In this episode, Trevor Oldham interviews Cory Harelson, a mobile home park investor. Cory shares his journey from being a structural engineer to investing in real estate. He explains the unique aspects of mobile home park investing, such as the land lease community model and the benefits of owning the land while the residents own the homes. Cory also discusses the criteria for selecting mobile home parks, including location, infrastructure, density, economics, and the age of the homes. He emphasizes the value-add opportunities in the mobile home park space and the high cash flow potential.
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What’s Covered In This Episode
- In this episode we’ll cover:
- Mobile home park investing offers unique opportunities for high cash flow and value-add strategies.
- The land lease community model, where residents own the homes and pay rent for the land, is a popular choice among mobile home park operators.
- Location, infrastructure, density, economics, and the age of the homes are important criteria when selecting mobile home parks.
- Mobile home parks provide a solution to the affordable housing crisis and cater to a diverse range of tenants.
- Raising capital for mobile home park deals can be done through personal networks, LinkedIn outreach, and partnerships with capital raising groups.
- Investors should carefully consider the illiquidity of mobile home park investments and ensure they have a long-term investment horizon.
Connect with Cory:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-harelson-81141414
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Read The Transcript Here
Trevor Oldham (00:01.903)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the REI Marketing Secrets podcast. Today on the show we have Corey Harrelson. And Corey for our audience out there who’s just learning about yourself for the very first time. Do you mind just digging into your background a little bit and how you guys started investing in real estate?
Cory Harelson (00:17.868)
Yeah, super excited to chat with you today, Trevor. Yeah, absolutely. So I was prior to doing this whole crazy real estate adventure, I was a structural engineer. So designing buildings for architects. And about, I guess it’d be nine years ago now, in 2015, 2014, we had, my wife and I had our first child, Max. And in 2015, I was getting the point where I was, I was getting pretty burnt out. I was working 60 to 80 hour weeks as an engineer.
I would oftentimes leave home before my son woke up, get home after he’s already in bed. So I was really not getting very much FaceTime with him while he was actually awake. And it was getting to me and it was one week in particular where I, it was a week straight where I didn’t see him awake. Like I was gone early in the morning, came back really late, woke up the next day, do it again. It was a really big push. And it was, I think a Sunday after about a week of this, it was about 5 PM and I was like, forget this. I’m dropping this, I’m going home. I’m going to go put my kid to bed. Gosh darn it.
And so I go home and I go to take him from my wife to go give him his bath and like spend a little time with him, put him in bed. And he looks at me like I’m a total stranger. Just freaks out like stranger danger. Why are you taking me for my mom? Like just, he was probably like, just how old was he? One and a half or something. And it like kind of killed me. It was really, really rough. And so that’s when, that was kind of my like, I have to do, like I can’t do this until.
forever like I just felt like so overwhelmed and like powerless but so I made a decision to do something so then I started doing blogs and books and all kinds of things somebody gave me the book Rich Dad Poor Dad it’s the same book that like pretty much everybody I think read but it was like my gosh assets that pay you like why didn’t I why did I have to wait till I was 35 years old to think of this and read in a book it’s not that complicated but so anyway that’s when I decided my wife and I decided we’re gonna invest in real estate we’re gonna
So we committed to savings. We weren’t saving very much money at all before that. We were going out to eat three times a day and just basically we weren’t going into debt, but we were just spending everything we made. So we got really intentional with our savings. We got to a 50 % savings rate. We accessed some HELOC in our house and we said, okay, let’s go try and buy a rental property. And we were looking for duplex, threeplex, fourplex.
Cory Harelson (02:32.556)
And I’m an engineer, I’m a nerd. So I made a spreadsheet to analyze them. I learned how to do a pro forma. I’m analyzing a whole bunch of deals and I got pretty discouraged even back then with just the cashflow you could get from a normal rental. I know I could have like driven for dollars or something and got a good deal, but I wasn’t like, I was kind of losing my zest. And then I stumbled on a mobile home park for sale on Craigslist. It was a little, I didn’t end up buying that one. It was a little nine lot mobile home park. And I punched that into my spreadsheet and was like, these numbers look much better.
and so I, I kind of, then I started asking questions and learning and diving in and kind of went down that rabbit hole from there. And we, but we bought our first 12 unit park in 2016. So yeah, kind of found it by accident.
