How to Invest in Mobile Home Parks for Long-Term Wealth

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Show Summary

In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, host Michelle Kesil sits down with Brett Bowman, Co-Founder and CEO of Suncrest Capital, to discuss his journey into mobile home park and long-term RV park investing. Brett shares how he transitioned from single-family rentals into this niche asset class, the benefits of mobile home park investments—including lower entry costs and recession resistance—and the operational challenges involved in managing tenant- and park-owned homes.The conversation also dives into Brett’s broader investment philosophy, highlighting the importance of building reliable local teams, creating strong operating systems, and fostering transparent relationships with investors. He emphasizes education, mentorship, and “failing forward” as key components of sustainable business growth in real estate.

Resources and Links from this show:

• • • Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind
    • Investor Machine Real Estate Lead Generation
    • Mike on Facebook
    • Mike on Instagram
    • Mike on LinkedIn
    • SunCrest Capital Website
    • SunCrest Capital’s Email: [email protected]
    • SunCrest Capital Facebook
    • SunCrest Capital Instagram
    • Brett Bowman on Facebook
    • Brett Bowman on Instagram
    • Brett Bowman on LinkedIn

  Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

  Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

  Brett (00:00)
  Like I mentioned before, it’s a fun, it’s a really resilient asset cluster. There’s lot of really good things about it. But just like any asset that you’re getting into, you’ve got to have a system in place and organization and tracking. it’s a very hard one to do by yourself. Usually you have to have a team that is working together on it.

  Michelle Kesil (01:50)
  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. And today I’m joined by someone that I’m looking forward to chatting with, Brett Bowman, who is the co-founder and CEO of Suncrest Capital, where he helps investors build long-term wealth through mobile home and RV community investments. So excited to have you here today,

  Brett
  Thanks, Michelle. I’m excited to be here.

  Michelle Kesil
  Yeah, absolutely. I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching creating your investment opportunities so we can dive in.

  Brett
  Absolutely.

  Michelle Kesil
  Yeah, just first off, for those who are not yet familiar with you and your world, can you share what your main focus is?

  Brett (00:46)
  Yeah, absolutely. So like you said in the in your the bio there, we focus on mobile home communities as well as long term RV parks in particular. So we’re not looking for vacation parks and overnight parks. We’re for a long term. And the reason for that is both of those asset classes operate similarly. You you shift into something like RV park that’s more traditional. It’s more like a hotel where you’ve got to have somebody 24 7 people arriving at 2 a.m. and leaving at 10 a.m. kind of thing. You got to

  Staff it differently, your demand and forecasting is totally different. So those are our two asset classes. And then we primarily focus on investing in the Midwest. Right now we’re big in Iowa, Missouri and Kansas, as well as in Louisiana.

  Michelle Kesil (01:28)
  Awesome. And how did you get into the mobile park and RV investment world?

  Brett (01:34)
  Yeah, good question. I didn’t stumble. Yeah I mostly stumbled upon it. was going say I didn’t wake up just thinking, hey, let’s go to Mestimo home parks, right? So I like many people in the real estate space, I started off with single family rentals where I was kind of following a BRRRR strategy where I would buy something, rehab it, rent it out, refinance it, and then repeat. And I was getting to my journey where I was ready to start getting fourplexes because I’d already done several singles and I was looking for fourplexes. I was just kind of talking to my network about

  getting a bigger team together as far as being able to remodel a fourplex and get it ready to go. And somebody overheard me and just asked, hey, have you ever looked into mobile home parks? I’m like, who wants to buy a trailer park? Come on. But I had lunch with the person. They had actually never bought one themselves. They’d just kind of been looking into it. But from that, he introduced me to somebody else that had a mobile home park already. And it just turned out that person was looking for a partner to buy a second one.

  So I thought, what the heck, I’ll buy this small mobile home park. And the numbers on that one, for people that are interested or are used to single family rentals, it looked fairly similar to a single family rental from a purchase price standpoint. It was $200,000 purchase off market and it’s 20 units. So when you’re talking about, know, a of these people, a lot of people in single family space are buying 400 to a million dollar homes and then renting them out. This was a fraction of the cost for 20 units.

  thought, okay, this is lower risk because, you know, I can be 30 % occupied and still be making money here. So we went with that. And as the as I was underwriting it and reviewing the deal, and then we started operating it, I just started getting more and more excited about the space because I realized not only is it a very versatile and very recession resistant asset class, but there’s a lot of creativity, you can do too. There’s a lot of different opportunities for income streams.

