Interview with Derek Vickers from Vicktory Real Estate Group

Listen on Apple Podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interview-with-derek-vickers-from-vicktory-real-estate/id1520681893?i=1000593696328

SHOW NOTES

Welcome back to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, hosted by Andrew Keel. On this episode of the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, Andrew talks with Derek Vickers from Vicktory Real Estate Group. Derek and Andrew discuss the most important aspects that limited partners and passive investors need to look out for when investing into mobile home parks passively. They also discuss how interest rates are changing investing strategies and how park owned homes are likely a higher risk than tenant owned homes during a tougher economy.

Derek started his mobile home park investing journey with his first mobile home park purchase in September 2020 after 10 years in the insurance business as a sales manager. He currently owns and operates 2,000 lots across 38 different mobile home parks throughout the southeast, 23 of those being in Florida. Victory Real Estate Group specializes in turning around neglected mobile home parks by increasing occupancy, converting park owned homes to tenant owned mobile homes and reducing operating expenses. With a busy schedule Derek enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter and has another baby on the way!

***Andrew Keel and Keel Team Real Estate Investments (Keel Team, LLC) do not endorse any interviewee. This interview is for informational purposes only and should not be depended upon for investment purposes. ***

Andrew Keel is the owner of Keel Team, LLC, a Top 100 Owner of Manufactured Housing Communities with over 2,000 lots under management. His team currently manages over 30 manufactured housing communities across more than ten states. His expertise is in turning around under-managed manufactured housing communities by utilizing proven systems to maximize the occupancy while reducing operating costs. He specializes in bringing in homes to fill vacant lots, implementing utility bill back programs, and improving overall management and operating efficiencies, all of which significantly boost the asset value and net operating income of the communities.

Andrew has been featured on some of the Top Podcasts in the manufactured housing space, click here to listen to his most recent interviews: https://www.keelteam.com/podcast-links. In order to successfully implement his management strategy Andrew’s team usually moves on location during the first several months of ownership. Find out more about Andrew’s story at AndrewKeel.com.

Are you getting value out of this show? If so, please head over to iTunes and leave the show a quick five-star review. I have a goal of hitting over 200 total 5-star reviews by the end of 2023, and it would mean the absolute world to me if you could help contribute to that. Thanks ahead of time for making my day with your five-star review of the show.

Talking Points:

00:21 – Welcome to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast

02:10 – Derek’s journey into manufactured housing communities

08:00 – Balancing mobile home park management and sales when you’re going through a lot of growth

10:40 – Derek’s first mobile home park deal

11:40 – How Derek self-educated before cold calling mobile home parks

13:40 – The toughest hurdle to overcome in mobile home park investing

18:04 – Derek’s current mobile home park investing strategy

21:10 – How Derek converts parks from park-owned homes to tenant-owned homes

23:50 – Smaller parks versus bigger parks: management and expense ratios

25:30 – Mistakes that Derek made

28:30 – The most important things that limited partners and passive investors need to look out for when investing into mobile home parks

29:49 – Derek’s perfect mobile home park

31:00 – What the future of mobile home park investing looks like

33:24 – Getting a hold of Derek

34:03 – Conclusion

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Links & Mentions from This Episode:

Derek Vickers’ Email: derekvickers885@gmail.com

Derek Vickers’ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/derekvickers885/

Derek Vickers’ Twitter: https://twitter.com/derekvickers885?lang=en

Derek Vickers’ Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/derekvickers885

Keel Team’s Official Website: https://www.keelteam.com/

Andrew Keel’s Official Website: https://www.andrewkeel.com/

Andrew Keel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkeel

Andrew Keel Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/PassiveMHPinvestingPodcast

Andrew Keel Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/passivemhpinvesting/

Twitter: @MHPinvestors

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TRANSCRIPT

Andrew: Welcome to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast. This is your host, Andrew Keel. Today, we have an amazing guest in Mr. Derek Vickers with the Vicktory Real Estate Group.

