“...a mobile home park is a little bit different than your standard real estate investment...You want the tenants to own their homes, and you're just renting the lot, which means lower expense ratios, and less hassle for various things.” - Derek Vickers

Tune in to my interview with guest speaker Derek Vickers, CEO of Vicktory Real Estate Group. Derek owns and manages 38 mobile home parks in the United States!

Hear his story of how he moved to Florida with $300 in his pocket and a dream, and grew to nearly 2,000 lots in less than 3 years:

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Connect with Derek:

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With every episode of Fierce Feminine Finance, I like to empower you with a POWERFUL free resource that goes with the episode which you can implement right away to create some of the same results, if not better, in your business.

This week, since we are talking about buying mobile home parks as investment properties, I put together an Ultimate Guide to Finding Funding so you know the best ways to raise money for your first property!

After going through this free PDF guide you will be able to choose a strategy that will help you secure funding for investment properties without risking your own savings or personal credit.

You can download it right away by clicking here or on the photo above 👆

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Interview Transcript

Sarah: Hello, everybody. My name is Sarah Nicole Nadler, I'm a money coach for business women. And today I have on the show a very special guest.

This is Derek Vickers. He is the CEO of Vicktory Real Estate Group. And I am so excited because he has a topic we are very excited about, which is passive income, and specifically how to actually become financially free using mobile home park investing.

Which Derek, correct me if I'm wrong, you moved to Florida, with just $300 in your pocket. And in less than three years, you had 38 mobile home parks and over 2000 individual lots, is that correct?

Derek: Well, yeah, it's partially correct...so I moved, I did move to Florida in 2012, with $300 in my pocket, but I didn't get started in mobile home park investing until 2020. But I did build the portfolio starting in September of 2020.

Sarah: So we want to know all about how you did that. Now, I'm gonna let you tell us a little bit about you. So Derek, go ahead and take it away. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your business.

Derek: We buy mobile home parks in the southeast, and specifically in the state of Florida. And essentially, a mobile home park is a little bit different than your standard real estate investment.

Because the idea of where you want to get to is that you want the tenants to own their homes, and you're just renting the lot, which means lower expense ratios, less hassle for various things.

And so we'll buy properties that have been neglected, they've been mismanaged, they're a mess.

They're a complete disaster, the counties and cities hate them. And we actually go back in and bring them back to life by paving the roads, putting new lights in, you know, enforcing rules.

So people can't have six cars on jacks in their yard, they have junk all over in front of their house. And so we'll take a property that would probably be better off being scraped and built, like an industrial or storage complex on top of it, which means less affordable housing. And we actually bring, instead of doing that we actually go in and revive the property so people can have an affordable, clean, safe place to live, because there's a big lack of that now. And that's one of our purposes is that we go in and turn these properties around.

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Sarah: How cool is that? So we had quite a few questions come in from listeners before we even it was like two weeks before we even went live. We had questions pouring in wanting to ask Derek things. So I'm going to just dive right into some of these questions. Because they're probably the same questions I would have asked you Derek, the first one was, how did you find your first property? And alongside that, how did you finance the first property?

Derek: Yeah, so great question. So the first property you know, I'm a big believer is that if you're putting action, and you know much, much intention out into whatever the universe, whatever you want to call it, like you just pull good things in.

And so in 2020, I had a insurance business of about 100 salespeople COVID tank that. And basically our revenue went to like nothing, I always wanted to get investing in real estate.

And so long story short, I found mobile home park investing. I liked that because of various things that we can get into. But I just started cold calling mobile home park owners I had done that in the insurance business. So picking up the phone and calling someone and communicating with them was not something that I was apprehensive to doing.

I found the list in Florida and started cold calling people. And I'd actually met a guy who sort of acted like a mentor who is now one of my business partners. He had actually owned some mobile home parks before. And so I started sending him deals because I was finding stuff I was driving deals.

And, you know, I think he saw the fire that I had.

I was like, I'm getting into this asset class.

And so we've been looking at some properties and he calls me one day.

And he's like, "Hey, man, my, my operating partner backed out. I got this deal. I'm closing on it and seven or 10 days or something. Do you want it?"

And I'm like, "I'll call you back."

But it was dumb of me to even wait. I called him back.

I [told myself], Oh, you're an idiot. Just call him back. You want to get into this business. This is your chance.

And so he needed me as an operating partner, and so I got into that deal with no money.

And that deal, we actually didn't finance it through a bank, it was actually a cash deal because this deal was a disaster. And you can probably look at some of my posts that I've had about this deal, but it was a mess. And no bank was ever going to touch it was $425,000.

He and another partner paid cash. And I got 20% of the deal just for going in knocking on doors, doing the dirty work, going and selling homes. I was actually in a suit every day, and then I had to get out of the suit and get into like clothes, there's not gonna go to a trailer park in the suit. And I was chasing the homeless people out of the vacant homes and units. And you know, we can get into that more. But that's first deal was cash. And I found it because I was really outflowing a lot making a lot of things happen. And then that deal just kind of fell in my lap.

To hear the rest of my interview with Derek Vickers, watch the video!