How Chris Gavre Builds Profitable Land Home Packages With Mobile Homes

Chris Gavre (00:00)
Yeah, no, I really like it I think a lot of people underestimate mobile homes and a lot of people have a mental picture in their mind of what a mobile home looks like and these are nothing like them. They’re brand new houses and they’re actually really nice depending on which models you get. We usually do the lower end models but on some of the mid-grade, higher grade models, you walk in and you feel like you’re standing in a stick-built house. So doesn’t feel like a mobile home at all with a lot of these and they sell extremely well.

Michelle Kesil (01:56)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil and today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Chris Gavre, who is a land and mobile home park connoisseur selling packages with land and mobile homes. So really excited to have you here today, Chris.

Chris Gavre (02:23)
Yeah, Michelle, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Michelle Kesil (02:25)
rate, let’s dive in. First off, for those not familiar with you and your world, can you share what your main focus is?

Chris Gavre (02:34)
Yes, so the main thing we do is we call them land home packages. So we’re buying land, half acre, two acres, know, subdivided up, whatever, and putting brand new mobile homes on it. We make them FHA compliant so they have the permanent foundation. And then we’re selling them on the market. So essentially think of spec building, but mobile home addition.

Michelle Kesil (02:53)
Awesome, in which markets do you operate in?

Chris Gavre (02:56)
So I’m located in Greenville, South Carolina. So we call it upstate South Carolina, about an hour radius of that. And then we’ll also do them near Charleston Metro, which is about three hours from where I live, and as well as expanding into North Carolina a little bit in the Charlotte Metro.

Michelle Kesil (03:11)
Awesome. How did you get into this?

Chris Gavre (03:14)
Yeah, so about five years ago, I started out wholesaling. I was wholesaling houses, land, all of that. And in 2022, I was a licensed realtor, by the way. And in 2022, the licensing board changed their regulations around wholesaling. So they didn’t want agents to be wholesaling anymore. So I got like a cease and desist order, basically said, hey, you can’t wholesale anymore. And when that happened, was August 2022, I want to say.

I was like, man, well that was my whole business and I had flipped some houses along the way and acquired rental properties. But one thing that I was doing was mobile home parks. And the licensing board only changed the regulation around residential properties so I could still wholesale mobile home parks. And so I started doing that, ended up wholesaling a mobile home park to this guy named Robert. He didn’t like my assignment fee, he thought it was way too high and he said, look, instead of me paying you an assignment fee, what if I just put up the cash and you come in as a partner on this mobile home park with me?

I said, sure, we’ll do that. So that was late 2022. In the beginning of 2023, we had some empty lots in this park and he was telling me how he could get brand new houses at wholesale prices because he had this dealer’s license that allowed him to go directly to the manufacturer and get those houses. And I like, man, what can you get a double wide for? And at the time I think it was maybe, I don’t know, 55, 60 grand. I was like, man, that’s really cheap. We should go buy land, put these brand new houses on it and then sell them on the market.

And he’s like, yeah, that’s a great idea. So February, 2023, we bought our first, ⁓ we bought five lots that we were going to do this with. And kind of to start from there, we flipped some houses too. But when we got into doing this and those first five lots, we realized, wow, this is really, I don’t want to say easy, but it’s really a simple process because the house is built in the factory. So most of the hard work is already done for you and it’s inspected before it leaves the factory. So you know what you’re getting every single time.

And it was really predictable and easy to streamline. So from there, we just took it and ran with it really and only did land home packages from 2023

Michelle Kesil (05:09)
Awesome. That’s an exciting niche. Yeah, seems like not as many people are doing it this way. So what an awesome way to get into real estate.

Chris Gavre (06:06)
Yeah, no, I really like it I think a lot of people underestimate mobile homes and a lot of people have a mental picture in their mind of what a mobile home looks like and these are nothing like them. They’re brand new houses and they’re actually really nice depending on which models you get. We usually do the lower end models but on some of the mid-grade, higher grade models, you walk in and you feel like you’re standing in a stick-built house. So doesn’t feel like a mobile home at all with a lot of these and they sell extremely well.

⁓

because in our market at least, we’re coming into the price point of 220, 230 is what we’re selling ours for. Median sales price for a house here in Greenville is roughly about 400,000. So we’re at 50, 60 % of the median sales price of a home. And I have a lot of friends that flip and do spec builds and all that. And they’re struggling to sell a lot of their product right now. But we don’t have that issue. We’re usually under contract within a week or so of listing. So it’s extremely. ⁓

not only cost effective, also it is serving the market well, think. At least it seems to be that way.

