Mobile Home Park Liability Concerns with Kurt Kelley of Mobile Insurance

Listen on Apple Podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mobile-home-park-liability-concerns-with-kurt-kelley/id1520681893?i=1000514054572

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 Kurt Kelley of Mobile Insurance. Kurt talks about the top liability concerns mobile home park investors need to look out for in their properties. Andrew and Kurt also talk about park-owned homes and LLC’s, cyber security liability insurance, Kurt’s idea of the perfect mobile home park, and his advice for new people getting into the industry.

Kurt has worked with Mobile Insurance since the mid-90’s. Mobile Insurance has experienced wonderful, steady growth and has a high client retention rate since its formation. Kurt is also the founder and publisher of a real estate publication called, “Manufactured Housing Review,” which is dedicated to professionals in the mobile home industry. He is also the managing member and co-founder of the American Insurance Alliance, which is an association of insurance agencies that specialize in the manufactured housing industry, the alliance has total premium volumes over $180,000,000!

Andrew Keel is the owner of Keel Team, LLC, a Top 100 Owner of Manufactured Housing Communities with over 1,500 lots under management. His team currently manages over 20 manufactured housing communities across ten states – AR, GA, IA, IL, IN, MN, NE, OH, PA and TN. 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 100 total 5-star reviews by the end of 2021, 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

01:53​ – Kurt’s story and his journey into the manufactured housing industry

03:32​ – The items that passive investors should look out for, which provide the most liability concern

04:49​ – The items which present the most risk and have the most claims every year in mobile home parks

08:22​ – The hazards and the real risks that they pose to mobile home park owners

09:43​ – dogs and trampolines

11:57​ – Hurricane and tornado exposure

15:50​ – The insurance policies that you recommend that an operator have on a typical mobile home park acquisition

17:05​ – Cyber liability concerns

21:39​ – Park-owned homes and LLC’s

25:04​ – The perfect mobile home park for an insurance broker

26:27​ – Which amenities are not going to make insurance costs go through the roof

27:59​ – Kurt’s final piece of advice for investors who are interested in mobile home parks

30:13​ – Getting a hold of Kurt and Mobile Insurance

31:22​ – Conclusion

SUBSCRIBE TO PASSIVE MOBILE HOME PARK INVESTING PODCAST YOUTUBE CHANNEL https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy9uI3KGQmFgABsr9lUtRTQ

Links & Mentions from This Episode:

Mobile Insurance Website: https://www.mobileagency.com/

Mobile Insurance Phone Number: 1-800-458-4320

Kurt Kelley Phone Number: 281-460-8384

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/PassiveMHPin…

Andrew Keel Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/passivemhpi…

Twitter: @MHPinvestors


TRANSCRIPT

Andrew: Welcome to the Passive Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast. This is your host Andrew Keel and today, we have an amazing gassed in Mr. Kurt Kelley. Kurt is the president at Mobile Insurance and has been with them since 1996. Mobile Insurance has been running as a family business since ‘91 and is the largest provider of insurance products to the manufactured housing industry in the nation. Kurt is also the founder and publisher of the Manufactured Housing Review, an industry publication dedicated to manufactured housing industry professionals. He is the past chairman and board member of the Texas Manufactured Housing Association.

He’s also the co-founder and managing member of the American Insurance Alliance, an association of manufactured housing specialty insurance agencies with a total premium volume in excess of $180 million. Kurt is a real estate owner and an active manager including investments in mobile home communities. He is also the managing member of Expert Climate Control which is a commercial HVAC contractor in Texas.

Kurt, welcome to the show.

Kurt: Thanks for that long introduction. I almost fell asleep now hearing that stuff.

Andrew: No way, man. We’re happy to have you here. Maybe you can start out by telling us your story and how you got into manufactured housing insurance of all niches.

Kurt: I’ll give a quick story on Mobile Insurance. Mobile Insurance was owned by General Electric in the early 90s, back when General Electric was the 21st of the mobile home industry, and did most of the financing. General Electric, at one point in time, decided to get out of business completely. It just exited overnight. They ended up and my stepfather was working for them. He ended up buying what little chunk there was of mobile insurance, which was just a monogram at that time.

My mom and stepfather started calling the mobile home parks then. At the time, I was working as a lawyer in a small town and they’d ask me to come and join them a couple of times. Finally, after some years, they wanted to retire and wanted me to come to join them and buy the agency from them. At just the last time, I just finished 2-week long trials of divorce cases. If you ever want to have a miserable life become a divorce lawyer and get involved with human beings at the worst, lowest part of their life. That’s what I was doing.