Trevor Oldham (03:15.206)
I like that finding it on, you know, obviously you didn’t go through it, but the one on Craigslist, it’s funny to think of Craigslist nowadays, going back, going finding it. But I agree with you there. I take a look at like a lot of multifamily deals, even myself, and I’m a passive investor, but looking at these active deals, I’m like, this is kicking off like 200 bucks of cashflow for like, you know, maybe 100 bucks per unit, maybe, maybe 400 bucks a unit, or 400 on a duplex, so 200 bucks, you know, like,
Cory Harelson (03:24.364)
Yeah.
Trevor Oldham (03:44.75)
there’s still a lot of risk. I feel like there’s a lot of time involved and especially multifamily. I mean, let’s say the water heater goes, you know, you’re looking at maybe 2000 bucks for that. Maybe if it needs a new roof, I mean, that’s, that’s coughing up your cashflow for, for a very long time. But when it comes to like the mobile home park space, how is it compared to the other asset classes that are out there? Are you the one, are you just owning the land and the person’s bringing in their mobile home?
Are you both, you know, let’s say you’re owning the mobile home itself and then doing like a seller financing or leasing it out. Are you doing both or just curious? Cause I feel like it’s different than like other types of real estate where if I own a multifamily, I just, I own it, but I feel like in mobile home parks, you can own both the unit or the mobile home itself. And then also the land underneath it and you’re renting out the lot space. So just curious how it works within yourself and your company.
Cory Harelson (04:35.98)
Right. So, yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with it. The thing that makes mobile home parks unique from other multifamily is that typically say 90 % of operators and I count myself in that 90 will prefer the type of park, the model where it’s called a land lease community. So, so the resident owns the home and we own the land under the home. And so they’re paying rent.
for that, it’s basically a parking space to keep their home on. So it’s much, much lower rent than they would be paying in a whole apartment because we’re not, they’re the ones providing the home for themselves, right? And then we’re just providing the land. And so it’s cool in several reasons. One of them is from a maintenance perspective, if there’s a leaky toilet, it’s not your toilet.
Right? It’s their toilet. And that’s actually a good thing. One of the reasons I like this model much better than the park on home model is, especially if you own a couple rentals, I know of a few operators who like the rental model and they’ll have a park with a whole, or they’re all rentals. It’s basically a horizontal apartment at that point. And then it’s generating enough income that you can have a full -time maintenance person there to address all the issues. But what happens when you have just a handful, you have some,
you don’t, you maybe don’t necessarily have enough revenue to have a full -time maintenance person. So you have to hire, so there’s weather stripping and you got to go hire a contractor to fix it. So, so it ends up being not cost -effective. So the, the, the, the tenant or home model though, if they own the home, then really what we’re just doing is the landscaping, making sure that you know, the water line, the sewer line, the infrastructure is us. So there is still some maintenance. You have to get to snowplow contract to plow the roads in the winter if it’s somewhere where it snows. But the, the maintenance,
you know, is drastically less and the issues that you can have are drastically less. So, and then the other big benefit to that is you’re both owners. They own the home, you own the land, so you’re kind of in it together. So, the, most of the residents in that scenario want the community to be nice. If you can come and find one that’s under maintained, you know, usually they get pretty excited once you start making improvements. And so it’s, you know, you’re all kind of invested in the community and people tend to stay a long time. They,
Cory Harelson (06:47.884)
The statistic, I forget who did the study, someone did a big, one of the big huge operators did a study of a whole bunch of their parks and found the average length of stay for a tenant was 14 years compared to, you know, one or two years in an apartment. So, and then another benefit of it is if the tenant leaves, they’ve got equity in their home. So typically, if they will want to,
sell their home. So they will find your next resident for you. So you’ll still have to pass a background check and everything to live in the community. But, you know, we still have all the same like tenant screening and everything criteria, but they’ll find the next resident, sell the home to them. So it’s more often than not when someone leaves, they move out on the 30th, the new person moves in on the first. So you get a zero day, zero cost turnover. So that’s another kind of benefit to the tenant on home. So yeah, it’s sweet. It’s a cool model.
