The high-profile private equity firm Carlyle Group recently completed a deal for two Florida prefab home communities for $30.8 million, which some say will bring other investors into the low-cost housing space.
“The industry struggles for respect,” Frank Rolfe, vice president of a private firm that owns about 9,000 individual lots in 82 mobile home communities nationwide, told the Wall Street Journal. “It always has.”
Rolfe said the Carlyle Group purchase will bring awareness to the sector, which he says is lucrative. “Our customers have no alternative shot at homeownership, nor do they (normally) even have the credit scores and quality to seek anything better,” Rolfe told the Journal. “They never leave the park they are in, and the revenues are unbelievably stable as a result.”
Mobile home owners typically rent a space in a community for a monthly fee, which in October averaged $391, according to research firm JLT & Associates.
Source: Wall Street Journal
