Mobile Home Residents See Rents Soar Under New Owners

Manufactured housing communities—where residents often own their homes but lease the land beneath them—have traditionally been viewed as an affordable housing option.

However, private equity firms and large investment companies are increasingly acquiring mobile home communities and raising rents.

That’s what recently happened at Smoky Palms North in Clinton, TN, where rents more than doubled under new corporate ownership.

“They’re raising my rent from $275 to $650,” Lillian Goins told WATE. “Yes. I’m retired. I work two days part-time to make ends meet. I think this is absolutely ridiculous. I can understand when somebody bought it, you might go up $50 or $100, but $375—it’s just not in my budget.”

In its letter to residents, the new owner wrote: “We understand the $650 represents a significant change. … Please know that this adjustment was not made lightly. … It brings the rates closer to market levels, allowing us to maintain the community.”

Rent increases like these leave many mobile home owners in a difficult bind, since moving a mobile home typically costs between $4,000 and $10,000—an expense that is out of reach for many residents.

According to the Manufactured Housing Institute, approximately 22 million Americans reside in manufactured homes, a category that includes both mobile homes and modular construction.

Similar complaints across the country

Karla Beach from Texas recently found herself in a similar situation and shared her story on Facebook.

“Our mobile home park got sold to a corporation out of Dallas,” she wrote in February. “We are all senior citizens [in a] senior citizen park on a limited income. They raised our rent from $365 to $525 that none of us are going to be able to afford.”

She wrote, “I just don’t know what to do. We are barely making it right now, just [with] the bills we have to pay [and] the insurance and everything—I’m just out of my mind with worry.”

The following month, Beach listed her mobile home for sale on Facebook.

“Believe me—I don’t want to have to sell it. I have to. They raise[d] the rent and we can’t afford it,” she wrote.

In April, she wrote that she had moved to an apartment in a different town after being forced to sell her trailer because of the rent hike.

Corporate investors on the rise

In recent years, private equity firms and corporate investors have increasingly been acquiring mobile home parks nationwide, with purchases totaling roughly $9.4 billion in 2021 alone, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Institutional investors (including private equity funds and other large corporate buyers) accounted for only about 13% of manufactured housing community purchases in 2017–19, according to a March 2025 analysis by Genesis Community Loan Fund. By 2021, their share had jumped to roughly 23% of buyers nationwide. 

In December, Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, initiated an investigation into major investment firms with significant holdings in New England mobile home parks. As part of the probe, she sent letters to six prominent companies operating in the region.

She requested that the firms provide records detailing how their business practices have affected residents of those parks, as well as information on the profits generated from those investments.

“The thousands of Granite Staters and millions of Americans who live in mobile home parks deserve fair rent, safe living conditions, and the ability to protect themselves from mistreatment,” Hassan said in a statement to Realtor.com®. “As corporate investment firms buy up more and more of these communities, they still have a responsibility to meet these basic standards for each and every one of their residents.”

In March,  Hassan launched a confidential community survey for people living in manufactured housing communities, seeking firsthand accounts of rent increases, living conditions, and treatment by park owners.

That same month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren also sent letters to the largest corporate landlords in the single-family, multifamily, and manufactured housing sectors, requesting data on their business practices, landlord-tenant concerns, and rental housing portfolios.

“Lot rents in manufactured housing communities have increased by 45% over the last decade,” Warren, a Democrat, stated in a press release. “In Massachusetts, for example, the State Attorney General is suing an investor owner of a manufactured housing community for ‘unfair and retaliatory (lot) rent increases’ of over 77% since 2022, with a cumulative 133% hike in new lease lot rents.”

Mobile home pros and cons

According to a recent report from Realtor.com, the median mobile home listing price was just $141,450, compared with $410,000 for a single-family home.

The report found that manufactured housing can still help owners build wealth, even when the home is on a leased lot in a park.

Mobile homes without land appreciated 51.6% from 2019 to early 2026, compared with the median single-family home appreciation of 58.6%. Mobile homes with land, meanwhile, appreciated 70.1%, the report found.

“It is a good time to be a buyer in the mobile home market, but selling a mobile home can be difficult, especially if it does not sit on its own land, thus buyers cannot use a mortgage,” Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com and author of the report, said.

And owning a mobile home when you don’t own the land underneath it comes with additional risks.

Traditional homeowners who fall behind on their mortgage typically go through a drawn-out foreclosure process, which includes several opportunities to catch up on payments, request assistance, or sell the property. In contrast, owners of manufactured homes in land-lease communities are generally covered by landlord-tenant law. As a result, even though they often own their homes, missing lot rent can quickly lead to eviction through a far faster legal process.

Florida illustrates this disparity clearly. Residents of mobile home parks there experienced an annual eviction rate of about 1.5%—roughly triple the foreclosure rate for conventional homeowners. In certain regions, eviction rates in these communities climbed above 6% per year, based on an analysis of over 60,000 eviction filings in Florida mobile home parks between 2012 and 2022 conducted by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab and the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies.

The data also shows a sharp increase in displacement following ownership changes: Eviction filings rose by around 40% in the months after a park was sold, indicating that transitions in ownership—such as acquisitions by institutional investors—are a significant driver of resident displacement.