At the end of that two weeks, they called me on that Friday evening and said, hey, let me try to talk you into it one more time. Before he started talking, I said yes.

Andrew: Easy sale.

Kurt: Yeah. That’s the story. I’m a refugee from divorce law.

Andrew: Wow. I did not know that. I learned something new. Kurt, we’ll just dive right in here. What are the most important things that passive investors need to look out for when investing in mobile home parks? What are the items that are scariest and provide the most liability?

Kurt: Okay. I want to focus on something passive. If I was a passive investor, looking at mobile home parks, I would be less interested in mobile home parks with high vacancy rates because that’s a lot of work bringing in homes, selling homes, renting homes, filling them up. Two, I’d be really worried about communities with a lot of park-owned homes with a lot of deferred maintenance.

Passive investors are not as good as maybe people like you that have a lot of connections or are good with rehabbing homes, fixing homes, know what to do, what not to do. They’re not as good at that. That’s maybe two things to really watch for. The third one here’s a little trick, go to that mobile home park on a Wednesday at 10:00 AM. If you see a lot of working-aged men standing around doing nothing, it’s a red flag because working-aged men are like teenagers with too much time. It’s a bad recipe for issues, for just having a bad tenant base that just becomes difficult for someone to manage.

Andrew: I love that. Yeah, those are some great tips. Say you’re an active operator, for the active operators, what items present the most risk and have the most claims every year in mobile home parks?

Kurt: Sort of the same things even active operators. If you’re selling homes think about this, if you’re actually selling a house, that’s a great way to fill a park. It’s a great way to build equity and some of our best operators do exactly that. It’s also a lot of liability because you got to have a 40,000-pound object brought down the highway at 70 miles an hour that you’re going to own. They’re going to connect it to a couple of power sources. One with your touchy guys. When the other one gets loose in your house, everybody dies. They’re going to set it up on blocks. You got people crawling around underneath it. What could possibly go wrong?

That’s something a lot of people don’t think about. You’re involved in a business with a lot of heavy labor, heavy equipment, heavy moving. Then, just overall with your things to watch for. The worst thing I hate is when we have a client that has a problem that’s not insured. It’s a big problem.

Be careful about mobile home parks in low-lying areas, in 100-yard flood zones. Those are expensive to insure. It is so expensive that most people in those areas don’t insure them. They’d just say, well I’m just going to take that risk. Be real careful about that. You had mentioned to me what we talked about not so long ago, what are you doing with all the pandemic stuff? How do you manage that risk? The answer is, right now, there’s really no good way other than realizing it’s out there.

Insurance has not covered pandemics. The loss of income coverage requires some sort of physical damage to your property and pandemics don’t provide that. There was a Texas legislator recently that filed a bill that wanted to require all insurance in Texas to cover loss of income in pandemics. The insurance association guys were talking. I hear them talking about it. We’re going to talk to them and we can do some of that. But the estimated loss with the pandemic was about $300 billion a month across the country.

There’s a total of about $900 billion in total capital in insurance countrywide. If they’ve done that, they won’t have three months before all the insurance companies are bankrupt. There’s nothing less to pay any other claims. By the way, there’s no more insurance available. If you can’t get it insured, you can’t finance it. You can’t finance it, you can’t buy it. The world comes to a stop.

The answer was really going to be, one, we don’t know how to price it because we don’t know when do we start it—when the mayor says your town’s closed when the governor says the town’s closed when your president says your town’s closed. We don’t know who’s going to do it where. What I’m saying is probably some risk is just not a good fit for insurance.

Andrew: I totally agree with you. I was looking at a video on your website mobileagency.com and I saw a video you did on the top things that park owners could get sued for. I think one of them was with dogs. The second one was trampolines. The third one was the employees, issues with the employees. Maybe you could talk a little bit about those hazards and the real risks that they pose to mobile home park owners.

Kurt: I would say anytime your tenants are doing something that’s risky, you’re going to end up with that bill. You are going to end up with that ultimate liability. In most cases, most tenants don’t have enough assets or liability insurance to cover a major problem if it happens. What ends up happening is that you end up sitting at the defense table alongside the defending team. Let’s say one tenant rapes another tenant. You would think, I got no liability for that. I’m not for rape. There goes to say I’m not for sexual assault. We’ve got nothing that ever said we want […] partner. Our business plan is, or whatever.