Before we dive in, I want to ask you a real quick favor. Would you mind please taking an extra 30 seconds and heading over to iTunes to rate this podcast with five stars? This helps us get more listeners and it means the absolute world to me. Thanks for making my day with that five star review of the show.

All right, let’s dive in. Derek started his mobile home park investing journey with his first purchase in September of 2020, after 10 years in the insurance business as a sales manager. He currently owns and operates 2000 lots across 38 different mobile home parks throughout the southeast United States, 23 of those mobile home parks are in the beautiful state of Florida.

Vicktory Real Estate Group specializes in turning around neglected mobile home parks by increasing occupancy, converting park-owned homes to tenant-owned, and reducing operating expenses.

With a busy schedule, Derek enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, and has another baby on the way. Derek, we’re excited to welcome you to the show.

Derek: Yeah, man. I’m excited to be on the show, honored to be on the show, excited to get this rolling. Hopefully, I can drop some nuggets and help some people out in their MHP journey.

Andrew: I love it, man, and congratulations on the baby news. That is fantastic for you and your wife.

Derek: Thank you very much. My wife wants four or five, so we still have a ways to go. The second one will obviously bring some additional fun.

Andrew: My wife always says the hardest jump—because we have three—was from zero to one so you’re ahead of the game, brother.

Derek: Ahead of the game.

Andrew: Maybe you can start out by telling our listeners a little about your story and how you got into manufactured housing.

Derek: It’s interesting because people always have a little strange journey about how they end up in this little niche investment world of mobile home parks. Mine is pretty unique in that, as Andrew mentioned, I was in the insurance business for 10 years. I did really well in that. I started out, it was really tough, but cold calling businesses was a difficult growth to where I got.

I was doing well. I was making good money in that business. I had been studying different guys online and I knew the end goal was always to get into some investment real estate. So we sold insurance to businesses. In March of 2020, businesses shut down so we couldn’t sell insurance to businesses.

We were doing it, but it was so slow. I’m like, okay. That was the push and the boost I got to okay, I got to get this real estate thing going. I started looking at multifamily apartment deals and I didn’t want to buy a duplex. I didn’t want to buy a quadplex. I wanted to go a little bit bigger and get some more scale.

It just didn’t work because the barrier to entry to multifamily is huge. Then it was $250,000–$300,000 a door. I had a friend that was in the mobile home park business, and he was like hey, you should look at mobile home parks.

I started listening to podcasts. This podcast is actually included in that and I think Andrew, you told me that’s when you started the podcast in 2020 there. I started listening to all these podcasts and then I was sold after that. I’m like, okay, wow. I love this business model. What I did is I actually went online and I’m like okay, what do I need to do to start at least advancing the ball here?

I found a list online of all of the mobile home parks in Florida. Miraculously, it was so easy. I don’t even know how I did it. I just typed in like, okay, here’s a list of all the parks. I started calling owners. I’m like, okay, I’m going to make a fool out of myself here.

I don’t know that much about the asset class yet. I’m learning, but still, I don’t know how to have that conversation with an owner about the intricacies of operations, but I had lots of experience in cold calling businesses. Actually, this was really easy for me to pick up the phone because I used to have to call people and go see them in person to try and sell them something.

This is a dream come true because I’m like, oh my gosh. I’m calling someone and offering to buy from them. Oh my gosh, this is going to be easy. I had no call reluctance, so I started calling. I literally drove probably every single mobile home park just about, between Hillsborough County, Orange County, […] around the central Florida area. Maybe not all of them, but I drove a good majority of them.

I was talking to the owners. I would put in offers on stuff. I didn’t know how I was going to get the deal done. I got offers rejected, got hung up on, got told to screw off because your offer sucked and all that.