Michelle Kesil (07:05)
And what do you feel have been some of the main keys that allowed your business to grow and run successfully?

Chris Gavre (07:13)
Yeah, first it was definitely the dealer’s license. That’s the necessity with this. And for perspective, the houses that we’re paying $60,000, $70,000 for, if you go to a little Clayton lot on the side of the road, they’re going to charge you close to $100,000 for that same house. Because that’s not the dealer. That’s not the manufacturer, I’m sorry. That’s a dealer like myself that just has a lot and is looking to sell these houses. So that is absolutely the key in this.

On top that, think it was streamlined in the process. It’s getting good contractors. It’s people that’ll show up and do the work properly at a fair price. And I think everyone that’s ever flipped a house knows how that goes. And it’s hard to find that solid group of people that show up and do what they say they’re going to do and do it in a timely manner. And we have cycled in and out of contractors and graders and plumbers and electricians and all that. ⁓ But finding that core group is vital in this. And I think it’s just you’re going to have to fumble through the first couple of projects to find that group of people.

Michelle Kesil (08:06)
Absolutely. And so how does it work with finding the land? What does that process look like?

Chris Gavre (08:11)
Yeah, so what we’ll do is we’ll typically pull a list ⁓ and we’re looking for, we have a data guy that scrapes the county websites for us so we’re not using a big list provider, though we started out using like a prop stream or bigger list providers. ⁓ For us, we’re usually filtering by zoning and then as well as road frontage. We want a minimum of about 75 feet of road frontage. For the bigger parcels, know, three, four acres, we want more road frontage to be able to subdivide it.

So we’re filtering with that. We’re not doing any floodplain lots, because that’s not common in South Carolina. ⁓ No subdivisions. We try to filter those out as much as we can, because any established neighborhood won’t allow mobile homes. And then as far as the marketing goes, we started out doing a lot of cold calling. That works really, really well. We did text blasting as well. Now we primarily do mail, just because it’s easier and you can do it more scale.

less time consuming, and the people that call in usually have a higher level of motivation than those that you just pick up the phone and you cold call them. Because it’s easy to say, yeah, I’ll take an offer when someone calls you, but it’s another thing to pick up the phone and actually reach out and seek that out. So we’re usually ⁓ using direct mail. We’ll typically send them a letter as well as just a contract with an offer.

that they can design the offer and mail it back to us or send us a picture of it or scan it and email it to us, whatever they want to do. We’ve also just done traditional postcards as well as just regular letters without an offer on it.

Michelle Kesil (09:38)
Awesome. And what have been some of the biggest hurdles or challenges that you’ve had to face in this role?

Chris Gavre (10:23)
Yeah, that’s really evolved over time. When we first started this in February 2023, my partner whose name is Robert, Robert nor I had ever developed land before. And so that was at first the biggest challenge was going through the process with the county and getting the permits and understanding what order to do everything in. just, were, we had no idea what we were doing.

Whereas with flipping a house, seemed a lot more kind of straightforward. You can just walk in and see what you need to do So that was a challenge at least for probably the first I’d say five of them after that. We kind of had that process down ⁓ Then what became an issue was funding these projects when we started in 2023 I actually thought Robert and I came up with a strategy. mean no one was talking about it I didn’t know anyone doing it at the time ⁓ and there wasn’t anyone on the internet talking about it really either and so

Funding these projects was interesting because the lenders also weren’t really knowledgeable on what we were doing. If you take them a house that you want to flip, they know what you’re trying to do. But when we say, hey, we’re trying to develop this piece of land and put a mobile home on it all that, they had no idea what we were talking about. So we kind of had to educate our lenders to begin with. But on top of that, a lot of the lenders that we had worked with, hard money lenders or banks, ⁓ they didn’t like land and they also didn’t really like mobile homes. And so we were trying to get them to fund.

both of those things at the same time. And so you can imagine how a lot of those conversations went. So getting the hard money lenders and getting the banks to take a chance on us was a little bit difficult at first. I think what really saved us on that was Robert and I owned a lot of mobile home parks at this point. At that time, maybe we owned, I don’t know, 20 or so combined. So we had a lot of experience with mobile homes and they knew that. And I think that that’s what really helped us get those loans at first.

Now it’s a little bit different. There’s not a ton of hard money lenders doing it or banks doing it yet, but there are a couple that are nationwide hard money lenders that are doing it. And so it’s a lot easier now to get funding than it was three years ago.

Michelle Kesil (12:18)
Yeah, that makes sense. And what do you see as far as opportunities for this market and this job? Do you see that there’s a lot of growth still available?

