We have bought ten mobile home communities. Every one of them started with a request for records, and in most cases what came back was a spreadsheet somebody had built by hand, a stack of bank statements, and a P&L that did not agree with either.
That is not unusual and it is not disqualifying. Deals close anyway. But every gap in the records has the same effect: it moves risk from the seller to the buyer, and the buyer prices that risk. Not out of malice — because they have to.
Here is what actually gets asked for, from the side of the table that asks.
The rent roll, and whether it agrees with anything
The first document requested and the first one that usually fails. A buyer wants a current rent roll showing every pad, who occupies it, what they pay, when they moved in, and whether the home on that pad belongs to the tenant or to you.
Then they want to tie the total of that rent roll to the revenue on your P&L, month by month. When the two do not reconcile — and they very often do not — the question is no longer about the difference. It is about which of the two documents is real.
A rent roll that ties to the general ledger every month is the single most persuasive document a park owner can hand over. It is also the one most likely to be assembled the week of the request, from memory, under pressure.
Trailing twelve months, by month, not by year
An annual figure hides everything a buyer needs to see. They want the last twelve months laid out month by month, because that is the only way to see seasonality, a collections problem, a one-off, or a step change in occupancy.
It is also how they catch a P&L that has been smoothed. If your utility expense is identical every month, either you are estimating or somebody is booking an average. Both invite the same follow-up question.
Lot rent separated from everything else
This is the one that moves the price, and it is the whole argument of why a park P&L is really three businesses stacked together.
A buyer capitalizes lot rent. They do not pay the same multiple for home sale proceeds, and they will discount or entirely exclude home finance interest depending on how the notes are structured. If your income statement shows one blended revenue line, their analyst separates it themselves — conservatively, because they cannot verify the split — and you lose the benefit of the doubt on every dollar they cannot categorize.
You will not be told this happened. It shows up as a lower offer.
The homes, individually
Which homes do you own. What did each cost. Which are rented, which are for sale, which are financed and to whom. What is the balance on each note, what rate, how many payments remain, and what is the payment history.
If homes were expensed rather than carried as assets, this list has to be rebuilt from invoices, and it will be rebuilt during diligence with a clock running. That is the worst possible time. We wrote about the fix in why the homes you buy are inventory, not an expense.
Utilities, gross both ways
What you are billed by the utility, and what you bill back to residents. Both numbers, separately, monthly.
Netting them tells a buyer nothing about your recovery rate, which is one of the few operating levers they can actually model. A park recovering 60 percent of its water cost and a park recovering 95 percent look identical on a netted P&L and are worth materially different amounts.
Capital spending, separated from repairs
Buyers want to know what was spent on the property and what it bought. Road work, pad construction, water and sewer lines, electrical upgrades — these are investments in the asset, and a park that has done them is worth more than one that has deferred them.
Bury that spending in Repairs and Maintenance and you have achieved two things at once: your historical earnings look worse than they were, and the buyer assumes the work was never done. You get charged twice for the same accounting choice.
Occupancy, defined precisely
Pad occupancy and home occupancy are different numbers and a buyer will ask for both. So is the distinction between a pad that is occupied, a pad that is vacant but usable, and a pad that has no working utility connection and cannot be filled without capital.
An operator who can produce those three counts separately is telling a buyer they understand their own property. An operator who reports one occupancy figure is asking to be discounted for the ambiguity.
The unglamorous ones
- Bank statements for the full period, to reconcile against the P&L
- Delinquency and collections history — not just the current balance, the pattern
- Concessions and free rent, which are usually invisible because nobody records what was never charged
- Property tax bills and insurance policies, actual documents
- Any license, permit or utility agreement that transfers with the property
- Leases, or an honest statement that some residents are month-to-month on nothing written
What all of this is really testing
A buyer is not grading your bookkeeping. They are trying to answer one question: how much of what you are telling me can I verify?
Everything verifiable gets underwritten at face value. Everything unverifiable gets a haircut, or a holdback, or a longer diligence period during which something else can go wrong. The records do not change what your park earns. They change how much of what it earns a buyer is willing to pay for.
And this cuts both ways. If you are buying rather than selling, a seller who cannot produce these documents is not necessarily hiding anything — but the gap between what they claim and what they can prove is where your margin lives.
When to fix it
Not during diligence. By then every reconstruction is a negotiation, every correction looks like a revision, and you are doing the work to a deadline set by the buyer.
Twelve months of clean, reconciled, properly separated books before you go to market is worth more than any improvement you can make to the property in the same period. It is also, unlike most things in this business, entirely within your control.
If you are thinking about selling in the next year or two
We keep the books for real estate operators, and we own manufactured housing ourselves — ten communities, 543 units. We have sat on the buying side of this list, which is a useful place to have learned it from.
Send us read-only access and we will tell you which of these documents your books can produce today, and what it would take to produce the rest.
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