But in those cases, we’ve seen jurors got, we sure felt sorry for the victim. We know the rapist doesn’t have anything and we know that Andrew is really, really rich because he owns real estate and he rents it out. What’s $2 million, $4 million, $5 million, $10 million against him? We’ll assign 30% liability to him and 30% of $10 million is $3 million. There you go. Now, you’re responsible for rape. I would say like with the dogs and I love dogs, in fact, my dog is sitting right there.

Andrew: I think I saw him walk by.

Kurt: But you got to be real careful attending dogs. You can’t control them. You don’t know if they’re trained. When they bite other people, that’s a problem. Trampolines are the same way. I love getting on trampolines. Those things are a lot of fun especially if you’ve had a couple of beers. But the problem is you can’t manage them. You can’t maintain them. You can’t tell who’s going to be on them. You can’t tell who’s going to be there at night. Even when healthy people flop off trampolines, they hit their heads and their spinal cords.

In today’s legal world, if you have a claim against yourself, involving damage to the brain or spinal cord, the judgment is whatever you got. It’s not at $500,000. It’s not $1 million. It’s whatever you got. That’s what the judgment is because I’ve heard the juror. I’ve heard the good plaintiff lawyers. It’s exactly what they’ll say. They’ll say, Andrew, I’m going to offer you right now $2 million for your ability to walk. Will you take it?

Andrew: No.

Kurt: What if I give you $5 million and we’ll put you in a quad and wheelchair. Would you take it? How about $50 million?

Andrew: No.

Kurt: That’s exactly the same. I would say the same. No, whatever it is, it’s not worth it. Whatever number that can magically appear in their head, that’s the number they decide. You can’t bite off risks, like dog bites. There’s a lot of great pit bulls out there. I know people with good pit bulls. They’re sweet dogs. But pit bulls account for 65% of all dog bite liability in the United States of America. As a park manager, you just have to stereotype that dog. You have to say, we can’t afford to have that dog in there at all.

Now, if they’ve got papers that say that’s a service animal or a support animal, they can supply all that information, that’s going to give you some protection if the problem happens. But the general rule is you can’t live with tenants creating obvious and open problems that you’re going to be dealing with.

Andrew: Definitely. Let’s see here, what’s the worst-case scenario. A lot of investors in the space always ask about the tornado or the hurricane that just destroys an entire mobile home community. Maybe you could shed some light on the insurance side of that risk and how operators can offset that.

Kurt: Okay, let’s talk about tornado and hurricane exposure. This is a good year to do it because I think last year we had multiple park owners that had significant damage with hurricanes. There are a few that were struck by tornadoes but nothing catastrophic. First of all, tornados are an easier risk to insure. It’s an easier risk to buy insurance for. They tend to have very small cones and very small areas. Even if they do total destruction, insurance companies can handle that pretty well.

The cone of destruction on hurricanes can be 70-80 miles wide, versus a tornado that can be 80 yards wide. Hurricanes are more tricky from that perspective and you got a lot fewer insurance companies interested in insuring in hurricane areas. The other problem with hurricanes is they have not only wind exposure, but they’ve also got a flood of exposure. That flood exposure is exceedingly expensive to insure. Those are issues.

Now let’s say I want to make sure my community is properly set up against tornado or hurricane wind exposure. I’ve got investors. It’s not just me. It’s my aunt. It’s Andrew Keel and it’s Kurt Kelley and they’re both throwing in $10,000 in this deal. They’re not going to be happy if I lose them up. What do you do, you can buy lots of income coverage, which you should, because it also includes something called extra expense coverage which will pay you to remove the debris of tenant-owned homes.

What you’ll find is even with tenants with insured homes, they get money for debris removal for their own homes, they never ever, ever pay for it. They just walk off. If you’ve got an 80s home in your park, all tenant-owned homes, and there is debris from all of them, the cost to remove that debris is $1000 to $3000 per home. You’ve got coverage for that. You also have extended liability coverage, lot income covered. Once the park is cleaned and reopened, your income coverage continues until you have time as a good manager to come in and refill that park with either rental homes or some sort of government grants they’re bringing in with people getting FEMA money to buy a nice down payment on a home.

