They Own Their Homes, Investors Own the Land—Now, One Senator Is Asking Questions

Private equity and corporate investors have snapped up mobile home parks across the country, to the tune of nearly $9.4 billion in acquisitions in 2021 alone, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Affordable housing advocates say that the wave of investment is driving rent hikes and evictions in one of America’s last affordable paths to homeownership.

Now, Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, is demanding answers.

Hassan has launched a probe into some of the investment firms with the biggest stakes in New England mobile home parks, sending letters to six major players in the region. She’s asking them to turn over documentation showing how their business practices have affected park residents and how much profit those investments have generated.

“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.”

Behind Hassan’s questions is a growing concern: At least 27 mobile home parks in New England—more than 5,200 housing units—are now owned by private equity–backed companies, according to a database compiled by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and Manufactured Housing Action.

Her inquiry could be the first step in forcing those investors to account for what that ownership has meant for the people who live there.

How Wall Street moved into mobile home parks

Nearly 22 million Americans live in manufactured homes, and a large share of those are in mobile home communities. These parks have become one of the last remaining forms of naturally occurring affordable housing, or unsubsidized homes that are affordable because of low market rates.

​​In most of these communities, residents own their homes but rent the land underneath them. The individual lots, or “pads,” plus access to roads, water, sewer, and other shared infrastructure, are all controlled by a park owner. For decades, those owners were typically local mom-and-pop operators who kept lot rents relatively stable in exchange for steady, predictable cash flow.

That was the story at Friendly Village in Gorham, ME, for years. Longtime residents—many of them seniors on fixed incomes—chose the park because it was one of the few ways to afford a home in a tight local housing market.

But the very features that made Friendly Village and similar communities a lifeline for low- and middle-income households—stable occupancy, high costs to move, limited nearby alternatives—also made them attractive to investors. 

With the country short of 4 million housing units and with plenty of institutional capital looking for yield, mobile home parks have emerged as one of the steadiest income plays around. And last summer, an out-of-state developer put in an offer for Friendly Village, along with seven other mobile home parks spread across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York, for a combined $87.5 million.

It’s just one example of a shift happening across the country. 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. 

New England has increasingly reflected that trend. Hassan’s letter notes that one of the firms she’s targeting accounted for about 23% of manufactured housing community sales nationally in a recent period—a sign of just how concentrated ownership has become in the hands of a few big players.

Owning your home—but still getting evicted

Traditional homeowners who fall behind on a mortgage generally face a lengthy foreclosure process, with multiple chances to cure the default, seek assistance, or sell. Manufactured-home owners in land-lease communities, however, are usually governed by landlord-tenant law. That means that, despite often owning their home, if a resident misses their lot rent, they can be subject to a much faster eviction process.

The result is a system where people carry all the obligations of ownership (maintenance, insurance, even property taxes) but many of the vulnerabilities of renting—and fewer of the safeguards of either.

Florida offers a sobering example. Mobile home park residents in the Sunshine State faced an annual eviction rate of 1.5%—roughly three times the foreclosure rate for traditional homeowners. In some parts of the state, annual eviction rates in parks exceeded 6%, according to an analysis of more than 60,000 eviction filings in mobile home parks from 2012 to 2022 by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University and Shimberg Center for Housing Studies.

Eviction filings surged by roughly 40% in the months after a park was sold, suggesting that changes in ownership (like a sale to an institutional investor) are a major trigger for displacement.

Those cases span hundreds of parks, from coastal communities where land values are skyrocketing to inland regions where older residents have clustered in manufactured housing because it is one of the only options they can afford on fixed incomes.

“Speed is really a critical element here,” Jacob Haas, a senior research specialist at the Eviction Lab and co-author of the Florida report, told Realtor.com in July. The easier it is to file, the more likely landlords are to use the courts, even for relatively small arrears.

Past research, Haas noted, has found that adding friction to the eviction process by lengthening timelines or increasing filing fees can dramatically reduce eviction activity. When it is cheap and fast to file, as it is in Florida, owners are more inclined to treat eviction as a routine collections strategy rather than a last resort.

Haas said there can even be a “perverse incentive” for some park owners: If they evict a homeowner, they can often take control of the home itself, then either sell it to a new buyer or rent out both the unit and the pad to a new tenant at a higher total price.

For residents, that can mean losing every dime of equity they’d built in their home.

States and residents fill the vacuum

While Hassan’s probe is still in its early stages, some states have already tried to get ahead of the problem. In Maine, the fight at Friendly Village shows both the promise and the limits of this approach.

Under the state’s “opportunity to purchase” framework, residents of mobile home communities get a narrow window (about 60 days) to organize, form an association, and make a counteroffer in the event that their park is up for sale. It’s a tight deadline even under ideal conditions, and most communities start from a standstill without the legal entity, lawyer, and financing needed to close the deal.

In response to that pressure, Maine lawmakers approved a bill strengthening and clarifying residents’ right of first refusal. Building on the earlier law, the new protections are meant to ensure that when an owner receives an offer from an outside buyer, residents get a real, enforceable chance to match or beat it.

The law is modeled on statutes in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where similar protections have helped residents convert parks into resident-owned communities. The goal isn’t to block sales altogether, but to level the playing field so residents aren’t automatically outgunned by corporate buyers with deeper pockets and faster lawyers.

For Friendly Village, though, it still wasn’t enough. Residents organized a cooperative, lined up financing, and submitted multiple bids that met or exceeded the investor offer. The new owners responded that they wouldn’t consider anything below $29 million—about $7 million more than the price the investor group had paid for the entire eight-park package.

“It boils down to plain greed,” Dawn Beaulieu, board president of the Friendly Village Cooperative, told Maine Public.

That standoff underscores what Hassan’s probe could mean for the 22 million mobile home residents across the country. Her letters ask the firms to hand over detailed records on who actually owns the parks (including any shell companies), how their deals are financed, whether they use public funds or tax breaks, how much they charge in rent and fees, what they spend on maintenance and capital improvements, and when and why they decide to sell or redevelop communities.

The responses could provide one of the clearest looks yet at how investor-owned mobile home communities operate, and what that has meant for the residents who live there.