Trevor Oldham (07:38.542)
Yeah, I really like that aspect. And I think like, like you mentioned, like apartments where if I want to move like me and my wife did, we moved around a couple of different times before we bought a house and stay in about one or two years in each apartment where I feel like if I own a mobile home and I was living in it, it’s not, it’s either, you know, I have to go move and sell it or, or I take it with me or try to imagine that’s a, that’s a whole big process. If you’re trying to move the entire mobile home park or not the park, trying to just move your entire mobile home to a new park. I would imagine that’s a
massive undertaking. And I do like it where people there, I feel like people that own it, are just going to take better than someone that’s renting it. And I think it’s just like apartments, like most people are probably going to take better care of their own home than when they’re just renting. So I really like that aspect of it. I know you mentioned a little bit about the infrastructure and I want to get into the parks and I guess a couple of questions and we can go through them and unpack them. But like curious on like the locations of the parks, if there’s like specific areas.
of the country. And then I have heard of like public versus private utilities. And I find some people might go more towards public utilities versus private utilities. Again, I’m not talking to you. You’re the expert in it. I have heard of that where people will stay away from one and gravitate towards the other. But yeah, I’m just curious when you’re going through and acquiring these mobile home parks, are there certain states? Is there like a certain asset size, maybe a park with nine lots versus a park with 50 or a hundred lots just
Here sort of looks like what your sort of criteria is when you’re going out there and, you know, embedding these deals.
Cory Harelson (09:10.828)
Yeah, absolutely. So what we do, we use an acronym, and I did not invent this acronym. I actually got it from a course I took with Frank Rolfe, but it’s a great way to look. It really, really helps me kind of formulate how to look at these things is ideal. We’re looking for the ideal mobile home park. It says I -D -E -A -L. So not necessarily in this order, but we’re looking at infrastructure, density, economics, the age of the homes and the location.
And so what we usually start with is actually the location because the other four, if the deal is good enough and you can bring in enough money, you can fix the other four, but you can’t pick the park up and move it. So I think I was actually, it was kind of an interesting story a month or two ago. I was talking to a broker and I was explaining to them there was a market, there’s two cities that we really like and another one, Cincinnati and Columbus are areas I really, really like. We’ve got a park right outside of Cincinnati. I’d love to have more there. Columbus is great.
But there’s a city kind of right between them, right next to them that was confusing me, the city of Dayton, Ohio. And it was the, you know, the median home cost was half. There’s lots of vacant homes. And it was, and it was for me, the mobile home park space is really a solution to this affordable housing crisis. So you have to have this affordable housing problem. And then the mobile home parks are a really great solution to that. But so good markets are markets where they have an affordable housing problem for me.
because then we’re providing a solution. You’ve got all the demand you could need. If the market’s got a ton of vacancy in it, or even if the vacancy is not there, but if you can get a regular home for $100 ,000, we can bring in brand new three bedroom, two bath homes and sell them for 70 grand. If the median home rent, like we’re about to close a park in Lexington, the median home cost is 280 ,000, 70 is a great deal. But if over in Dayton, they’re 100, and it still costs, it’s still gonna be 70 as well. We can sell it out. It’s not as great of a deal.
So I was talking to this broker and explaining like, I was like, I don’t really love the Dayton market. The broker was surprised going, man, and this was not a mobile home park specific broker. They were just a commercial broker. But most people say that Dayton’s one of the best investment markets in the country. And we started kind of proud workshopping that. I think what I came up with is if you’re buying apartments or houses, you’re really looking at that price to rent ratio. So the fact that you can get,
Cory Harelson (11:31.5)
a house for $100 ,000 and probably rent it for similar to what you can over in Columbus or Cincinnati means you’re getting double the price to rent ratio in Dayton. So you can get houses for cheap and rent them. That’s really good from a rental house perspective. Not so great from a mobile home park perspective where if we want to fill out vacancies, we need to sell homes and we’re competing with the buyers of homes, not the renters of homes, right? So it’s just kind of a different way to look at it. So anyway, that’s kind of the interesting little nuance to the location thing.
is a little bit different than the way you look at it in an apartment.
Trevor Oldham (12:06.414)
You know, if that makes sense to know, like you mentioned, like the two, like at least for me, like getting, getting the one to one, like if I’m paying 300 ,000, can I get 3000 a month? And right. It was, it was crazy looking. I was looking in Boston and trying to invest. There was like the flip side would be like, you could, you’d buy the property for like 650 ,000 and you’d get 3000 a month. I was like, I don’t know how anyone’s buying these properties. I mean, people, they would sell and I remember walking through one, it was like 450 ,000 three unit and it was down to the studs.
