Mobile Home Park Investing to Multifamily Success | Eric Vinson’s Story

Eric Vinson (00:00)

Once we did our first deal that way where we wholesale it and then we got paid the $50,000 we split it and then we kind of looked at each other with your realization that okay we can do this. And it probably would have taken longer if that first deal hadn’t closed the jobs that we had, they were pretty good revenue. So to quit that and move into something else that was kind of unknown was, it was scarier.

Dylan Silver (00:23)

Yeah. Scary,

Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is an Ohio based investor with a background in construction and sales who’s built and exited the 46th largest mobile home park investment group in the country and now focuses on multifamily, fix and flips, commercial residential. Please welcome Eric Vinson. Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric Vinson (02:21)

Thank you, appreciate you having me out.

Dylan Silver (02:23)

It’s always great to talk with folks who maybe have an interesting strategy or an interesting angle and you certainly fit that mold. But I always like to start off at the top by asking folks how they got into the real estate space.

Eric Vinson (02:36)

Yeah, it’s a good question. So I was in sales and I had a business partner who had purchased his first mobile home park and it was totally by accident. He was basically looking to make a little bit of extra money on a monthly basis, right? So he was thinking about purchasing a mobile home in the park and then fixing it up and renting it out, right? Maybe make three, 400 bucks a month, sort of a passive sort of cashflow. Well, it was kind of

Serendipity because the park owner ended up saying well, why don’t you buy the park and he’s like look I can’t buy the park I’ve only got $40,000 to my name and he’s like well that so if that turned into a down payment on a seller financing Purchase for that mobile home park. So then he has his first asset. Well him and I team up and ⁓ You know, he talks me into let’s just say, you know cold calling and just sourcing more mobile home parks in other states right not just Michigan or just Ohio but

really all over the place. So when doing that we would purchase the parks that made sense for us to buy but then we would wholesale the ones that we got under contract to other investors. So that’s kind of how that, it was a side hustle at first that ended up becoming way better than our main hustle. So you know we put away the sales and working for other people and then we scaled full-time just into you know

Pursuing and purchasing mobile home parks. Yeah, so

Dylan Silver (04:02)

I’m a big fan of the connections and the way that people meet their partners and form these businesses. How did you meet the partner who you built the mobile home business with?

Eric Vinson (04:12)

So that’s another interesting question. He is actually my stepson, right? So I have been married to his mother for the last 15 years. ⁓ you know, when I was, yeah, I moved from Michigan to Ohio to, ⁓ he was the head of sales for a timeshare company, right? So I came down here to try my hand at sales. Turned out I was pretty good at that. I was top in the nation for two years in a row. And during that time is when, you know, again, he bought his first mobile home park

Dylan Silver (04:20)

Family business.

Eric Vinson (04:41)

and he ended up getting me a list. This was built the old fashioned way, right? Just by putting time in and literally picking up your phone and cold calling.

Getting rejections, sifting through skip traced lists of numbers that 90 % of the numbers are bad. But then there’s 10 % of the numbers that are good and maybe 2 % of those good numbers with motivated sellers. But if you can sift through all that properly and consistently, you’re going to wind up with a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And that’s kind of what happened to us.

Dylan Silver (06:00)

That’s ⁓ how great businesses are formed. think a lot of people kind of underestimate what they can do in their warm network. And ⁓ a lot of people might have said, you know, stepson or anybody in the family even, right? And they would have said, well, how can I start a business? So I haven’t done this before, but you had a construction background and he was looking at buying one, it sounds like spot in an RV park, ended up doing the first whole deal.

How did that first deal happen? Was it pretty straightforward or was it a lot of kind of learning on the fly?

Eric Vinson (06:32)

So this whole thing was learning on the fly. We were, essence, building a plane in flight, right? Because we didn’t know, right? When we started to do this full time, we didn’t know if it was going to work. And we were making pretty good money in the timeshare space, right? It wasn’t like, you know,

get you rich sort of money. But it was good money. was better money than I had. Well, sales will do that. It’ll show you better money if you’re good than pretty much any other profession. But it was one thing to purchase the first one. To figure out if we could create a business and quit our current jobs and go full time on this, we needed to have what we like to say proof of concept, meaning, OK, what we needed to do was get a mobile home park under contract.

Dylan Silver (06:57)

Yeah.