You can do those things. The other thing I would say is if you’ve got the infrastructure in your community which is either a building of some sort or above-ground utility infrastructure, that will get destroyed often with those direct tornado hits. You might think, well that’s not likely to happen and if it does happen, it’s $40,000 or $50,000. I can live with that. But the problem is, lots of times, you’re getting that exact same deal at the same time. You’re out of money income. You’ve also spent money on cleanup. You’ve also spent money on everything else. Then someone lays a $50,000-bill on top of that. It becomes suffocating.

It’s not that expensive to insure. You can do it. We’ve got many examples of people that had bad tornado events and even bad hurricane events that have come out through the back end of it as good or better than they were. Maybe a better tenant base, better homes, better setup, better income, the mortgage is paid off. If you insure it right, it’s a manageable risk. There’s a lot of good reasons not to buy mobile home parks, but I would say tornado exposure is probably not one of them. Hurricane exposure, depending on if you’re in a flood zone or not, maybe.

Andrew: That’s great. Thank you for that. Let’s see here, on a typical mobile home park acquisition what are the insurance policies that you recommend that an operator have? What are the must-haves that every mobile home park should have on its real estate?

Kurt: Generally, you can buy what’s called a package insurance policy. But not always. It depends on the community. The packaging policy can include liability insurance, general liability which premises liability. If someone drowns on your property, if someone’s electrocuted on your property, if someone dies of carbon monoxide poisoning on your property, they slip and fall and break their neck, they fall into a septic system and drown which we had that happened this year—that covers that exposure which is probably the number one thing.

It also covers property exposures like your office building if you have that in the community. If you’ve got a big improvement on a warehouse, you got contents in there, and your loss of income coverage. If you can buy the loss of income coverage as part of a package, it’s generally fairly inexpensive. Maybe one-third of 1% of your income per year in most parts of the country away from the coast. That’s what you would start out.

I also like tenant discrimination coverage. We’re getting more of those claims where they won’t rent to me because of my race, my sex, my sexual practices, whatever they come up with. It’s not because they’re a convicted felon who raped seven kids. It’s because they were Irish and they got Notre Dame Football gear and you can’t stand Irish fans.

Andrew: What do you think about cyber liability? Is that something that you see a lot of claims on?

Kurt: Well, I would say this, when I started in the 90s in insurance, I think 95% of all theft were physical. I think we’re well past the point where most theft in the United States now is electronic. A big issue with community investors and real estate investors is you guys got a lot of cash. The thieves have figured that out. They figure out ways to do what they call electronic wire fraud transfer, electronic fraud transfer of money from your account.

They’ll basically mimic your account. They’ll call your banker. They’ll set up an email for your banker to wire them $50,000, $500,000, $700,000 from your account. It’ll look exactly as if you did it. If it’s your fault, not the banker’s fault but your fault that it happened and your system was hacked, it could be your loss, not the bank’s loss. That’s the cyber liability world now. You can buy that coverage in addition to coverage from people who hack in your system, steal all your tenants’ information, and now you’re going to send a notice to everybody, someone that hacks into your system and says, oh, by the way, we’re not going to bring up your system again until you send us $100,000.

That’s the second most prevalent claim, the cyber issues. You got people in there who just like to mess your stuff up. If you’ve got a computing system and you get the wrong software, it may be gone. It may just be lost. You can buy coverage to fix your software and even replace your hardware if that’s so messed up that it can’t be replaced.

Those policies are for mobile home park operators, starting at $1200 or $1500. I think it’s a good investment right now for anybody with either a very large community or multiple communities. I think it’s money well spent. I think it’s probably under-priced right now. It’s a good time to buy it. Although we’re seeing a lot of pressure now for getting that electronic wire fraud coverage because insurance companies have figured out that you guys are the exact target of those thieves because you guys have all done something miraculous. You’ve collected capital and saved money and now it’s in a bank account and makes you one of the very rare people in the world that have done that, and they like a chunk of it.

Andrew: That’s pretty scary. You’re trying to wire money in for closing or something and it’s very real. I’ve had some friends that have been compromised.

Kurt: There have been multiple people in our industry that lost six figures. Here’s a good tip for everybody on there. Call your banker today and say, you should never ever wire anything from any of my accounts if I’ve done it in writing unless I, or my vice president, or whoever you have designated, is sitting in front of you. That’s a good business practice. That’s a little bit hard on some people to do them every day. But you need to make sure you got very specific protocols if you get sat at that side at all.

Take my company for example. I’m the worst possible risk. One, I’ve got a ton of cash in my account. Two, it’s not mine. It’s the insurance company’s. I’ve collected Andrew’s money and I’ve put it in my account and I’m going to have to pay for the insurance company in 30 days. I’m really ticklish about that. We’ve got very specific protocols that have to be followed.