My buddy that was in the business actually introduced me to a capital partner that he had and that actually lived right down the road for me in Orlando. I went and met him and told him what I was doing and he was like, okay, cool. I started sending him deals that I was finding because I was finding a bunch of deals and he had a lot of experience in the high financial world.

He was showing me hey, look at this. Look at this. Okay, that’s a good deal. That would be good for your first deal or it wouldn’t. We started to create a relationship there.

I know this is maybe getting a little long-winded, but basically, I got a call from him one day. He’s like hey, I had a deal under contract. My partner backed out. We’re closing in a week. Do you want in? I was like I’ll call you back. I said, I’ll call you back tomorrow. I got off the phone and I’m thinking, going through my head, and was like, call him back now.

I called him back like 10 minutes later and I’m like I’m in and I got into that deal. I wanted to learn the business, I wanted to learn the operations. I was like okay, I’ll do all the heavy lifting on this deal. Basically, I got into that deal with no money.

People that say if your excuse is that you don’t have any money, you don’t have to have any money, by the way. I got in that deal, did all the heavy lifting and got 20% of the entire deal for doing all of that heavy lifting. That’s how I got into the business, and then it just started going crazy after that.

We never meant to get to the size that we’re at today. I take that back. When I do something, it’s always I can’t halfway something, I have to go all in. There was some intention there to get big, but not really at the beginning. We just kept finding these great deals. You couldn’t pass on them. Then it started to get crazy and we acquired more. That’s the gist of how I got into the business.

Andrew: That is an awesome story. I have some notes here. It seems like your strength initially was the sales side of things, but then you came in helping out with the heavy lifting part of it, the value add, the implementation of the management company, I assume.

How do you balance those two when you’re growing so fast? Your first park was September of 2020 and we’re recording this in November 2022. I think in your intro there were many parks, 38?

Derek: Thirty-eight, yes.

Andrew: Wow. How do you balance the two and maybe tell us about some of your struggles from the acquisitions business versus the property management business versus the construction management business? Because that’s something that we’ve struggled with in-house.

Derek: I’m glad you brought that up because a lot of people don’t talk about that—the construction management aspect of it on these value add properties. I didn’t know anything about project management and construction management. I had no idea when we were getting these turnaround properties, that a lot of that was going to be involved.

I struggled with that because contractors are what they are. It’s difficult to find one that you can trust. It’s difficult to find one that you can rely on regularly. I’ve had experience where a lot of them I can rely on for a little bit and then not.

Balancing that was difficult because I was still in the insurance business full-time until August of 2021, until it just got ridiculous that it couldn’t work. How do you balance it? You don’t, really. You got to go and get it done.

I was working in my office and this is funny. In the insurance business, I would wear a suit, a tie, and I would even put on a vest sometimes during the day. I was all fancied up. This first property we bought was probably 10 or 15 minutes from my insurance office. I would change into a t-shirt and some comfortable shorts and then go to the park from 5:00 to 8:00 doing what we have to do.

By the way, that property was an utter disaster. I was chasing homeless people and drug addicts out of the vacant park-owned homes every single day for two months. It was a lot of fun. A lot of fun.

It was difficult to balance all that. I would go home after that and I’d be up doing stuff until three o’clock in the morning and I would get up at five o’clock in the morning and go to the gym and just figure out how to get it all done. It wasn’t easy, but you just figured it out.

Andrew: Tell us about some of the challenges. Covid hit March, 2020. Your first park was closing in September. Tell us about some of the challenges you went through there to get that first deal done.

Derek: The first deal, when I mentioned that before, there was no due diligence because the property was closing in seven days.

Andrew: Oh geez.

Derek: That’s when I just got told about the property that we were closing. There wasn’t really that much struggle leading up to it because it was so sudden that I didn’t even have time to think about it. We get on site, half the park was septic and half the park was city water and city sewer that we didn’t know, and all kinds of other fun coffins that we found there.