And I’m like, this needs it. And we’re talking like 25 miles outside of Boston, where you, I don’t even know if you could get the rent, but yeah, no, it’s, it’s crazy. Some of these markets out there where on where the market I’m in now in New York, it’s definitely more of that one to one or two to one ratio, which is, which is nice, but I’m curious when it comes to the mobile home parks and the investment returns that someone would see versus investing in another asset class, what does that sort of look like? Is there high cashflow just given?
Cory Harelson (12:36.236)
wow.
Trevor Oldham (13:03.918)
the asset class, is there some sort of equity play in place where, you know, like a typical multifamily deal might put off say 5 % the first year, but it’s more value -wide where you come in, you just turned over the unit and then obviously renting out and refinancing. But curious what the strategy looks like or the investment return someone could expect. I don’t want to say expect, I don’t want to say that’s a, you know, not every deal is going to be similar, but like the general rule of thumb, like what would be a return someone could think about getting in the mobile home park space?
Cory Harelson (13:34.252)
Yeah, great question. And I think the thing that mobile home parks are well known for is they’re known as a high cash flow asset. And that is still true in most markets. They tend to trade at a little bit of a higher cap rate than apartments. That has definitely, that gap has compressed though as the secrets kind of got out about them. They’re the best performing asset class in the last two recessions, both the pandemic and the Great Recession. Maybe storage was right there with them, but.
but they’re like very, very recession resistant and all these other great things. So the secret’s kind of gotten out. So there still can be great cashflow on them, but I think the real opportunity with them is actually in the value add side of it because there’s so many of them. If you drive around and look, there’s so many of them that are in great locations and are just ugly. And there’s like the one we’re about to close at Lexington. I mean, it’s a beautiful area. They’re building a McMansion neighborhood right behind it. There were bulldozers driving behind the fence.
building his neighborhood right over there. A middle school’s going across the street, rolling hills, horse farms, gorgeous. And the park has potholes, it has overgrown with trees, there’s empty pads. There’s an affordable housing crisis. People need the housing and there’s just empty pads sitting there waiting for someone to bring homes on for people that need these homes. So there’s actually, I think the big opportunity with these is actually in the value add side of it. And especially now that it’s not 2016 anymore where they’re trading it.
good parks trading at 10 and 12 caps typically. So it’s, I think it’s a value add. So you asked about returns. Typically what we’re targeting is I like to see a 5%. If we’re gonna get, like the cash flow tends to grow pretty quickly if you can do the value add. So if I can get that like year one returns of like a 5 % or 6 % and then grow that up into the 10s and teens over a couple years,
then I’ll be looking at an IRR like a total return of around maybe 15 to high teens. And if it’s something that’s a bigger value add where maybe we’re going to reinvest the cash flows and wait till year two to start distributing, then I’m usually targeting around a 20. So for an IRR, if that makes sense.
Trevor Oldham (15:48.11)
Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I feel like it just seems more stable to me right now as an asset class than multifamily. Not to say that there’s not deals out in the space, but I’ve seen a lot of operators in the multifamily space where there’s just, I think just given the purchase price, I would imagine there’s a lot more debt that comes onto it and there’s been a bigger increase of interest rates and floating rate debt. But how has the mobile home park space fared over, let’s just say like the last two years or so, because I’ve seen a lot of, and I’m just picking on multifamily, obviously there’s,
there’s other asset classes that, but I think that one’s taken the hardest hit with people foreclosing on properties because they had floating right debt. They didn’t have interest rate caps or anything like that. Or maybe they want to go buy one and then all of a sudden all the cashflow is just gone. But yeah, just curious how the mobile home park space has fared over the last two years. And then also like when it comes to yourself and your company, how you guys structure your deals, whether you do, you know, fixed rate debt, whether you just do, you know, work with the owner and do seller financing, just curious what that looks like from one.
the last three years and then to like how you structure your deals there is on a park by park basis.