Eric Vinson (07:14)

and then sell that contract to somebody else for a fee. Now

once we did our first

deal that way where we wholesale it and we made let’s just say $50,000 on the deal which turned out for that particular asset was a low number for what we probably could have gotten but we didn’t know at the time right so we tacked $50,000 on that and then the deal closed and then we got paid the $50,000 we split it and then we kind of looked at each other with your realization that okay we can do this there is you know room here for us to

be able to do this. And it probably would have taken longer if that first deal hadn’t closed and we hadn’t been able to wholesale that. Because again, the jobs that we had, they were pretty good revenue. So to quit that and move into something else that was kind of unknown was, it was scarier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be scarier had I done it by myself

Dylan Silver (08:05)

Yeah. Scary,

of the things that people often talk about, because I’m in a realtor now, is they’re kind of two different worlds. And actually, in many cases, you can’t, because of brokerage limitations, be both a wholesaler and a realtor at the same time. But I came from that world. So I was in distressed real estate single family as a wholesaler. So wholesaling…

Eric Vinson (08:28)

Let’s stop.

Dylan Silver (08:34)

mobile home parks, that’s a different ball game, right? And so, did you teach yourself that of that skill set and the contracts and how to talk with the sellers and how to find the investors you mentioned kind of skip trace lists or was there maybe a mentorship that you had mobile home wholesaling as a different beast entirely, right?

Eric Vinson (08:52)

Yeah, no it is. That’s a really, really good question. And again, like I said, we were sort of building the plane as we were flying. And I knew very little about mobile home parks and the infrastructure and the sort of things that go on, the sort of actual operational issues that owners run into in the process of owning, in the course of owning a mobile home park. So really what helped me is when I was on the phone doing cold calling, if you’re good on the phone, you can get a knowledgeable person

and on the other side to really give you a lot of information. So for me, that was more, I stole mentorship from every old mobile home park owner that I was able to talk to and develop a relationship with. They would say things to me that I didn’t quite understand. I’d ask for clarification. And then on the next call, right, I would sound even more credible because I had a little bit of that history.

Dylan Silver (09:34)

Yep.

Eric Vinson (10:18)

And you know, I took a few things from one conversation, brought it to another one where only

somebody who has had operational struggle and owned a mobile home park would even know that that’s a thing, right? So that builds a little bit more credibility. And then through the law of reciprocation, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, if somebody thinks I’m credible and I share something with them, they’re going to share something with me, and we’re sharing information. And as long as you understand that that is valuable information that could help you with the next conversation, well, then it’s a snowball.

all effect of knowledge that comes down. And that’s how I learned a lot of stuff. Now, that’s as far as being able to get a deal under contract or have a conversation with most mobile home park owners. They’re men of means. So they have money, or they wouldn’t own what they own.

Dylan Silver (10:57)

That’s right.

Eric Vinson (11:11)

sure that you can agree with this but a lot of times men that have means and they have a lot of money they can be a little bit short-sighted and they don’t have time for nonsense and they also want to speak to somebody that they think is credible so there’s that’s what I learned through cold-calling is how to build and maintain credibility now like you asked how did we learn about investors and wholesaling well that is where my partner and my stepson he was brilliant at this so me and another partner we spent most of our time

in the beginning of the business just on the phones, on the dialer, calling and sourcing mobile home parks. Once we would get something, we would collaborate. And really, with my stepson, he would evaluate it. basically, his job was to find investors, to take the deals that we got, put them under contract, and then put them out there to the real estate network within the mobile home park space. Which is, it’s a smaller space than one might

think, right? Because there’s not a ton of mobile home park owners on a high level in the country, right? So it’s not a big deep pool of people to shop these to. So we got an email list, and we would blast it out there. Just simple stuff, nothing too fancy. We weren’t doing drip campaigns. We were just.

Dylan Silver (12:10)

Yeah.

Eric Vinson (12:25)

Like I said, getting something under contract, getting a good deal on it, putting a fee on that based on what it could become, and then assigning that to other people. And then that’s how that relationship built with other investors. we still are friends with a lot of investors, some of which own well over 100 mobile home parks. So yeah, been a wild ride.

Dylan Silver (12:49)

I want to ask you about pivoting

to the space that you’re in today. You’re involved in some interesting deals, multifamily, fix and flip, commercial, residential. Each have their own vertical, their own obstacles, their own challenges. I’ve done fix and flips. I’ve seen a little bit of multifamily. I haven’t done any commercial, residential. But walk me through the pivot points going from you exited the mobile home investment group to then

multifamily commercial and residential, which you’re involved in today, commercial residential, how did the business grow and what were the flex points or pivot points in multifamily commercial and the fix and flips?