  So that’s really how we dialed in on mobile home parks and then we expanded into long-term RV parks just because we were looking for a little bit more diversification, not so much from a long-term investment standpoint, but just more that we wanted to be able to grow and scale a little bit more and we didn’t want to be confined just to mobile home parks. And then like I mentioned before, long-term RV parks operate fairly similarly. There’s definitely some nuances for management and how you would underwrite them, but they’re close enough that that’s worked really well for us.

  Michelle Kesil (03:52)
  Amazing. I love that. What are some challenges that you’ve faced in that region of investing that you’re in that maybe like looking back now in hindsight, you now have the wisdom from?

  Brett (04:08)
  So, right off the bat for people that are not super familiar with mobile home parks, generally the play is you come and you buy the land and then it’s a land lease where people own their own homes and they’re paying you to just have their home on your lot, right? And that’s really what you want it to be because when you value a mobile home park, you’re only valuing the land lease. Unfortunately,

  Pretty much every time you buy mobile home park, you have some homes that you’re buying as well. So just to give you some numbers, if you buy a mobile home park with 100 lots, maybe 90 of those are occupied, and of those 90, maybe 10 of those are park owned homes. So you’d be buying a park where 80 lots are occupied by owners or tenant owned homes, and then you will inherit another 10. And of those 10, some of them are going to be occupied by people that are

  leasing them from you over time. They’re doing like a lease to own contract where over the course of the next few years, they’ll own it. And then some may be renting them where literally they could leave at any moment and then you’re stuck with the home. And then you typically have some homes that are in some state of either they need to be removed because they’re just in too dilapidated condition or they need to be rehabbed. And so that those 10 homes out of a hundred lots end up being most of your work because those homes just

  You’re managing the leases, you’re managing the sales of these homes, the titles of the homes, the taxes, the insurance, the rehab, the construction, all that kind of stuff. So there’s just a ton of work that goes into home management and it’s very hard to avoid. So of the, own 25 mobile home and RV parks. And of those, we have maybe a couple of the mobile home parks that are 100 % tenant owned. And then of course the RV parks are all tenant owned, which is really nice about those, but.

  They can also move their homes very easily. So there’s the trade off there. And then the rest of our parks, most of them have some composite of park owned homes that we have to manage. So that’s definitely, I would say, the biggest challenge.

  Michelle Kesil (08:42)
  Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for sharing all of that. I think that is helpful for people who are maybe considering what type of investments to get into and seeing how that process really works.

  Brett (08:55)
  Yeah, absolutely. It’s a

  Like I mentioned before, it’s a fun, it’s a really resilient asset cluster. There’s lot of really good things about it. But just like any asset that you’re getting into, you’ve got to have a system in place and organization and tracking. it’s a very hard one to do by yourself. Usually you have to have a team that is working together on it.

  Michelle Kesil (09:15)
  Yeah, and what kind of team do you have? How is your setup structured?

  Brett (09:20)
  Yeah, so we started off small, of course, with that first purchase, there were three of us buying it. So this original partner that I mentioned, his name is Ryan, and then we had a friend named Dan, the three of us bought it together. So that was it, just the three of us kind of doing everything. We did, we all live in Boise, Idaho, and we were buying this mobile home park in Kansas City, which I did have some experience with other like multifamily and industrial investments I’d made in Kansas City, so I was somewhat familiar with the market already.

  But pretty quickly we needed to get a team that was local that we could trust. So first hire was a property manager. And of course, when you’ve got 20 lots that are maybe paying somewhere around $200 a month, you can’t afford a full-time property manager there. So we found somebody part-time that was already doing some other property management. And she’s been amazing. So she’s been on our team for six years now. We’ve promoted her multiple times.

  She’s running all of our asset management now, but that was our first hire. And then we found some of it was more of a handyman that could handle various work. We had to get a lawyer. You you just got to, it’s kind of your typical, you got to have your team, right? So we made sure we had all these people that were local that could help out, that we could trust. And then we weren’t able to get out there super often because it really hurts your cashflow if you’re flying out on a small 20 lot park.

