Tea Leaves

Consider these statements:

• When the Meatpacking District was still the Meatpacking District, there was a place where you could drink for free, if you consented to being handcuffed to the bar; 

• Frank Rolfe says that owning a mobile home park is like owning a Waffle House where all your customers are chained to their seats; and,

• From now on, you will never think of one of the foregoing statements without thinking of the other.

Franks’ statement is an example of act in haste, repent at leisure.  It took him less than five seconds to utter it, and maybe thirty to enjoy the laugh that it got.  He has been back-pedaling it ever since.  He meant to say that turnover is low in the manufactured housing space.  Transaction costs are high and residents have pride of ownership in their homes.  People who live in manufactured housing communities have a greater stake in staying put than do apartment dwellers.  The quip has been taken out of context.  The academics, pundits, late-night talk show hosts and demagogues smell blood in the water, and they want at it.  John Oliver said that Frank’s course is a course in ‘how to be an asshole’.  I do not think that that is fair – but when eyeballs and short-term political gain are at stake, feggedabout rational discourse

I never went to the bar in the Meatpacking District – but I think there was a lot of acting in haste and repenting at leisure there, too.

Turnover is low in a mobile home park, but it does happen.  As a park owner, you set the ground rules for the community.  Your residents depend on you to keep good neighbors in and bad neighbors out.  Learning to read a potential resident application is an important part of the job.

Here are a few things you should consider when you read an application.  None is dispositive, but all should be put in the blender when you evaluate facts and circumstances:

• Age.  When I was twenty-two, three other young people and I rented a home in eastern Connecticut.  We were shitty tenants.  I caught a garbage bag-full of blue fish and gutted them on the porch.  Kids from the school where some of us taught egged the house on Halloween.  We did not mow the lawn until the owner, distraught and angry, asked us to do so eight months into the lease.

If an applicant is under thirty, subject them to heightened scrutiny to make sure that he or she is not like me and my three friends.

• References  Applicantions should list references from three people who are unrelated to the applicant.  The best references come from people who have supervised the applicant, such as employers, teachers, coaches, commanding officers, co-workers and clergy.  If an applicant understands this and offers up, sua sponte, the names of three unrelated authority figures who can vouch for him or her, that is the sign of a strong applicant.  It doesn’t even matter what the references say in a case like this; the mere fact that the applicant can list, say, a work supervisor, a colleague and a rabbi or former soccer coach who like her is a very positive fact.

Some people give friends as references.  The substance of what a friend says about a friend is not useful.  However, the way they say it can be a good indication of the strength of the applicant.  A person who has friends who are well-spoken, responsive, sensible and polite is more likely to be a good resident than someone who hangs with people who do not return calls, badmouth former landlords or bosses, or are hostile to reference seekers.

If an applicant gives his mother as a reference, ding him.

• Voice Mail  Voice mails with outgoing messages are now the exception rather than the rule.  They don’t make as much sense as they did before the days of caller ID. People change phones and SIM cards so often that they can’t be bothered to update them.  And the kids never use voice anyhow.  My younger son – the pain-in-the-ass, the one who rides me for owning mobile home parks – has an outgoing message that says, “Why are you fucking using voice mail?”

That son reminds me of myself.  It saddens me, but it is a fact of life.

The way an applicant and his or her references set up their voice mail is a reliable indicator of how the applicant will communicate with park management and their neighbors.  If a reference has a voice mail with an outgoing greeting that states the reference’s name and a statement such as, ‘Please say your name, the time of your call and a brief message’, that is a positive factor.  If the voice mail simply states, “You have called three one five two oh seven three oh seven six.  Please leave a message”, that is neutral.  A voice mail that has not been set up, or a voice mail that is full, is a red flag.

• Vehicles  A car with a tidy interior is indicative of a person who keeps a tidy home.

• Net Income  The rule of thumb is that an applicant’s rent should be no more than a third of income.  But that’s gross income.  What’s important is net income.  Ask an applicant for pay stubs or proof of SSI payments, but also look at what they spend in fixed costs each month.  Do they have car payments?  Alimony, child support, insurance, student debt?  Credit cards, chattel loans, medical debt?  Cable bills, cell phone bills, sick relatives?  You are at the bottom of the capital stack. Residents will pay you last, because your remedies are inefficient and slow.  Make sure that the line in front of you is short.

If there is a hell, I think that it is populated by politicians who dump on people like me.  But if the late-night talk-show hosts and demagogue politicians are right, it is populated by park owners.  In that alternate reality, you can see me and people like me in an enormous Waffle House, chained to the tables, force-fed an infinite regression of waffles, Johnny-cakes, and Karo syrup.  You can see Frank Rolfe chained to the bar at a mock-up of a Meatpacking leather joint being savaged by the likes of John Oliver, James Skoufis, and Esther Sullivan. And you can see an enormous clock on the wall, ticking down the minutes. Because eternity is a very, very long time – particularly near the end.

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