Cory Harelson (16:51.884)
Sure, so I guess like the macro side of it, the big deal with the apartments right now is that two years ago when everything was really frothy, they were trading at such high purchase prices that a lot of people, if you wanted to play in the game for the apartment side, especially in the best markets, you had to take that floating rate debt or that short -term bridge debt. And so that’s where a lot of the people getting burned. So the answer on the mobile home park side is,
Most of those are better deals and so people were doing, the variable rate debt has been much more rare. I always go fixed rate debt. So there’s not like this big wave of these things come and do that where these bridge debt or fixed rate debt things for mobile home parks, which you have the opportunity. Mobile home parks is really the folks who built them all in the 50s, 60s and 70s. There’s still a lot of those folks out there who own them that are like getting old and ready to retire. So that’s really more of the buying opportunity in the mobile home parks.
And so the other as far as how they’re doing with the apartments the other issue that apartments are having right now is that rents were skyrocketing and so a lot of people were underwriting as if the rents were gonna keep shooting up and They got overbuilt and we had this big glove supply coming on and so instead apartment like the market apartment rents have come even flat or down a little bit over the last year I like to refer to mobile home parks as like the submarine under the stormy sea
If the median apartment rent in the country goes from $2 ,000 to $1 ,800 and my mobile home park, to use one of the ones in Arizona as an example, our residents are at 400 and the one down the street is charging 500, we’re still just sticking to our business plan. It doesn’t like our 400, 500 doesn’t matter. It’s still such a good deal compared to what the apartments are charging that if the apartment…
our market rents aren’t really, I don’t see them getting affected. The need for affordable housing is still there and it’s still such a good deal that it hasn’t really been affected. And sorry, your other question was about like how, what we’re looking for as far as how we structure our deals. Is that right?
Trevor Oldham (18:53.998)
Yeah, exactly. Is it like more like, you know, 10 year interest only loans creative, you know, some sort of creative financing just, you know, the fixed rate debt. I mean, obviously, way conventional, it’s like a 30 year mortgage, but I know there’s so many different creative financing options in real estate. I’m always just curious to hear how people are, you know, financing the deals that they’re finding.
Cory Harelson (18:57.548)
Mmm!
Sure.
Cory Harelson (19:13.548)
Yeah, so we’ve done several different things. So I’ve done some seller financing. I’m always looking for that, especially right now with the interest rates the way they are. I’m always at least throwing that option out. A lot of the ones we’ve gotten done, we’ve done through good banking relationships, commercial loans through banks, like fixed rate loans. So we’ll typically get a 10 -year. The one bank that we worked with a lot is Five Star Bank. And so we’ll get a 10 -year loan with them with a five -year rate reset. So it’s fixed for five. It’s got one reset.
So it’s five -year basically fixed rate debt at that point. And then the plan as far as we do it, I like the idea of a really long -term hold. So the goal is to try to get it where we can raise the value and cash out, refi out so that we can return capital, but then the investors still own it. And so,
we’ve returned capital and it’s still cash flowing. So it’s kind of like a mobile home park version of a BRRR. We call it our FAIR method. Fundraise, acquire, improve, refinance, return capital and repeat, is our little acronym we use. But basically what’s cool is you can take that same chunk of capital when you refi out, it’s not a taxable event. And you can take that same chunk of capital and keep redeploying and kind of build up a portfolio over time versus if you sold it,
and return all the capital. Now you’ve got a huge tax headache with all the depreciation recapture, and you’ve got to now go find another spot and you get rid of this property that by that point, you know like the back of your hand. So this seems like this really low risk thing that you’re just completely throwing away to start all the way over. So it seems like kind of the best of both worlds as far as, you know, keeping your returns high by redeploying most of the capital, but still keeping this at that point, low risk asset that you already own and know. So that’s the plan.
Trevor Oldham (21:04.046)
Yeah, that’s perfect. And I thought it was interesting when you mentioned a little bit before, and I can agree with it looking at like the mobile home parks that drive by just in my local area. And you can see some of them. It’s like, wow, like that’s really nice to take care of. And then you see these other ones and you’re like, wow, I would not ever want to live there just depending on, you know, and I want to mean by that is like, they haven’t done any landscaping this, the mobile homes themselves just look old and worn down. And then you go to another community and it’s very everything’s landscaped.
mobile homes are nice. So I can definitely agree with you there. It’s, you just want to have like that nice park where people actually want to live and I don’t want to let it go. But are there any misconceptions that you find when people are ever thinking about investing in the mobile home park space or, or mobile home parks, just cause it is, you know, a cheaper asset than say your apartments. Do you ever come across anything like that where people might have like, I would never invest in there because maybe the tenants not going to be.
as good or they’re maybe not going to take care of their property. Again, not to say that that ever happens, but I’m just thinking of just things that might come to mind where people are like hesitant to invest in mobile harm parks, just given that it’s, you know, typically a lower asset class.