Andrew: You must have had some trust in that friend of yours to dive in that quick without the due diligence. That’s cool. I know before we started recording, you actually live 15 minutes from where I live in Oviedo so we’re both the central Florida boys.

Let me ask you this. I know you said you listened to some podcasts, but was there anything else that you did to self-educate on mobile home parks before diving into cold calling?

Derek: I did the Frank and Dave Bootcamp and it was all virtual then. I did that. I listened to other commercial real estate podcasts and I actually looked up commercial real estate nomenclature. Defined all those terms like banking terms and things, so I would understand that.

I think a combination of that, the podcast, actually going out and talking to owners, asking them questions about operations, actually going there and asking hey, how does this work? How does this work? How does that work? Mom and pop, they’ve got their own issues, but I was at least able to learn from some of these guys like how parks operated. Then the bootcamp was great.

The interesting thing about that first park is it literally violated everything in the buy box on the bootcamp. It’s half city water and half septic. It was all park-owned homes, terrible dilapidated park-owned homes. That first park was probably like I learned on level 10 at level 1, so there was no gradient. It was just all in.

Andrew: I was telling somebody yesterday that if I had my first park, I would have got the best manager. She still manages the park to this day. She’s just a rockstar. If that first park didn’t go as well as it did, I might have tapped the brakes a little bit. I’m just naturally conservative, so I would’ve been like okay, I can’t take on too much too fast. But you had the opposite. You were just thrown right into the mess and dug your way out so that’s really interesting.

Let me ask you this, what do you think is the toughest hurdle to overcome in mobile home park investing?

Derek: I think getting that first deal done is definitely a hurdle for some people. I know when I was just digging around before I got that opportunity, there’s a lot of stuff that’s going through your head. You’re doubting or overanalyzing, this and that. I think that’s a hurdle.

Then also, I think personally, I underestimated the amount of work that’s involved in some of these turnaround projects and underestimating the amount of time and expenses it takes to do that because these value add properties, if you’re flipping park-owned homes to tenant-owned, you can’t hire a manager for $500 a month in free lot run. That’s at least a 40-hour-a-week job.

The level of work you’re going to get by doing that is very low. I think people just underestimate the work involved and the things that are actually involved in this because the operations can be tough and I understand that.

Andrew: I think that a lot of new operators, including myself, do that because you’re exactly right. It is a ton of work and I think through some of the boot camps and things like that, Frank pretty much tells it how it is, but you get this impression of okay, the tenants will own their homes. It’s this passive deal. They’re just paying a lot of rent. You’re not supposed to have the repairs and maintenance.

I know with your model where you’re converting park-owned homes to tenant-owned homes, there’s a lot more involved. I think you get sold on this like hey, this is going to be passive and very hands-off, and it’s not. It’s affordable housing. You need to be hands-on because things can get way out of whack.

I think one thing that we’ve done to really stay on is that we visit all of our properties at least once a quarter. I don’t know if you guys, you’re Florida-based, so you probably get to them more often than that. If we didn’t go to these the managers are notorious for doing the drive through videos and really quickly, they’ll go by lot 13, which has the refrigerator in the front yard and there’s a dryer in the back by the skirting. We’ve seen it all. That’s been really valuable, but I agree with you. There’s a ton of work involved.

Then you said getting into your first deal. One thing resonated with me. My mentor, Ryan Smith with Elevation Capital, told me about his first mobile home park which was in (I believe it was) Tennessee. He was telling me he literally got sick before the closing. He literally got sick because he was just so nervous and now he has 20,000 plus units. I think that first deal where your nerves are running and people are telling you what are you doing?

I remember my dad. I was like Dad, I’m going to buy a trailer park. He was like Andrew, I think you’re making a huge mistake. All of your savings, you’re going to lose all of it. I was like, no, I think this is a good business. He was like Andrew, I don’t think you know what you’re doing. But it turned out, it worked out. He had never heard of this as an investment option, so very cool.