In the last two years, we’ve had two instances where someone’s contacted the bank, claiming to be my team, and wanted to transfer and wire money out. In both instances, the bank has called because of our demand that they do so to follow up and say why do you want to spend $50,000 to Bert Jones in Saskatchewan? We don’t. The answer is no.

Andrew: Yeah, I know. That’s a great tip. Let’s talk a little bit, Kurt, about park-owned homes. It’s the ugly duckling in the industry. A lot of park owners will put the park-owned homes in a separate LLC, and own the real estate in one LLC, and then a management company altogether as a separate LLC or separate S-Corp. Maybe you can talk about park-owned homes and how to shield some of that liability because it’s a necessary evil that a lot of park owners are forced to do until they can sell them off and make them tenant-owned homes.

Kurt: I think overall, putting park-owned homes in a separate entity once you get past maybe 10 homes. Maybe before that, it’s not worth it. There’s just not enough risk to justify another LLC, another set of books, another record overall. But after that, I think it’s probably a good idea.

Here’s what you really get with an LLC. Think of an LLC as a self-contained globe that if something goes wrong inside of it, the worst thing it does is it destroys everything in it and it implodes. But you don’t lose everything outside of it. We’ve got the LLC that owns the park-owned homes. I’ve got the LLC that owns the real estate. I’ve got an LLC that owns the management company. I’ve got my house, my other investments all over here.

The worst case that could happen to the LLC is you just lose in them. I really like that perspective. From an insurance perspective, we don’t really care if you own it in the same LLC or separate LLC, we can name them all in the same account. I think anybody that’s got multiple parks probably ought to have a management company that is owned separately from the real estate owning company or even a park-owned home company because the management company has these awful little assets. They’re really nasty to deal with park employees.

None of us would have any of them if we had any other viable option in the world. We would not have them. By the way, employment lawsuits are the number one civil category of lawsuits in the United States right now. Get it out of your real estate. In worst cases, let’s say, Kurt said something about the way I was dressed today and I’ve got a $10 million judgment against him. I’ve got that in a management company. I go alright, the management company is yours. You own it today, by the way, I’m out of it. I’m moving on.

I’m starting a management company tomorrow. We’ll reassign staff and we can do it. The same with park-owned homes. Here’s how the park-owned homes deal works. We get brain injury and spinal cord injury and carbon monoxide cases settled within policy limits because we go, okay, you can sue us. You can go for an excess judgment and you can own those 35 homes in our park. But if you own them tomorrow, you owe rent to our other entities in a matter of $400 per month per home starting tomorrow. We’re happy about that. We didn’t really like it that much anyway. You’ll own all that. You owe us all that. They’ll go, just hold on, we’ll just take the $2 million of insurance.

Andrew: That makes sense. With the park-owned homes, say you’re doing like a straight rental, do you need to have a separate bank account just for the park-owned home entity and collect the income through that entity and then pay the park out of that?

Kurt: Yeah you need to run them in separate little companies. It’s obviously the same ownership and management, but you need to have separate books, separate bank accounts. You probably have money going back and forth. If you don’t, you run the risk of a lawyer saying, it’s just a subterfuge. They didn’t even believe in their own company. They didn’t treat it as their own company. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. We’re going to disregard that entity.

It’s harder to do that than most people think it is, but you can have that happen if you don’t have your own tax ID number, bank account etcetera. But it’s pretty simple.

Andrew: Wonderful. What does the perfect mobile home park look like in your eyes as an insurance broker?

Kurt: Well, I’m going to answer that literally from my perspective. Here I go. I want to park, that’s going to be the most expensive there is possible to insure because that’s what I’m going to make my 12% on. I want you to buy a park in Chicago where everybody sues everybody for everything. I want you to have a ton of old used manufactured homes that have had no maintenance on them. I want some significant lack of occupancy issues, too. I want you to have your own water system in the area that’s known for bad water. That’s what I would say so.

Now, if you look at them, Andrew, he owns perspective. I want a real community. I don’t want any park-owned homes. I want 100% occupancy. I want no amenities. That part is cheap to insure. It’s easy to insure. It’s easy to manage, easy to operate. It’s also probably the most expensive one to buy. I’m guessing you guys would know that better than me because it’s a passive investment with a lot less risk.