Cory Harelson (22:14.284)
Yeah, I mean, it’s affordable. It’s the most affordable form of housing out there, right? It’s the only type of housing that I’m aware of that works without a government subsidy. There’s no section eight or anything. It just works. A minimum wage family can support themselves. So it does carry a stigma, especially you got all the shows out there like Trailer Park Boys and everything that really paint, I mean, it’s, on the one hand, it is kind of a funny show, but it paints a very inaccurate picture. So.
Do we have issues with tenants sometimes? Yes, of course we do. Everybody does. The Class A apartments that charge $3 ,000 a month do too, right? And so my friends who live in the fancy neighborhood with the HOA, they’ve got crazier stories than we do. But yeah, I think the tenant stigma thing is a real thing. And really what it is, like most of the tenants that we have, almost all of them,
They’re just good people. They’re either old and on fixed income, and so they just have a limited amount of money that they need to be able to live on, or they’re trying to support a family and they’re not in a high paid career. Our tenants, we’ve got people that drive. We’ve got truck drivers. They’re the people taking your food to the grocery store, checking you out at the grocery store, pouring your beer at the golf course, checking you in and scheduling your next doctor’s appointment. These are all examples of real tenants that we have. These are the people that live there. And so,
They’re just real people that need an affordable place to live. And I mean, when houses are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, there’s lots of people in that camp. And so it’s not all just, it’s not the trailer park. It’s not the trailer park boys scene. I guess is the best way to put it. And you’re right though, like certainly we get that. I’ve even had, I was talking to an investor friend of mine the other day. He’s in several deals with us and he was telling me how he’s got,
he really likes them, but he’s got some some friends were giving him crap calling them a slumlord and stuff for investing in mobile home parks and he it was like, I don’t know, I felt bad. I was like, I like, I, if no one invests in them, then they’re all going to be run. Investing in them is what’s what lets us fix the potholes, make the trees nicer, help the tenants paint the homes, fill them in, provide more housing. If no one invests in them, that stuff doesn’t happen. And so,
Cory Harelson (24:22.476)
there’s people that need this housing. And so it is kind of like, sorry, I get a little worked up by the, when people like the, you’ll read a lot of these newspaper articles that are really, really misinformed and just paint all mobile home park owners as like bad guys. And I just think that’s really far from the truth. We do our best, right? And we’re providing something that people do need. So.
Trevor Oldham (24:48.462)
And I think you’d even look again, just the Harpon Multifamily and you could definitely get some words in there, especially I think of the folks in New York City where I’m a couple hours north of, but you hear a lot of stories come out of there. You see a lot of things come out of there where it’s crazy what the people will pay for down there and what they get and what won’t they fix. But I definitely agree with you. It really just comes down to the park operator, like yourself coming in and just doing a good quality job for the tenant. But when it comes to your company within itself,
Cory Harelson (25:05.068)
Mm.
Trevor Oldham (25:16.846)
How do you guys go out there and find investors for your deals? Are you just tapping on friends, family, current investors? Are you, yeah, I’m just curious what the marketing strategy or the strategy looks like behind it when you’re going out there and bringing investors on board.
Cory Harelson (25:31.276)
Yeah, so we, so our first, so I kind of used up all my money around 2021 and partnered with my brother -in -law and we, we had some, we first had some friends and family that were like, Hey, we, we heard about what you’re doing. We’ve helped invest, take our money and do it. And so we, we, we’ve done a few five or six B syndications. And then this last year, I’ve really tried to focus on the capital raising side. I joined, there’s a capital raising group called Raise Masters. So I’ve kind of really doubled down on that. So we’ve been, I’ve been.
trying to get on podcasts like this and doing a lot of LinkedIn outreach and to try to meet more investors. So as far as like my marketing to meet people, it’s really been largely LinkedIn has been the best source of leads so far for new people. And then on my own email list, we do like a weekly newsletter and then obviously each deal we’ll do actual quarterly updates with write -ups and pictures and
Statements and everything as far as what what’s going on with the deal, but yeah, we’ve got the weekly newsletters We’ve got our list is up to I think around a hundred and eighty or so people on it at this point So yeah, it’s been exciting It’s pretty neat like honestly the fundraising stuff is one of the funnest pieces because you get to talk with people and out of necessity I’m trying to assess like where you at. Are you actually capable of investing? I don’t want to take money from someone who isn’t and it kind of leads to these conversations about people’s hopes and dreams and
It’s really fun conversations where you get to talk to people and get to know them at a deep level. So I really like it. So.
