Trailer Park Takeover By Private Equity: Turning Last Affordable Homes into Wall Street’s Next Punching Bag

Once upon a time, the American dream included a porch swing, a mailbox, and a roof you could actually afford. 

For roughly 20.6 million Americans, that dream lives (and mostly stays put) in manufactured homes — the places we still sometimes call mobile homes, even though more than 90% never move. 

Those homes are often the only path to ownership for families with modest means: over half of manufactured homeowners earn less than $50,000 a year, and one-third are over age 60. 

So when private equity arrives like a troupe of investment clowns with spreadsheets, the consequences are anything but funny.

Private equity’s love affair with mobile home parks is booming — and residents are paying the rent for its romance. 

Over the past decade, lot rents in these parks have climbed about 45%, census data shows, and once a park is sold the risk of eviction spikes — in one Florida study, eviction filings rose roughly 40% in the months after a sale. 

In short: buyouts equal bill shock, and bill shock equals dislocated seniors, squeezed families, and communities hollowed out.

Why the rush? 

Manufactured home communities look like a gold mine to institutional investors. 

They’re dense, provide stable cash flow, and are full of people who own their homes but rent the ground underneath them — a business model that rewards rent increases. 

Between 2020 and 2021 institutional investors accounted for 23% of all park purchases (up from 13% in 2017–2019), and today some 23 private equity firms own over 1,800 parks nationwide. 

For profit-seeking funds, housing is not a social good — it’s an asset to be “optimized.” 

Optimization, in practice, often means higher lots rents, thinner maintenance, and tougher eviction policies.

That’s where the cruelty kicks in.

Manufactured-home residents are famously immobile: many have removed wheels or built porches and additions that make moving prohibitively expensive. 

Faced with a rent hike that’s a percentage of what they can’t afford, they must choose between paying the increase or paying hundreds of thousands to move a home that, in many cases, is their only real wealth. 

State laws make the squeeze worse: in Virginia the Manufactured Home Lot Rental Act governs the process and gives evicted homeowners a finite window to move, while in North Carolina a resident has just 21 days to remove a home after an eviction judgment. 

If the home isn’t moved in time, repossession or forced removal looms. 

The legal safety net exists, but the holes in it are significant.There are rays of hope though... 

Some states are starting to push back: Maine now gives residents a right of first refusal on park sales and levies fees on out-of-state investors to make resident purchase more feasible. 

New York capped annual rent hikes in mobile home parks at 3% (with narrow exceptions up to 6%). 

Residents have organized cooperatives and, with support from groups like Resident Owned Communities USA, bought parks themselves. 

These resident-led efforts show another truth: when ownership and stewardship are local, people are likelier to keep rents fair and infrastructure maintained.

Policy fixes that actually matter include stronger notice requirements for park sales (only 22 states currently require advance notice), limits on rent increases, expanded right-of-first-refusal laws, and financing tools to help residents buy parks as cooperatives. 

Rent control without exit-proof protections won’t suffice; lawmakers also need to address eviction timelines and liens that strip residents of their homes when they fall behind.

This is not a property dispute between faceless capital and greedy locals; it’s a fight over where the country’s poorest homeowners will live, age, and sustain the tiny nest eggs they have. 

Treating housing like a commodity — “financializing” neighborhoods the same way a hedge fund treats a portfolio — is a policy choice. Fighting back is the only choice!

The question is whether America wants the cheapest rung on the home-ownership ladder propped up for families, or priced out for profit. 

If the answer is the former, expect more laws that give residents real tools to keep their homes.

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