In this episode of the Land Academy Show, Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit tackle one of the most overlooked opportunities in real estate: marketing and selling mobile home lots. While the spotlight often shines on house flipping or vacant land, mobile home lots sit in a forgotten middle ground, ripe with potential for savvy investors. Discover why this niche is a goldmine, the unique strategies to connect with motivated sellers, and tips to price and market these properties effectively for maximum profit. If you’re ready to stand out in a crowded real estate market, this episode is a must-listen!

Listen to the podcast here

Master The Art Of Marketing And Selling Mobile Home Lots

The Opportunity In Mobile Homes

This is episode number 2118. Jill and I are talking about tips for marketing and selling mobile home lots. All week, we have been talking about mobile homes. This is one of my favorite topics. When a mobile home dealer comes back into this office signed, Jill takes a look at it, talks to the seller, and makes sure it’s real. Often, we do a little dance because we know how much money we’re going to make on these things.

Mobile homes, philosophically, when you think about it, are in the middle. On one end, there are house flippers. We know how traffic-y and jammed up that market is. There are a lot of people because of HGTV and a bunch of other reasons that think that it’s incredibly profitable and easy to buy a house, clean it up, and resell it for a lot more. Whether it’s fact or fiction, it happens. There are a lot of people trying to buy houses in these areas. Land, on the other side of that, is the same way. For the last decade, we’ve seen an uptick in the amount of mail that’s being sent to vacant landowners. Nobody cares about mobile homes. They’re right in the middle. They get forgotten.

That’s great for us and great for you.

All week, we’ve been talking about it. Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy Member Discord forum and take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular requests.

Here’s the question. Michael wrote, “In using Geocod.io to reverse lookup GPS coordinates from DataTree and plug in the site of ZIP codes that were either inaccurate or missing in the county I’m working in, most of the records display a high accuracy score like greater than 0.95. I noticed numerous apparent errors that affected my pricing. I discovered that during the final check, for a reason, many of the randomly selected parcels appeared to be overpriced.

In my DataTree export, 75% of the records had a situs ZIP code but 7% of those didn’t match the geocode’s results. Geocode also showed a high error rate for the records for which DataTree did not provide a situs ZIP code. Nobody can find it. Previous comments mentioned relying on the DataTree situs ZIP for pricing and only using external services to fill in the gaps. I plan to test this next. Has anyone found DataTree situs ZIP to be reliable?”

Addressing Pricing Errors In Data Analysis

Here’s the deal. This is a good question. It’s very intense. Most of you are probably saying, “What the heck is this?” I’ll try to dispel it piece by piece here. Vacant land does not have a post office address or what this person’s referring to as a situs address. It doesn’t need one. You only ever get an address assigned to a piece of vacant land when the post office decides you’re going to receive mail there theoretically.

Usually, you request it.

It is by request. A regular land data download for me, let’s say, maybe 10% or 20% have an actual address, and those are all infill lots in general. To get an accurate address, we use a tool called Geocod.io. It translates the GPS coordinates that DataTree has assigned to the location of the property to a likely situs address. It assigns a ZIP code to it because, within that situs ZIP address, there’s no ZIP code.

We base our whole analysis on whether or not we should be sending mail to a ZIP code. It’s smaller than a county, and pricing is very accurate. What this person is saying is, “75% of the records I get are accurate. There’s an accuracy percentage associated with each record. The other 25%, not so much. 7% don’t match at all.” He believes that it’s resulting in an overpriced mailer. This is the first time anyone has ever gone into this at this level besides me.

I want to say one thing about this that Michael needs to think about. ZIP code does not account for the right side and the wrong side of the train tracks. It could be in the same ZIP code. That could be some of your pricing. You’re getting down to ZIP code pricing, which is great which it’s not doing here. If you want to take it crazy, get it down to a census track or that kind of thing.

A zip code does not account for the right side versus the wrong side of the train tracks. Share on X

He could get it down to an APM, which is what we do with houses.

That comes to, Michael, whether you want to spend a month getting your mailer out or a week getting your mailer out.

Pricing Within A Zip Code

In the end, the question is, “These records are overpricing my mailer. This part of doing a mailer or this geocode part is overpricing my mailer.” I’m sorry to say that’s not the case. Overpricing the mailer in the geocode scenario is not what’s causing that. I do not even look at that accuracy percentage when I download, and I still won’t. What’s overpricing your mailer is the deviation or the range of the size of the property.

Follow me on this. In my data sort, I have at the bottom 0.5 acre properties or half acres. At the top, I have 40-acre properties. The price per acre for a half-acre infill lot is crazy high. If an infill lot sells for $30,000, which is very normal, then my price per acre that I’m attributing to the entire range of acres is $15,000 an acre. No way. You’re going to end up with a crazy overpriced mailer.