  So we had to budget and be smart about that as well. But as we’ve scaled, so my first move after that was I drew kind of a three hour radius around the Kansas City market and just kind of looked at, where could we go from here that could be strategic? So our next move was up to Des Moines. And as it expanded there, we made up to about 300 units through that expansion. And that

  allowed us to hire more people. So we were able to from there have in full time regional manager that was able to manage all of our parks as well as have on the ground community managers. And then now we’re at the point where we have these 25 parks, about 15, 1600 plots across those. So we’ve really been able to scale now where we have a controller that helps us out with the analytics. We’ll keep being, he kind of oversees all that kind of stuff, acquisitions, full time project managers.

  whole team of property management. So we’ve really gotten to that point where the scale is there. And so now we’ve got a whole system in place that everybody kind of knows what the roles are. It’s a well-oiled machine at this point.

  Michelle Kesil (12:16)
  Yeah, amazing. That’s great that you’ve created that structure.

  Brett (12:20)
  Yeah, thank you.

  Michelle Kesil (12:21)
  What do you feel are some of the major keys that have made the biggest difference in allowing your business to be able to get successful and to run smoothly?

  Brett (12:32)
  Yeah, good question. I believe in the philosophy of failing fast, but failing forward, meaning try lots of things. If you’re going to fail, fail fast, but make sure you’re progressing every single time. And so we’ve had plenty of those kind of stumblings where we learned what to invest in from a capital preservation standpoint, when to invest in it, how to time those investments. Also, we have been working with investors for most of the time.

  doing mobile home parks. And so we’ve got a really amazing team of investors. shouldn’t say team, but partnership of investors that many of them have repeatedly invested with us on almost every deal we’ve done, which has been really cool. And so we’ve kind of built up that relationship and that system as well for making sure we’re managing with transparent communications and updates and all those kinds of things. If I was going to point to one thing that’s helped us get to where we’re at today,

  I’ll subscribe to this book called Traction by Gina Wickman. Have you heard of that one, Michelle? Or I can give a quick overview.

  Michelle Kesil (13:33)
  I

  feel like I’ve heard of it, but not in much detail. Like the name sounds familiar.

  Brett (13:37)
  Yeah,

  I’ll give you the 60 second overview. So in the book, he talks about this kind of operating system he calls entrepreneurial operating system. And every business needs to have some operating system that basically is the foundation for how you operate. So anytime you make a decision or set a goal or hold somebody accountable, it kind of all falls back on this system you’ve created, right? So in this book, he kind of lays out exactly how things should work.

  Michelle Kesil (13:40)
  Sure, go ahead.

  Brett (14:07)
  And that help this credit gets a scorecard. We have a 90 minute weekly meeting that we go down and everybody’s held accountable for goals. We talked about any issues we’re seeing and you know that 90 minute meeting. Most of it is actually talking about what issues are impacting the company and solving them. So there’s this whole section of IDS is what it’s referred to. So it’s identify the root cause of the issue, discuss options and then solve it. And so your goal of that meeting is to solve as many issues as a team as you can.

  And what if you can’t use, you create a very discrete tasks to be done the next week or two. So, you know, creating that, having everybody read the book, follow the process, took us several months to kind of like get figured, figured that out. But that’s really helped a lot because rather than, you know, I think otherwise you it’s this whack-a-mole game where every day there’s something new that you’re kind of seeing, we got to go focus on that. Let’s have a hundred percent of energy to go fix this one problem. But when you do it.

  on this larger scale, you’re really making sure you’re focusing your energy on what matters the most. And so that’s helped us a ton from a focus and accountability and scale standpoint.

  Michelle Kesil (15:13)
  Yeah, definitely, I can imagine that’s a powerful way to look at things.

  Brett (15:16)
  It’s Highly recommend the book.

  Michelle Kesil (15:20)
  Yeah, awesome. Why are you most focused on solving or scaling to next in your business?