Eric Vinson (13:29)

Yeah, that’s another good question, Dylan. ⁓ Thanks for asking that. So when I left the mobile home park business, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what direction I was going to go into. I knew it was going to be real estate involved. ⁓ So I started looking for duplexes, triplexes, things like that, because it’s easy to get a skip trace list of those sort of assets. A little bit tougher to do a single family. I mean, you might as well just get a phone book and open it up, because there’s no real

you know, me, so just single family homes that are a little bit in distress. So it was a little bit easier. And then I ended up running into a man here locally where I live, just a brilliant, brilliant young man. His name is ⁓ Devin Mooney’s. so my company, VPI Investments, teamed up with him and his company, which is called BL Capital, where we have a real estate sort of a fund. It’s not a REIT, but it’s more of a…

the wrong word, maybe a syndication or LP kind of a scenario where we basically what we were able to do and BL Capital, just so that everybody’s clear, was an established growing business when I teamed up with them.

basically, we were able to take a million dollars in investor money and parlay that into 36 properties.

that are worth over $4 million combined. So we took $1 million in investor money, and we were able to parlay that into a lot of properties in a very short period of time. And it was reminiscent of the way that the mobile home park business grew, too, as if we had lightning in a bottle. But when you get a

When you get forward thinking minds and ambitious people together and egos can go out of the way, it’s amazing what can be done in such a short period of time. So that’s how that worked. Now, he had been in, Devin is who I’m referring to, my new partner.

He had been in the residential space for some time now. So he was able to help me get up to speed on some of the differences. Like, mean, we’re talking about the difference between a conventional mortgage and a debt service coverage ratio loan, right? Which a lot of people don’t quite know the difference there. But they’re both amortized out for 30 years. However, with a commercial loan, I’m sure you know you have to perform within the early years of that loan so that you can raise

Dylan Silver (16:35)

Yeah.

Eric Vinson (16:36)

the value

to be able to refinance out of that thing. that’s where a lot of that’s why for me switching my attention from acquisitions and going into you know the value add and the actual operations and you know getting these things ready for purchase or not necessarily purchase but for refinance or sale right because that’s when investors get return of capital that’s when all the magic happens right after all the hard work there. So but that takes a while on

commercial loans, right? It’s easily a 90-day close, sometimes 120, 180 days before one of these things can actually cross the finish line. But what I learned that Devon got me up to speed on was that we can close much faster on duplexes, on triplexes, on things that are basically four units and under, right? Because you can do a conventional mortgage on those. Now, one of the things that we really excelled at was the creative deals, right? It was being able to

Find a…

a seller who is willing to do a seller financing deal. That is how you can take a million dollars and turn it into four million dollars in assets and provide a really athletic return for investors, right? So anything with real estate, I’m sure you can agree with, really a good deal is 20 to 30 % cash on cash return in real estate. Anything in double digits would be OK, but if I’m looking at 11 % return, I don’t know if I’m really going to be pursuing that.

Dylan Silver (17:54)

Yeah, that would be tremendous. Yeah.

Eric Vinson (18:00)

super hard but when we’re talking about 20 to 30 maybe 40 even 60 percent cash on cash returns you know which sounds crazy but really when you’re getting a deal for 10 % down out of pocket I mean it’s not hard to have a 70 % cash on cash return right so it was if we were able to open up a lot more

Dylan Silver (18:19)

Yeah, no, I’ve seen him, and,

There’s a there’s a lot of opportunity that I think all over I’m in Texas you’re in Ohio But I was speaking with an investor who runs a AI company of sorts who will search and filter the active MLS listings by what has greater than a I want to say it’s a 20 or 30 % cashing and all these deals cash on cash I said unbelievable. These are all listed right now. He’s like yeah, I’ve done it myself. It’s worked for me So proof was in the pudding. He’s done it himself using his own

Eric Vinson (18:48)

Yeah.

Dylan Silver (18:50)

tool. where can they go to learn more about you or to reach out to you?

Eric Vinson (18:53)

Yeah, yeah, good question. Well, you know, I don’t necessarily limit myself to just Michigan or Ohio. Our mobile home park business was in 10 different states. So I’m definitely open to pursuing deals in other areas of the country. But if anybody would like to reach out to me, they can call or text me directly. If you don’t mind, I’ll just let everybody know what my phone number is. Is that OK?

Dylan Silver (19:16)

Yeah, go ahead.

Eric Vinson (19:17)

Yeah, so anybody can reach me at 269-339-2545. You can call me. You can text me. And another way to reach me will be I have a website. It’s nothing super fancy, but it’s a real easy way for me to bring in more leads. And that’s vpinvestmentsllc.com. So somebody can go and check me out on my website at vpinvestmentsllc.com.

number is listed on there as well along with my email address or you could find me on Facebook just with my name Eric Vinson.

Dylan Silver (19:51)

Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Eric Vinson (19:55)

Thank you. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity.