STRATEGY
MOBILE HOMES
properties, the expertise of the entire room is applied to their client’s situation and creative suggestions (and potential offers) fly around the room for just about ev- ery property. It’s like drinking from a firehose for three days. Usually there is over a billion dollars of real es- tate being presented and expertise in the room ranges from brokers to developers to private lenders. As an example, at the most recent meeting I made a deal to purchase a renovated commercial property in exchange for a down payment in cryptocurrency and a seller note for the balance. There will be no payments or interest on the note for three months to allow time to lease the rest of the property. At the same meeting, sev- eral hundred million dollars of funds looking for a proj- ect were presented, over a hundred Exchangors were in the room, and well over a billion dollars in property was in the marketing book. Most of those properties are also available for viewing on the organization’s website. There are several regional or local exchange groups around the country, many of whom are affiliated with the NCE and can be found through the NCE website or by contacting its members. Another national organization, the Society of Exchange Counselors (SEC) also meets regular- ly, but attendance and membership are by invitation only. The NCE also sponsors a designation, the Equity Marketing Specialist (EMS) that can be obtained by completing their training and attending meetings. Look for the EMS designation to find creative real estate agents, brokers, and investors who know ways to com- plete a real estate transaction. Knowing how to exchange properties involves learn- ing techniques and approaches that are all focused around achieving a seller’s objectives and constructing deals from more than just cash and bank loans. Once you understand these techniques most of the real estate brokers out there look like one trick ponies — all they know is cash down payment and a bank loan. One exchanger, Robert Steele has written a book “300 Ways to Buy, Sell, or Exchange Real Estate.” Why not have 300 ways to invest rather than just one? • Steve Streetman, president of StreetSmart Investments, LLC, a commer- cial real estate investing company, is an avid cryptocurrency investor and has worked in cryptography and high-end computer modeling for over 30 years. He teaches commercial real estate investment courses and is a real estate agent with RealInvestors Real Estate Services. His book “Cryptocurrency and Real Estate: How Bitcoin and BlockchainWill Transform Real Estate Investing” is anticipated to release early 2020. To find out more about exchanging or exchangors, you can visit the NCE website, readWayne Palmer’s chapters in Robert Kiyosaki’s “The Real Book of Real Estate,” or contact Steve. Readers who are real estate licensees in the mid-Atlantic area who might be interested in joining a local exchange group should contact Steve via email or LinkedIn.
A Solid Investment MOBILE HOMES APPRECIATE AT RATES ON PAR WITH SITE-BUILT HOMES.
by Chimene Van Gundy – “Mobile Home Millionaire”
ost people think mobile homes cannot be a solid investment because they are simply too easy to acquire. They depreciate, right? In fact, as someone who has fix and flipped more than 500 units, I have had other investors tell me that they don’t deal with “trailer trash.” Remember the adage: “It is the man with a little knowledge who feels he knows everything and the man with a lot of knowledge who realizes how little he actually knows.” Long has been the belief that mobile homes depreci- ate. For those who think there is an appreciation, they believe it is at a drastically slower rate than the site builds. They also believe they only appreciate if they are attached to land. In researching the up-to-date data released from the Federal Housing Finance Agency and disseminated by the Urban Institute, this assumption is finally chal- lenged and ultimately thrown out. In fact, the opposite is true, and this could mean major changes regarding the affordable housing crisis plaguing the nation. The index for home price on manufactured and mobile homes is growing at an average rate of 3.4 percent annually. What about site-built homes? They were growing at an annual rate of 3.8 percent. However, in the last few years, the prices of manufactured homes and mobile homes increased faster than that of tradi- tional housing/properties. One of the reasons these trends have been so mis- leading is that these houses aren’t as present in areas of the United States where the housing market recov- M
ery on a whole was more noticeable. These houses are more likely to be found in areas where recovery from the housing crisis was diminutive. California, for exam- ple, contains more than 17 percent of the entire U.S. housing market. Yet, in looking at the number of units shipped, only four percent of the manufactured housing market is represented in California. Headline areas — those featured for having had a noteworthy boom from the housing market crash — simply aren’t areas that mobile homes have occupied. This unintentionally excludes their rise, leaving them out of the picture to those who take news at face value and make assumptions without digging deeper. When comparing Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama to California, these states en- compass 41 percent of the market for manufactured housing, but they have seen price appreciation increase at a slower rate than it has on average nationally. This is area-based. Not home-based. And that makes a big dif- ference. We simply aren’t comparing apples to apples. • Chimene Van Gundy is the mother of five children, and she runs and manages five different companies. She is known as the "The Mobile Home Millionaire" and “Queen of Mobile Homes” because she has fixed, flipped, and wholesaled more than 400 units to date in four years and in 11 states. She currently owns 20 mobile home parks and has taken her business international by rehabbing mobile homes in Ireland, where they are called “Holiday homes.” Chimene is on a mission to preserve the “last frontier of affordable housing for the U.S.” and is currently teaching others how to use these “little boxes that spit out cash” to change their lives and live the life of their dreams through her mobile home millions platform.
54 | think realty magazine :: january / february 2020
thinkrealty . com | 55
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