Trevor Oldham (27:00.366)
Yeah, and I really like just you talking about that, getting to really know them. Because I know for me as a past investor, I definitely talk to sponsors and operators and it’s almost like a sales call per se. Like, you know, they’re just trying to take the money, whether or not the deals are fit for what I’m looking to do. And, you know, it’s not that enjoyable. But what I’m curious, I know you mentioned the 506B deals. Are you guys still doing 506B? Are you doing more 506C now? What does it look like on that? And…
Cory Harelson (27:14.892)
Hmm.
Cory Harelson (27:26.316)
Yeah, so the last one that we did and probably the way that we’ll do for the next few is we actually did a 506B first for our existing list and then we converted it to a 506C so that we could advertise it. And we did that because we needed to extend beyond our list. But I didn’t, we’ve had several people that have been in multiple deals and they’re just not quite accredited and we didn’t want to like say like, thanks for staying with us in the beginning and see you out. That didn’t feel right to me. So.
So yeah, so it’s pretty cool. If you do the 506B, as long as you follow all the rules of the 506B, you don’t advertise it, you don’t generally solicit, everybody’s got a pre -existing relationship, and then you fully shut that one down, then you can open up a 506C and then post on LinkedIn and actually generally solicit. So that’s probably the way that… That worked really well. So that’s probably the way that the next few we will do.
Trevor Oldham (28:19.886)
Yeah, no, definitely. I hear some people doing that. It’s usually I find this cut and dry. It’s like 506B, 506C. So I do like that you have that option where you’re helping out the people that aren’t that accredited investor where they could come on and into those deals and then you bring it over to the 506C. But Corey, I just wanted to say…
Cory Harelson (28:35.628)
Yeah, to your point on those real quick is I do think that the one thing I always like to be careful with, especially if people are non -accredited is, is it right for you? I love these things. There’s all kinds of, all the returns and the tax benefits and all that stuff is great, but they’re also extremely non -liquid. Any syndication you invest as you’re pulling money to buy one property, it’s really, really hard to get your money back out. If you decide later down the road, you need it. So the one thing, especially on the non -accredited, I always like to…
just clarifies like, hey, you don’t need this. You’re not like, maybe you want to do this and maybe you want to buy a house. Like you should definitely make sure that it’s money that you’re intending to invest for the long term and you’re not going to need it for something else next year. So just something to think about.
Trevor Oldham (29:19.342)
Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s perfect that you said that. And I know for me, it’s like, I’m as if you’re marrying the sponsor for however long five years you’re in the deal because like you mentioned, it’s not going to be liquid. I mean, maybe you can maybe you can get your money back. I mean, you’d be diluting your shares depending on 60 cents on the dollar if that’s where you’re going. You know, you got to just know like, hey, if I’m putting 50k into this deal, it’s not my last 50k I have in my life where if this deal doesn’t end up working out, I’m
Cory Harelson (29:28.972)
Right.
Cory Harelson (29:46.956)
Right.
Trevor Oldham (29:48.622)
I’m going bankrupt. So I do like that you brought that overview, but I wanted to say I really enjoyed our interview today. And if our audience is interested in learning more about yourself or your company, where should they head off to?
Cory Harelson (30:00.908)
Yeah, so I’ve got a free PDF that’s kind of educational on mobile home park investing that’ll tell you how to do it and how to do it passively. And sorry, my phone rang. So a free PDF that’ll tell you how to do it passively. And I’ve got that at passivemhp .com. You can get it and hope to hear from people. I love to chat too, so people can reach me at, you can also contact us at freedominvestinggroup .com. And I’m a nerd on this stuff, so happy to.
answer questions if anybody has them.
Trevor Oldham (30:32.672)
I’ll make sure to include that in the show notes of today’s episode and Cory. Thanks so much for coming on today
Cory Harelson (30:38.508)
All right, thanks Trevor. That was a ton of fun.
