In Fort Worth, Texas, a woman with the e-mail name spaceylacey0420 was selling a park that looked promising, save for the sewage it drained into a nature preserve. In Banning, California, a barista at the local Starbucks -- which was, strangely, out of milk -- told Shlachter to get out of town because there was “nothing good” there.
SWAT Team
Finally, in November 2012, they closed on a 191-pad park in Odessa, Texas, called the Vista West Mobile Home Ranch. They were finally park owners.
Then, Highland Estates, a park in Indianapolis with 159 pads, popped up. They flew out and looked it over. It was a 78- acre (32-hectare) dystopia. More than 70 homes were abandoned, and some of them contained evidence that the former residents had cooked meth. They went for it anyway.
“These things are hard to find,” Weissman says.
Two hours after the deal closed, while Shlachter was heading out to surf on the California coast, the park manager called to tell him his new asset had made the national news. A SWAT team had descended on one of the trailers, whose owner was suspected of blowing up a house nearby for the insurance money and flattening part of a subdivision in the process, killing two. The trailer owner and two others were charged with arson and murder.
Meth Heads
Later, a squatter on meth chased the park manager with a metal pipe. The county health department delivered a stack of violations 8 inches high.
“When you stop maintaining anything, it goes bad,” Shlachter says. “When you stop maintaining a mobile home park, it goes real bad, real fast.”
Jaffa paid a local scrapper to stuff 60 of the abandoned, vandalized homes into a compactor at $1,800 apiece. They bought a backhoe to fix sewer lines and landscape the place and brought in 23 brand-new homes and rented them. They renovated 14 others, fixed up the clubhouse, refurbished the pool and raised rents. Jaffa paid $485,000 for the park, including back taxes, and made $250,000 in improvements. The owners expect to earn $150,000 in 2014 -- and the place is only 40 percent full.