  Brett (15:29)
  you know, in 2026, looking at this next year, I think this is going to be a liquidity year for us, meaning we have of our 25 or so parks, probably 15 of them are eligible to be refinanced in the next year or two. What I mean by that is we always set up fixed term debt and many of ours have five to seven year terms where we’re able to refinance within that timeframe. If you go earlier, you’re paying a prepaid penalty.

  but then you kind of have to do within a certain amount of time. So we still have some flexibility to wait, but we’ve had several that we have been able to increase the value very quickly on. And so we’re ahead of schedule on when we want to do the refinances. So this year we’re going to be positioning ourselves with you know doing kind of our last minute. What are the highest levers we can do to increase the value here and then doing some refinances in the summer. So looking forward to that. definitely is a long, it takes several months to position yourself for a larger refinance when you’re talking about this.

  these kinds of assets. Beyond that, we’re constantly looking for acquisitions. I mentioned earlier before we started recording, we’ve been very conservative with our acquisitions over the last few years. So going into 2022, we had been pretty aggressive. And by the end of 2022, we’d bought 20 something parks by then. And since then, we’ve only bought a handful. So 23, 24, and even 25.

  very slow to expand beyond that. And it’s mostly, we’re looking at dozens of deals every week still, but we are being conservative about it. So we wanna be smart about, okay, are we buying at the right price? we cash flowing from day one? Are we, Do we still have the right value add play that we’re gonna be able to do reliably and make sure we can increase the value the way we want to? And so I think that…

  We probably need to double down on that a little bit more and try to be a little bit more aggressive on some of what we can do because we do have a really strong team that can make pretty amazing things happen to turn around some of these parts.

  Michelle Kesil (17:30)
  Yeah, amazing. That’s exciting.

  Brett (17:33)
  Yeah, thank you.

  Michelle Kesil (17:34)
  So when it comes to partnerships and other investors, is this something that you bring people on to co-invest with?

  Brett (17:46)
  Absolutely, yeah We are typical model is to do a syndication where we’ll bring in most capital will come from our investment partners. We always invest our own money as well. We like to show people, pay, we believe so much in this deal that we’re putting in at least five, if not 10 % of the equity will come from us. So people know that we have our skin in game as well. But yeah, we love working with investment partners.

  Michelle Kesil (18:08)
  Awesome. And is there like any type of criteria that you look for?

  Brett (18:13)
  We only work with accredited investors, meaning, you know, IRS standard of accreditation. So it’s usually 250K annual income or 300K if you’re married, million dollar net worth, one of those two, either one of those is great. And that’s our main thing is that we just need one, accredited investors. We do like to invest with people that are curious.

  and that they want to learn about the asset class as well. Not a requirement, but that’s always fun for us when we’ve got somebody that’s kind of new to the asset class, but also wants to learn more about it because we like to educate and teach. we do, like I mentioned before, we have a lot of communications with the investors explaining what we’re doing, why we’re doing it. It’s a little bit more fun when people are asking questions too.

  Michelle Kesil (18:51)
  Yeah, absolutely. So are you offering like mentorship or you just kind of teach the people that are like collaborating with you?

  Brett (18:59)
  It depends. in that scenario when it’s investors, we’re mostly mentoring in that case. We do actually have an education program called Deal Launch where we will teach people A to Z how to find, buy, operate mobile home parks. Well, it’s obviously outside of our investment group, but that program’s worked out well too for anybody interested in learning more about mobile home parks and how to operate them.

  Michelle Kesil (19:20)
  Awesome, that’s exciting.

  Brett (19:22)
  Yeah.

  Michelle Kesil (19:22)
  Well, before we wrap up here, if somebody wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you and connect with you?

  Brett (19:30)
  Yeah, so my company’s name is Suncrest Capital and our website is suncrestcap.com, just short for capital. My email address is probably the best way to get ahold of me. It’s Brett, so [email protected]. I’m also really active on LinkedIn if you want to find me there, Brett Bowman on LinkedIn. But probably again, website or email address are probably the best ways.

  Michelle Kesil (19:50)
  Perfect. Well, I appreciate your time, your story, and your perspective. Thank you for being here.

  Brett (19:56)
  Of course, thanks again for me. Appreciate it.

  Michelle Kesil (19:58)
  Absolutely. And for the listeners tuning in, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Brett who are making real businesses and we’ll see you on our next episode.