Derek: That’s great, man. I remember that before I closed the first deal, too. I was in the office and I’m like okay, I got to get these welcome letters out. I was super nervous to go there, hand those out, and knock on the doors at that property. That property was a yucky and nasty property, so it was even more exciting.

Andrew: The same thing like you were saying, it’s all the little things that you’re like, how hard could it be? You just need to prepare an intro letter and get it out to the tenants, but the way my mind works is okay, what liability is this intro? Is this worded right? Do I need to have an attorney review this to make sure I’m not saying something I shouldn’t, or I’m talking indefinitely instead of otherwise? I think there are a lot of nerves running at the same time. I remember the first one. It’s definitely a hard one.

Let me ask you this. What does your mobile home park investing strategy look like today? Has that changed from when you bought that first park and why is it the way it is now?

Derek: We’re still in the process of figuring that out because with interest rates, it just made the market really, really weird. We can buy some of these value add properties, these all park-owned homes, and hope to convert them over to tenant-owned homes, but then we have to pay the seller for what we’re going to do. It just doesn’t make sense after knowing all the work that goes into it.

I was talking to one of my business partners a few weeks ago about this and he asked me the same question. Would you buy those same properties again? I said, yes at the price that we got them at that point in time. But if we’ve got to pay up for those, I’m not going to do it because it’s just a lot of work and the upside wouldn’t be there.

We actually purchased the park I was telling you about, it’s right there in a suburb right outside of Orlando, back in May of this year. We probably paid too much for it, but it was all tenant-owned homes. The mom and pop owner took fantastic care of the property and you don’t even have to be there. It’s very stable.

I like that. Cash flows less. We’ll make more money over time. We’ll create more value over time. It’s a balance. I don’t really have a definitive answer to that question right now, but if we can still get these value-added parks at a reasonable price, then we’ll move on them. If not, I just don’t think the effort required is worth the upside if you’re paying for some of that upside up front.

Andrew: That’s a really good insight there. I think that’s like when you first get in. You don’t know what you don’t know. You’re just like, hey, and you can work through it. It’s been a great past seven years, so it was easy to ride the cap rate compression and to create a lot of value. It’s not that it’s not hard work, but you create a lot of value really fast and we were beneficiaries of that. But now, it’s like, okay, let’s step back and see what works the best.

Buying fewer park-owned homes is a huge part of that. When tenants own their homes, it’s been proven in our portfolio, literally less than 5% of the tenant-owned homes move out and leave per year. The park-owned homes have a much higher turnover rate.

I posted something on LinkedIn—it was yesterday or the day before—and another operator commented. He said when the economy gets rough, it’s the park-owned homes that you need to worry about because there are higher chances of them turning over. The higher monthly payment, they’ll just abandon the homes. You’re one water leak away from them just walking out and leaving behind all they’ve paid for that home and so forth.

I would love to get your feedback on that, on how you guys convert these parks from park-owned homes to tenant-owned homes. I love the model, but is it through a lease option–type of program, or do you just say, hey, we’re going to give you the home and your lot rent just going to go down, or what does that look like?

Derek: It’s been a variation of all that. We give everybody the opportunity to purchase their home. They have to pass the background check because mom and pop probably never did a background check. We have to make sure, because we’re going to be moving families into these parks. We want to make sure that we don’t have any criminals or any sex offenders in there. We have to make sure of that.

A lot of the properties that we bought, there were a lot of vacant park-owned homes, so we would just sell those as a handyman special for $500, so we never underwrote the price we would sell the homes for in our deals. We didn’t really care what we sold them for because we wanted a good family there or a good individual there that was going to pay a lot of rent every month and not cause any trouble.

We would do it various ways, and sometimes if people had a nicer house, we would do a rent-to-own or a lease option with them, or we would sell for $500 or $1000. In some of the markets that we’re in like the Tampa and Orlando markets, it’s so hot. These things are easy to sell.