Chris Gavre (12:32)
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think that there’s a ton of people doing it. I know that there’s a lot more conversation starting around it than there were three years ago, absolutely. I would say even in the past year it’s really picked up a lot. And I think a lot of that is due to flippers and spec builders that are getting stuck with inventory and realizing, hey, I can’t really flip an R-Market, least a $500,000 house like I could five years ago. It’s just not selling.

the same way. ⁓ And so I think people are looking for other avenues ⁓ and real estate to do. And I think that there’s absolutely still lot of opportunity in this. Affordable housing is a massive problem. is pretty much anywhere in the country, no matter where you are for the most part. And like I said earlier, we’re coming in at half of the median sales price, at least in our market. So we’re helping solve that problem. So there’s absolutely a lot of opportunity for it. ⁓ But there are certainly more people getting into it.

than there was even a year ago.

Michelle Kesil (13:24)
Right. And how does it work with land? Like is there an abundant amount of land that’s for sale?

Chris Gavre (13:30)
In our market, yes, ⁓ you kind of have to go towards the more rural settings in general, ⁓ just because one, for zoning issues, ⁓ but two, to be able to find enough land. ⁓ We’re usually about, like the biggest metro in our market is Greenville. We’re typically…

30, 45 minutes outside of Greenville. So I think pretty much anywhere in the country, depending on where you are, you may have to go an hour outside of the big city. But typically, I think there’s plenty of land to be able to do it with. Absolutely.

Michelle Kesil (14:01)
And what are you most focused on solving or scaling to next?

Chris Gavre (14:06)
So right now we’re doing about 50 or 60 of these projects per year. ⁓ I think that

we would like to probably get to 100 per year. I think in order to do that, we need to expand into other markets. That’s why we’re starting to look at North Carolina. We’ve done some things in Georgia, maybe looking down there as well. ⁓ But kind of going back to the land question, I think that there’s absolutely 100 lots around Greenville that we could find every year. But I think that that’s a lot more difficult than maybe just going two hours north to North Carolina and doing some up there as well. So to answer your question, ideally, we’d like to get to about 100 of these projects per year.

Michelle Kesil (14:41)
Awesome. And what does the team structure look like? You mentioned you have a business partner. Are there any other people that you work with?

Chris Gavre (14:51)
Yeah, so Robert and I, ⁓ we’re 50-50 partners. ⁓ I do a lot of our acquisitions and finding our land.

⁓ Robert does all the project management. He actually just hired someone to come in to help him with project management, kind of like an assistant role. ⁓ That’s it as far as the extent of our team. And when him and I first started working together, that was one thing we agreed on is, we don’t want a lot of overhead. I don’t want to have a lot of employees. I don’t want to manage people. It’s exhausting. ⁓ So we were kind of in alignment on that. And it was awesome to see that, hey, we can go do 50 of these per year and it’s just us.

And I think that by bringing on one or two more people, then we could get to the hundred per year. But that’s one thing that I love about this is we don’t have to have a big team and we don’t have to have a full office of employees.

Michelle Kesil (15:39)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And is this a model that you think is applicable to investors in other states and areas as well?

Chris Gavre (16:30)
Yeah, absolutely. I think it maybe will get more difficult as you go further up north because they just don’t have as many mobile homes up there. think a lot of that’s due to how cold it gets. ⁓ But we have ⁓ in our coaching program, we have a guy that lives in a Brazil and he’s doing these in America or we got another guy that lives in Texas. He’s doing them in Florida. We’ve got a guy that lives in Boston doing them in Tennessee. So you can do it virtually even if it doesn’t work in your own backyard. But I would say for the most part, I think

probably 70 % of the country, you can do these in absolutely.

Michelle Kesil (17:00)
Yeah, and so you just mentioned coaching program. What does that look like?

Chris Gavre (17:03)
Yeah, so we have a coaching program, called Land Home League. We actually partnered up with Brent Bowers. He owns the Landsharks community where he talks about flipping land and finding land. It was kind of perfect marriage. We actually met him at a conference and he was like, man, you guys need to teach this stuff because no one’s talking about it. And so he kind of nudged us to do the coaching program. So basically, there’s three tiers to it, but…

We have course modules like just an online course and then we also have a community part of it like Facebook group. do twice weekly calls. I’m sorry, three weekly calls ⁓ where people come on with their questions or we look at their deals with them. And then we also just have a one-on-one part of it. So we’ll hold people’s hands through their deal, get on a zoom call with them whenever call them, text them, whatever.

