The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: Co-op Ownership of Mobile Home Communities.” View the full webinar here.

From our experience, we had actually initially looked at the option of resident-ownership about 12 years ago, so…eight or 10 years prior to us becoming a resident-owned community. NeighborWorks Montana was the organization that assisted us with looking into that to begin with.

With their assistance, we were able to approach the owner at that time, who also owns two other mobile home communities within our community or within our town. And at that particular point in time, he had a price set, and we negotiated back and forth, and we were never able to reach an agreement.

“One of the biggest attributes to becoming a resident-owned community is figuring out what people within the community can bring to the table.”

For other reasons, one of the other communities was able to reach an agreement with the owner and purchased their community at that time. And then a few years down the road, the second community was able to become a resident-owned community. And then we were the third out of the group that the previous owner had to reach the negotiation table again in 2020.

Talking along the lines of other investors coming in, we were in a time crunch with getting on board, with getting our work together, making our final purchase. There were investors that had come in, and there were a couple of other communities in different locations of town that these investors came in and purchased. And since having done so, they have increased their lot rents enormously.

We really wanted to make sure that we weren’t the third one that the investors were able to purchase, and so we rushed through getting our community lined up to become a resident-owned community in order to be able to have that control over our lot rents and the other expensive improvements that the out-of-state investors wanted to implement.

So, timeliness was quite a factor for us. But in addition to that timeliness, trying to organize individuals with various skill sets and trying to determine who was going to be good for leadership. That’s probably one of the biggest attributes to becoming a resident-owned community is figuring out what people within the community can bring to the table to make sure that we’re moving forward as a community and doing so effectively.