What you proved to me is that the system works because you went all the way to the end and then you started testing for a reason. You were like, “Would I buy it? No. It’s all overpriced.” It’s overpriced because the acreage range in your mailer is too wide. To solve that, you want to create a mailer in a ZIP code from a small acreage range, let’s say 1.25 acres to 2.5 acres. Those are like-kind acreage sizes. The active properties that are for sale and the sold properties for sale in a county or in a ZIP code like that are going to be similarly priced unless there’s some strange other-side-of-the-tracks like Jill’s talking about, which, in my opinion, you will get through if you’re pricing it at 20%.

The Role Of Local Knowledge In Pricing

You’re right. I didn’t even think about that. The whole ZIP code is not all the same price per acre regardless of the size and regardless of location.

Michael may be like, “That’s great, Jack, but this is too complicated. I don’t want to do it.” I understand that. All you have to do is 1 of 2 things. Number one, do exactly what I say in chapters 3 and 4, which this person is doing, but he’s questioning it, which is great. If you do what I say, it’ll be fine. Number two, you can call concierge data and Offers2Owners.com and have them do it for you. People hate doing mailers. I understand that. That’s why we created concierge data so you don’t have to do it. This episode’s topic is tips for marketing and selling mobile home lots.

I brought up one.

I have some answers too. Go ahead.

I brought up a big one. People don’t realize the value of these lots. There are a lot of cities, counties, and parishes that are moving away from them. Some have never changed. There are a lot of healthy communities that love them and appreciate them as do we, but there are a few areas that don’t. When you have these mobile home lots and they are welcomed in that area, that’s a very big deal. I always make sure that it’s spelled out in the title, at the beginning of the description, or at the top and not hidden at the bottom that this is mobile home-friendly. It’s a big deal for buyers.

It then should be marketed to all of those groups. If you’re doing the marketing, that’s great, but whoever’s doing it for you, if you have an agent selling them, they should be very mobile home-focused. They should know them very well to speak of them and then put them in front of all the people who are looking for mobiles and mobile home lots to put their mobile or buy a mobile home.

Mobile homes equal affordable housing. If you think of buying a piece of property, do the research before you buy it and see if it’s conducive to putting a mobile home on it or what’s around it. If there are mobile homes around it, that’s great. That means affordable housing. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to go onto a luxury market on the internet where people buy multimillion-dollar houses and advertise that property. You’re not going to choose a luxury house real estate agent as a listing agent because that’s not the market. That’s what Jill’s saying.

Mobile homes equal affordable housing. Share on X

My tip for marketing and selling mobile homes is to reach that market. Reach a person who understands that mobile homes are affordable housing and that they always have been and always will be. Some people are end users with children and their dream is to live on an acre and a half in a brand new mobile home in a nice environment with a good reasonable school system and have an amazing, simple life. That’s my tip. Reach those people. They’re in apartments. They’re living in an apartment and hate it. I’d love to hear one person say, “I love living in this apartment.”

I know 1 or 2 people, and they’re weird. They’re 50 years old and they love apartment life. I’m like, “Okay.”

Better than that, if you talk to anybody who lives in a mobile home in a park and they’re paying land rent, their dream is to get what I described. It’s not hard to market mobile homes and mobile home lots. Marketing mobile home lots is simple. Find out who the local mobile home developer is there, and there are probably maybe three. You can do that in the county by pulling the construction permits.

These are great. Coming from doing land and then we start rolling in lots that are mobile home-friendly, every single time I’ve had one, it’s the first thing to sell. It’s the very first thing to sell because it’s mobile home-friendly. They’re like, “Here they come.” It’s like they smell it. I’m glad. We talked about it a little bit and alluded to it. We went on a factory tour. They’re getting more lovely. I’m arguing that construction is amazing. It’s not like an RV where it’s parked. It’s very well insulated. The things that they’re doing, the appliances, and the amenities are nice. You walk through them and go, “I want to live here.” It’s great. It’s affordable housing. It’s a smart, efficient way to provide housing.

The next time you’re driving down the road and you see a dealer with the flag out there that says “Open”, walk through there. It’s shocking. My jaw drops. Even after going through all these mobile homes, it’s still amazing.

They have beautiful bathrooms and freestanding tubs. I can go on and on with the things they’re trying to make them look like. You’re standing inside and you don’t know the difference if it’s a house or a mobile home. They have amazing floor plans.

Some of them are multiple stories. Some of them have attached garages. I can’t tell the difference. Join us again through a bunch of new episodes. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.

Important Links

• Geocodio
• Offers2Owners
• Land Academy on LinkedIn