It’s really whatever someone needs. ⁓ We’re not really gurus. We’re not really coaches We’re just kind of operators that have started to do that ⁓ So we are basically just teaching people how to do these land home projects start to finish and everything in between And then we’ve also had quite a few people that are wanting to buy mobile home parks after doing these ⁓ And Robert and I today have 33 mobile home parks combined So we’ve helped a lot of people analyze mobile home park deals and buy those as well

Michelle Kesil (18:15)
awesome? What advice would you give to someone that’s wanting to get started in this niche?

Chris Gavre (18:22)
Yeah, I think the first thing is depending on where you are, ⁓ look and see what requirements there are for a dealer’s license. South Carolina, for example, is one of the hardest states to get license in, ⁓ whereas you go two hours south to Georgia and all you have to do is pay the fire marshal $400 and they just give you the license in the same day. So depending on where you are in the country or where you’re looking to do these at, first step is seeing what ⁓ the requirements are to getting a dealer’s license. You can do it without one in some places, or if you have a friend that has that license,

can order houses through them, but they’ll typically mark them up a little bit. But I’d say that’s the first step. Second one is just finding land and generating a marketing funnel that can find land for you consistently. ⁓ Even if you’re not sure if you can take one these projects on yet, you can wholesale the land if nothing else, or build a spec on it if that’s what you’re into. But those are the two main components. After that, ⁓ it’s kind of just doing the first one and going through it. It’s a little ⁓ …

unique because you’re not building a house. the process is a little bit different, but it’s definitely figureoutable and leaning on your contractors going back to I think it’s vital to have good contractors and being able to lean on them to say, hey, I don’t really know what to do next. Can you help me? And a lot of them will know the process and be able to walk you through that as well.

Michelle Kesil (19:39)
Yeah, and what is the contractors for setting up the mobile home park?

Chris Gavre (19:43)
Yeah, so we’ll have a licensed installer. So the house will deliver on site from the factory, but then they’ll have to tie it down, ⁓ block it, tie it down and all that. And then we’ll also have like a brick mason come in. We do brick skirtings in our market. I know in Florida they don’t do those. They usually just do the vinyl ones. So we’ll do a brick skirting. You’ll have to build decks on the house.

It comes with the inside furnace and duct work, but you’ll have to do an outdoor HVAC unit for it. So we have HVAC company, electrician to hook up power to the house. And then depending on your lot, if you need septic tank, then you’ll have to install that or a plumber to connect you to the sewer. Same with water, connect you to the water lines or do dig a well for you if you require that on your lot. Clearing and grading of course, before the house gets there.

and then we’ll just do like a gravel drive while usually that’s about it.

Michelle Kesil (20:32)
Yeah, amazing. That makes sense. Thank you so much for sharing.

Chris Gavre (20:35)
Yeah, it’s a pretty straightforward process. once you’ve done…

three or four of them, you can keep doing it over and over again. mean, it’s same thing every single time. And that’s what we like about it is it’s predictable, it’s repeatable, and you know what you’re getting into every single time you do these deals. Whereas when we were flipping houses, I mean, you open up a wall and you’re like, holy crap, we’ve got to rewire the whole house, or I didn’t realize all the cell floors rotted out or termites were eating this up. And so we never knew what we were walking into. But with this, we’ve never really had any surprises. The ones that we have had, we’ve learned from it now. It’s something that we can fix moving forward.

For example, one time we didn’t realize the water line was on the other side of the road from our lot, so that meant we had to pour underneath the road to get to it. And what we thought was going to be a $5,000 water line turned out to be $15,000. But moving forward, we now know on every lot we buy, we’ll ask which side the water line’s on. So once you make a couple of those mistakes, you kind of know what to look out for. And we haven’t really had any since that incident, which was about two years ago.

Michelle Kesil (21:35)
Yeah, that makes sense. Amazing. Well, before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more about what you’re up to, where can people find you?

Chris Gavre (21:45)
Yeah, so they can find me on ⁓ Facebook or Instagram. My name’s Chris, last name is Gavre. That’s G-A-V-R-E. If they’re interested in learning about our coaching program, like I said, we partnered up with Brent Bowers. You can go to thelandsharks.com and book a call with him to discuss it if that’s something that you’re interested in.

Michelle Kesil (22:02)
Perfect, we’ll appreciate your time and your story. Thank you for being here.

Chris Gavre (22:06)
Absolutely, thank you for having me, Michelle.

Michelle Kesil (22:07)
And for those tuning into the show, if you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Chris who are building real businesses. We’ll see you on our next episode.