Andrew: That is a great tip. We’ve been told amenities in communities like swimming pools and dog parks or a really nice playgrounds are nice to add. Could you maybe give us a tip on which amenities are also not going to make our insurance costs go through the roof?

Kurt: Swimming pools will cost you about $600 a year extra plus $300-$400 a month extra whatever the operating cost is. Swimming pools are probably the most expensive amenity and then one most likely to cost you a $1 million liability loss. Generally speaking, if anybody drowns for any reason in your swimming pool, it’s probably a policy limit. There’s just too many things that just have to be perfect for it not to be the case. We’ve got out a few of them but not much.

Dog parks is an evolving risk. Insurance companies don’t like evolving risks. They’re asking a lot of questions. They’re insuring them now. I don’t know why you would want to get people and dogs together because people and dogs, the dogs fighting and getting involved in the middle of them is a recipe for problem. I just rather have the dogs on leashes, walking around the park, not around each other in a dog park. Playgrounds, I would say that’s the best thing. They look nice. They’re low maintenance. If you have decent equipment, they’re inexpensive to insure.

In fact, I’ve argued with my insurance companies. We should charge nothing for a playground because that means now the kids are on the playground and not in the streets. As a consequence, they only charge a couple of $100 a year for them. That would be my choice if I was a community owner. I want to put a nice amenity that looks nice.

Andrew: Alright, the playground is the winner. Kurt, last question for you. What’s your final piece of advice for investors out there interested in mobile home parks?

Kurt: Do your research. Buy the property that fits you. Buy the car that fits you. Buy the motorcycle that fits you, the clothes that fit you. In my investment, I invest through other people. I don’t have time to manage them. I would never have the ability or time to manage a park that had significant occupancy issues or a bunch of rental homes. That’s just out of my skill set, out of my time set.

There are other people I know. In fact, probably the most successful financially ones have all those problems and they manage them well and their return on equity is higher. They’re buying them at higher cap rates, selling them at lower cap rates. They’re doing much better, but they’re uniquely skilled people with knowledge. Buy what fits you. If you got a park in a flood zone or it’s got a pollution problem, I don’t think those are discounted to the extent that they should be to be viable investments. That’s what I see.

Andrew: That’s a great point. We were just under contract on a property that nobody knew about. The seller don’t even know that it was built on an old landfill. As we discovered this and talked to my friends who are our environmental engineer and talked to environmental attorneys, there’s just a ton of risk. If seven years from now, a little girl gets leukemia and somehow it’s tied back to the landfill. There’s a lot of risks out there. But everything comes back to making sure you have your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed and making sure your policy’s covering the risk you’re taking.

Kurt: That environmental risk can attach to you forever personally.

Andrew: Yeah.

Kurt: You could never get rid of it. It’s like catching herpes. You got it. No matter what happens 100 years down the line, you have a liability. I don’t have you buy it.

Andrew: We had to pass. Well Kurt, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. How can our listeners get a hold of you if they’d like to do so?

Kurt: Thanks, Andrew. I love being here. It’s always fun to see you and talk to you. Good to see we’re in the James Memorial when we’re at the dance together. You can reach us at mobileagency.com, 800-458-4320. Call me on my cellphone if you got it. If you’re looking at mobile parks or thinking about it, and you’re worried about it, give me a call. We’ll walk through it and I could say if the risks match, 281-460-8384. Just put Kurt Kelley, problem-mobile home park. I had nothing but bad news.

Andrew never calls me and says, today, we collected all of our rent. Everything went perfect. The secretary came in and gave me a pat on the shoulder and said, man you’re smart, and left. I never get that phone call.

Andrew: Kurt, you and I probably talk a handful of times every year. I really appreciate your willingness to share and just shed light on the insurance side of things and making sure we’re covered. Thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. That’s it for today, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in.

https://keelteam.com

Andrew is a passionate commercial real estate investor, husband, father and fitness fanatic. His specialty is in acquiring and operating manufactured housing communities. Visit AndrewKeel.com for more details on Andrew's story.


Keel Team provides unique opportunities for passive investors to enter the mobile home park asset class without having to deal with the headaches of tenants, toilets or trash.

DISCLAIMER:

Contacting us does not entitle you to purchase, or to participate in any current or future offering of, securities by us and/or our affiliates. We are not offering to sell you securities by providing you with an opportunity to contact us. All of our and our affiliates’ securities offerings are done through private placements, and participation in those offerings is restricted to persons with whom we have a prior, established business relationship and who meet applicable investor standards.