FRUITLAND PARK, Fla. – As residents of mobile home parks across Florida deal with skyrocketing rents, others have found a way to keep costs down: cooperative ownership.
While corporate landlords push monthly lot rental fees close to $1,000, one resident-owned community in Fruitland Park maintains rates hundreds of dollars lower.
Nancy Hurt, a three-decade resident of Harbor Oaks Homeowners Cooperative, Inc., only pays a $125 monthly maintenance fee, which includes trash collection, water service and yard maintenance.
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“Our maintenance fee does not go up and they manage to get income from different sources in the park, which allows us to pay the $125,” Hurt told News 6. One of those income sources includes dock rentals and boat trailer parking, since the community sits along Lake Griffin.
The cooperative model, established at Harbor Oaks in 1996, stands in stark contrast to corporate-owned parks where residents report dramatic rent increases.
“Resident-owned means that you control the park. You’re a shareholder and you control the park. No corporation comes and just takes over and runs you in the ground,” says resident Geno Moser, who specifically sought out a resident-owned community when moving to Central Florida over a decade ago.
“We knew that we wanted to go someplace where we would at least have something to say about the property that we lived on,” Moser said. “These people that go out here and rent from some big corporation, or they might find a park like this that actually is owned by the residents, but a lot of the residents get this wild idea: ‘We’ve been offered so much money for this park, we ought to sell it. Oh, we can go somewhere else and get us another place.’ You know what? You can’t go anywhere and find another place, you’ll pay five times more than what you ever thought you paid here.”
Mobile home park ownership models
Florida’s mobile home communities operate under three distinct models:
- Full-rental properties where companies own both homes and land
- Parks where residents own homes but lease land from corporate landlords
- Resident-owned cooperatives where homeowners collectively manage the community
[Mobile home residents in Central Florida face eviction risks as lot rents surge]
Cooperative advantages
More than 700 resident-owned communities exist across Florida, according to a News 6 investigation. These parks typically begin as traditional rental properties but transform when residents exercise their right of first refusal during a sale.
“Let’s say we have a mobile home park that has owner-renters in it and we’ve got 50 of them. The landlord wants to sell the park. The law protects the owner-renters by giving them the right of first refusal to purchase the park,” explained Betsy Barbieux, professional development coach, Florida CAM Schools LLC. Barbieux trains managers of condominiums, co-ops and homeowners associations.
Financial benefits
At Harbor Oaks, even non-shareholders who rent within the community pay significantly less than market rates.
Paul Nowak, president of the Harbor Oaks Homeowners Association, told News 6 non-shareholders pay around $400 a month and that includes the $125 maintenance charge.
[Central Florida mobile home residents priced out as lot rents skyrocket]
Nowak used to pay lot rent in two other mobile home parks before moving to Harbor Oaks.
“The residents kind of have control over the direction that the co-op goes in because we have a board of directors, our board of directors is nine,” Nowak told News 6. “All of the shareholders elect the board members to actually look out for the park and do their due diligence as far as maintaining the park, protecting the assets and enforcing our governing documents.”
“They’re not here to make money. They’re here to pay bills and so you have a more conservative approach to the budget,” Barbieux said.
News 6 asked Barbieux what she recommends prospective mobile home residents do during their search. She gave us this answer:
“Just ask a lot of questions and be sure. They should very definitely consider a co-op rather than a rental park. I mean, you would be better off in the first scenario where you’re renting the mobile home and the land, and if the rent goes up, then you can move.”