Sell Your Mobile Home Park to Buyers Who Specialize in Communities

Selling a mobile home park is not a mobile home sale, and it is not quite a commercial building sale either. Park buyers price the lot-rent income, not the homes sitting on the lots. The market for that income is a small pool of park operators, value-add groups, and portfolio buyers, most of whom never browse LoopNet and instead find deals through brokers, mailers, and their own networks. If one of them already sent you a postcard, you are holding a single number with nothing to compare it against, which is the weakest position a seller can negotiate from.

Park buyers largely underwrite the same way. They take the park's annual net operating income and divide it by a capitalization rate, and that cap rate depends on the park's class and market: stabilized communities on city utilities generally trade at lower cap rates, which means higher prices, than small parks on well and septic. Then they look at lot rent relative to nearby parks, occupancy, who owns the homes (tenant-owned lots are preferred, and park-owned homes are valued separately), and whether water and sewer are municipal or private. BuyerMatch.ai profiles those inputs once and matches your community against the buy-boxes of vetted park buyers whose criteria actually fit. A 20-lot well-and-septic park and a 150-lot city-utility community go to different buyers, and the matched buyers who contact you already know the lot count, utility setup, and home-ownership mix, so the first conversation starts at the number instead of the basics.

Florida's mobile home statute, F.S. 723.071, has two tracks, and which one applies depends on how the sale starts. If a park owner offers the park for sale, the owner must mail the officers of the homeowners' association (where one exists under ss. 723.075 through 723.079) notice of the price and terms, and the association has 45 days from the date of mailing to execute a contract on those terms, plus 10 more days if the price is later cut. If instead the owner receives a bona fide offer it intends to consider, which is the usual case when matched buyers make offers, the owner's only obligation is to notify the officers, disclose the price and material terms at which it would sell, and consider any offer the association makes; the owner is under no obligation to sell to the residents and remains free to contract with another buyer at any time.

Transfers by gift, inheritance, or operation of law, to affiliates or partners, to lenders, in foreclosure, between co-owners, by exchange, or by eminent domain are exempt under subsection (4), and the owner can record an affidavit of compliance under 723.072 that title companies are entitled to rely on. Getting competing written offers first means the price in that notice is a real market number, not a guess. Other states have their own resident-notice or right-of-first-refusal rules; Massachusetts, for example, requires 45 days' advance notice to residents of any sale, and when the sale would change the park's use, or a majority of residents have asked in writing to be told of offers, a group representing at least 51 percent of homeowners gets 45 days from notice of the offer to match it (M.G.L. c.140 s. 32R). None of this is legal advice, and a Florida real estate attorney should confirm which track applies to your park before anything is mailed. Matching is free for sellers, with no commission and no obligation to accept any offer.