Even what we learned on that first property we bought, it was 22 lots and I think 10 or 12 of those were vacant park-owned homes and they were a disaster. But we were able to sell those for cheap and people came in and fixed them up. We gave them free lot rent until they had the home fixed. It was a great deal for them.

I was looking at our numbers and it was something crazy. In the last year, we brought back online something like 400 homes of affordable housing in our different markets that weren’t available, that families did not have before that. I think that’s the cool thing about our business. You get to provide that to people that may never get the chance to own a home.

We’ve had people in our parks buy homes and then they’re reselling them for double the value. They’re making money off of them. We had a guy who bought a house. I can’t remember how much he paid for it, but he put maybe $10,000 or $15,000 in it and then he sells it for $60,000.

Andrew: That’s awesome.

Derek: It’s pretty cool.

Andrew: That’s really good. You mentioned one thing, that park had 22 lots. Another thing is the size of the parks. That’s one thing that I’ve learned at least is that we have a new criteria. We don’t touch anything under 50 lots. I would just love to get your opinion on that. Are you guys buying these smaller parks? Do you have a better way to manage them? Are you able to still hit the industry standard of a 35% expense ratio on those smaller parks? What does that look like? I know that we are trying to buy more of the scale like you talked about earlier.

Derek: We would rather buy scale now because it doesn’t make sense to buy a 30-lot park unless it’s right next door. If we have something right next door, it fits into the machine, it’s right there, we’ll take it down.

In our area that we’re in now in Florida, we’re not going to buy something in the middle of nowhere Florida of 30 lots. You’re going to have to pay a manager. If it’s a turnaround property, I know all the issues that are going to come with that. It doesn’t necessarily make sense to actually do that. I know when you’re starting you have to look at those things. We would want more scale now for sure.

Andrew: That makes sense.

Derek: If you’re operating that park as you mentioned, your expense ratio is going to be higher. If we buy a 40-lot park in Tampa, we can just throw it in and our managers are already there.

Andrew: That’s nice when you have scale somewhere. What mistakes have you made in mobile home park investing that we could learn from?

Derek: Where do I start? I definitely think if you’re buying value-added properties—and I touched on this earlier—it’s a lot of work and I would not underestimate that. You cannot hire someone and pay them the free lot rent of $500 a month. It just doesn’t work. You’re going to get sketchy people. You have to look out for that and really look at who you’re hiring and are they going to be able to do the job, are they reliable, and are you paying them enough?

That’s just a big thing. You need to get reliable and trustworthy people on your team. You also need to actually look at what those people are doing on a daily basis. That is one.

Due diligence. Make sure you’re going through all of your due diligence checklist. Check the utilities. If you have to spend an extra couple of thousand dollars to scope the lines or have septics pumped out, do it. Always do your due diligence.

We had a property in Tampa. We bought a lot of these properties that are 50%–60% vacant, so we didn’t take into account the old infrastructure that was already there. It wasn’t ready for the capacity to be 100% occupied. We underestimated—it’s all city water—but sewer backups, water line breaks from the old infrastructure. All of that needs to be taken into account.

Check septics. Just check them because we have a deal now where the septic was another disaster. It’s the same septic system that it had when it was in the 50s and we made the mistake. We were getting the park cheap enough to where we just plugged our noses, didn’t really check the septics, and assumed it was fine. Now we’re having to tap into city water and sewer, which is right out front, but that’s a tough process to do. It’s taken us about a year and we’re still not done with that project yet. I would definitely look at those couple of things for sure.

Andrew: Thank you for sharing those. The due diligence piece resonated with me. When we started, we used the due diligence handbook that we got at the MHU Bootcamp and that was an awesome starting point. But literally from every deal that we’ve done, we’ve learned at least one thing and added it to our due diligence checklist. Like we got to do this next time. We have to make sure to meet with this person or talk to them about this.

