700 in two years doesn’t capture where the value in these assets actually sits. And his most expensive lesson: don’t pick fights with a municipality. You can be right, a judge can agree, and you still lose, because the city is still there years later.

Frequently asked questions

How do you find out whether a mobile home park has unused lots you can bring back online?

Walk the site looking for old utility connections — stubs and laterals left behind when spaces were combined or taken out of service. Those are the strongest physical evidence that a pad once existed and was served.

Then build the paper case with historical photographs and county records showing the property’s prior configuration and space count, and present that package to the county to establish that the additional spaces exist. Bridgeview uses this process routinely to take a 50-unit park to 60 units.

Can you finance a manufactured home that sits on rented land in a park?

Yes. FHA Title I is designed for exactly this — a full 30-year mortgage on a manufactured structure sited on rented land.

The practical obstacle is availability rather than eligibility. Andrew Cramer estimates only about two brokers in the country are actively underwriting Title I loans, because demand hasn’t developed. If you plan to sell infill homes to residents, line up your financing source before you list, and expect to walk buyers through the process yourself.

Is a HUD-code manufactured home structurally comparable to a site-built house?

The HUD standard and the IBC are different codes, but Cramer describes them as functionally equivalent on safety and structure. The unit is inspected and labeled at the factory rather than reviewed on site.

The stigma most people carry traces to product built before the HUD code took effect in 1976. Cramer argues that perception stopped being accurate a long time ago, and that larger builders now produce homes that don’t look or perform cheap — but that the perception still costs buyers real equity-building opportunities.

Does statewide rent control in Oregon and Washington kill manufactured housing returns?

Cramer operates roughly 23 properties across the Pacific Northwest under statewide rent control in both Oregon and Washington and still finds substantial opportunity within it. What rent control does is eliminate the strategy of buying, pushing rents hard, and flipping in two or three years.

His argument is that the value in these assets comes from adding density and improving the community to the point that better lenders and a wider buyer pool will engage — which takes longer than a rent-bump turnaround but isn’t capped by rent regulation in the same way.

What should I look for before investing with a manufactured housing sponsor?

Look for evidence the sponsor has been on the ground. Cramer wants to hear about walking the vacant units, calling the framer and the excavator, and specifics about the few-block radius around the property — not MSA-level market statistics.

Be cautious of pitches built on vacancy percentages and a plan to have dealers bring homes in, with no detail about who is doing the physical work. If there are too many third parties between the sponsor and the execution, that’s a concern.

The bottom line

Before you underwrite another community on its current rent roll, go find out what the site was originally platted to hold — the utility stubs and the county’s historical record will tell you, and that gap between platted and operating density is where the return is.