Last summer, Tom Macurdy filed a complaint with Colorado’s new Mobile Home Park Oversight Program over rules instituted at his park in Lafayette.
The owners of Arbordale Acres, Kingsley Management Corporation, banned homeowners from erecting fences on their property, Macurdy said. They outlawed window-unit air conditioners because, he said, “they’re not pretty.” Nighttime parking on the street would also be disallowed — though the park will rent homeowners a space for a fee.
“They do this kinda crap and I don’t know why,” said Macurdy, 88. “They’re kinda control freaks.”
Complaints against mobile home park owners continue to stream into the state’s oversight program — and they’re disproportionately centered on a few large corporations, like Kingsley, that own hundreds of parks around the country.
Almost 40% of the 241 open complaints in the state system are against just 10 mobile home parks, according to state data, and a quarter of all open complaints are against four large corporations that own dozens of parks around Colorado.
Together, these four corporations have accrued 66 open complaints across 65 parks, according to state figures. That’s roughly one complaint per park, on average — about four times higher than the rate of complaints against the rest of Colorado’s mobile home parks (175 open complaints across the remaining 666 parks).
It’s all part of the corporatization of mobile home parks that is becoming more and more common, observers say, as private equity, real estate investment firms and institutional investors descend on the industry to earn significant profits from the owners of mobile homes who often aren’t, in fact, able to move.
“It’s incredibly concerning if we’re interested in preserving the largest form of unsubsidized housing in our state,” said Colorado state Rep. Andrew Boesenecker, a Larimer County Democrat.
National corporations move in
The list of the companies racking up the most complaints from Colorado’s mobile home residents is a who’s who of industry giants.
Equity LifeStyle Properties (16 open complaints across 10 parks), founded by billionaire businessman Sam Zell, may be the earliest example of a private equity giant getting into mobile home park ownership.
These parks have been a cash cow for Zell and investors, with shares in Equity LifeStyle Properties returning 1,186% between March 2009 and February 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported last year.
Zell, meanwhile, has received at least $12.7 million in director’s fees and stock awards from Equity LifeStyle Properties in the last five years, according to a 2019 report from Manufactured Housing Action, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund.
The company, though, once paid out nearly $10 million to homeowners in a mobile home park in San Jose, Calif., who sued Equity LifeStyle Properties in 2007 over myriad maintenance issues including sewage backups, potholes, electrical blackouts and a swimming pool filled with goose droppings.
One resident there told the San Jose Mercury News that he was evicted on Christmas Eve after complaining that an avocado tree growing beneath his San Jose home had crashed through his shower wall.
And in Thornton seven years ago, a dozen people at a mobile home park owned by Equity LifeStyle Properties said they had their cars towed just for parking in front of their homes.
Equity LifeStyle Properties, in a statement, said it had been contacted by the Colorado oversight program and the company has “addressed or responded to each of the matters that have been raised to us.”
The San Jose settlement, the company added, involved less than 10% of the park’s residents and the “allegations set forth in the lawsuit were without merit.”
The story is similar for the other large corporate owners in Colorado.
RHP Properties, which has 20 open complaints across 30 parks in the state, has an F rating from the Better Business Bureau, with seven complaints closed in the last three years and five in the past 12 months.
A New York state senator in 2019 called out RHP Properties for what he and residents claimed were unlawful rent increases.
RHP Properties, in a statement, said it “always respond(s) promptly” when contacted by the Colorado Department of Local Affairs.
“According to our records, we have responded to all items and do not show any open items at this time,” a company spokesperson said in an email.
Kingsley Management Corporation, another mammoth national mobile home park owner, has 19 open complaints across seven parks and has already been investigated — and reached settlements with — attorneys general in New York and Colorado.
The Utah-based company agreed in October to return $146,000 in security deposits that Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser’s office alleged were wrongfully withheld from mobile home owners.
And in New York, the state attorney general found Kingsley — along with seven other major mobile home park operators — took advantage of low-income individuals trying to purchase homes, “leaving families with default, eviction and financial devastation,” then-Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood said in a news release.
Company representatives did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Finally, there’s RV Horizons-Impact Communities, which has 11 open complaints across 18 Colorado parks.
The owners, Frank Rolfe and Dave Reynolds, run a seminar called Mobile Home University, in which they teach park owners to raise rent “relentlessly” and remove any amenity that might dip into their profits.
Company representatives could not be reached for comment.
“These companies all have a very similar business model that we see across the country,” said Elisabeth Voigt, policy and development director for MHAction, a mobile home owner advocacy organization. “That business model seems to be built around taking advantage of the fact that mobile homes are not in fact very mobile.”
Since it can cost between $5,000 and $10,000 to move a home — if it can even be moved at all — “folks are essentially trapped,” Voigt said.
Corporate owners, as opposed to mom-and-pop operators, need to make profits for shareholders, said Esther Sullivan, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver, who wrote a book on mobile home communities.
So how do you do that effectively? Massive rent increases, fee hikes and cuts in investments in infrastructure and maintenance, she said.
“This is really the leading edge of the issue surrounding manufactured home communities,” Sullivan said. “It’s been a veritable gold rush of private equity and corporations rushing to get in, while there’s this massive affordable housing crisis at the same time.”
A “huge concern”
With these numbers and stories in mind, Colorado’s elected officials are looking at ways to give mobile home owners better protections.
Boesenecker, the Fort Collins representative, called the private equity invasion into mobile home park ownership a “huge concern.” He’s working with Rep. Cathy Kipp, another Fort Collins lawmaker, to figure out how to close gaps in the current statute.
“We’re talking about folks on fixed incomes, people with disabilities, older adults, people from the undocumented community,” Boesenecker said. “People in a variety of ways who don’t have agency and voice and can’t compete with investment portfolios.”
Weiser, the state attorney general, has plans underway to establish a new fair housing unit in the Department of Law, and is pushing for legislation “to provide greater legal authority and enforcement tools to allow the Department of Law to pursue bad actors in the housing industries,” Lawrence Pacheco, the attorney general’s spokesman, said in an email.