Now, our due diligence checklist is well above 300 items, where in the beginning in the handbook, I think it was closer to 50 or 60. It just grows the longer you’re in the business. You just keep adding to that. That’s a really really important piece, especially with the infrastructure because that can be costly. It can be super costly.

What are the most important things that LPs and passive investors need to look out for when investing into mobile home parks?

Derek: A couple of things that as an LP, I think you should really try to understand the asset class a little bit. If you have a sponsor that’s showing you a pro forma for a park and they’re banking on the park, running on 20% expenses, this is probably not going to happen. The park has a wastewater treatment plant and it’s a well. You and I both know it’s not going to run at 20% expenses. It’s just not. I would just try to understand that a little bit so you can see if the numbers are making sense and what these pro formas look like.

Also, the operators themselves, obviously, even if they don’t have experience, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be a bad operator. Look at prior experience that they had in other businesses. Were they successful? How are they as a person? What do they do in their spare time? If you can get that detail, I would definitely look at those things.

Andrew: That’s great. Those are great tips. Thank you for those. What does the perfect mobile home park look like in your eyes and why?

Derek: A perfect mobile home park for me would be in one of these larger MSAs in Florida. They would be all park-owned homes, like 90s homes or above, and 100 lots or more. Of course, city water, city sewer, all direct build, trash is direct build, everything. That would be the perfect park for me. You would have to get that at a relatively decent price but that would be my perfect mobile home park.

Andrew: That would be the great white buffalo right there. And get it at like a 10 cap. Get it where it’s of course a really great price. That sounds awesome.

Let me ask you this, what does the future of mobile home park investing look like and how do you see mobile home parks fitting in with the direction the economy is going with higher interest rates and possible recession?

Derek: What I loved about this business was the supply and demand factor. It’s always going to be on our side. That bodes well for us. I think there’s going to be a slowdown in transactions here because mom and pop still think their parks are worth it. They were getting unsolicited LOIs for 125 a pass in Florida and they’re like I still got to get that.

I think that’s going to cause some slow down in the market, but I think over time we’re still going to do very well. The equity multiples that we were able to get in a short amount of time, I think that time’s going to stretch out obviously a little bit. We’re not going to be able to create as much value in 12 months. It may take 36 months, 24 months, or 48 months, which is still great, by the way. It’s still good.

I love this business and I think as I mentioned before, with the supply and demand thing being constantly on our side and there’s no affordable housing multifamily people, you can’t permit and build affordable housing and charge $1000 a month and the deal makes sense. It’s difficult to do that. I think there’s a bright future for us, for sure.

Andrew: I love that. Specifically with what’s going on in the market, I think there was a graph floating around on Twitter. Credit card debt is exponentially higher than it was last year, the year prior, and savings rates have gone down a lot. Who gets hit hardest. It’s the affordable housing, it’s the low income people that are living in our parks.

I think we got to be aware of that and some of these rent increases that may have been really nice on the pro forma. I think that also needs to be readjusted. In addition to the park-owned homes and the lease option type of deals that were done, we got to really work with those people like we did during COVID where we’re like hey, we need to do a payment plan or something like that. You had a setback, you had a car go down or something.

Those are some of the stuff we’re looking at, but I do agree with you. I think the long-term buy-and-hold model where you’re going to hold these things forever, this is just going to be a temporary little blip where you’re going to be able to really build a lot of value holding these things long-term for sure.

Thank you so much, Derek, for all of these golden nuggets. If any of our listeners would like to get a hold of you, what would be the best way for them to do so?

Derek: Just shoot me an email. It’s derekvickers885@gmail.com. I’m on Instagram, TikTok. I’m posting videos around properties and about crazy things that you see in the operations when I’m out there. You can follow me on those. It’s derekvickers885 as well. Then on Facebook too, I’m on Facebook.

Andrew: Awesome. Thank you Derek for coming on the show.

Derek: Absolutely. Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew: That’s it for today, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in.