Mom-and-Pop industry gives way to investors and publicly owned companies
By Namira Haris
NewsWorks Lab staff writer
Four national companies have purchased at least 30 manufactured home communities – worth an estimated $330 million – across six southwestern Pennsylvania counties, a NewsWorks Lab analysis of public records shows.
The companies are part of a national shift in an affordable housing industry once dominated by mom-and-pop owners but increasingly attracting private-equity investors and publicly traded corporations.
Locally, these investments have gone largely untracked – even by tax assessors, lawmakers and residents themselves.
“The logic of investing in the purchase of a manufactured home community is to make a return on investment, and that return comes from increasing lot rents,” said Esther Sullivan, a nonresident fellow at Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center who studies manufactured housing. “It’s just a fundamental part of the equation.”
It’s not that private equity firms specifically target manufactured housing in rural areas, said Erin Gaede, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies this industry.
“Private equity is targeting all sorts of housing,” she said.
Manufactured homes are disproportionately concentrated in rural communities, where they make up roughly 15% of the housing stock, and where more than half of all manufactured home residents live, Gaede said.
That concentration, combined with limited housing alternatives, makes residents of mobile homes a “captive population” with few other options, Gaede said.
Pennsylvania has roughly 2,288 manufactured home communities, according to a June 2023 Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia report.
The four companies that have invested across southwestern Pennsylvania are:
- UMH Properties, a publicly traded real estate investment trust, with 23 properties in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Somerset and Westmoreland counties;
- RHP Properties, the nation’s largest privately held manufactured home operator, with five properties in Allegheny and Washington counties;
- Castle Park Investments, a New York-based private equity firm, with at least one property in Allegheny County; and,
- COARE Communities LLC, a Miami-based manufactured home community operator led by Hansel Rodriguez, with at least one property in Butler County.
UMH is providing a much-needed service to meet a “dire need for affordable workforce housing” in the region, Sam Landy, CEO of UMH Properties, told NewsWorks Lab by email.
“Manufactured housing is the most affordable type of housing, and the only form built to a national (HUD) standard for quality and efficiency,” Landy said.
RHP has invested $4.5 million in infrastructure and improvements at its Pennsylvania properties and added overall housing for residents, Joel Brown, the company’s president and chief operating officer, said in an emailed statement.
“We have also expanded the supply of attainable housing in these communities by adding a total of 318 brand-new homes, representing a $30 million investment,” Brown said.
Officials at Castle Park Investments and COARE Communities could not be reached for comment.
Manufactured homes are built to one uniform standard under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, rather than the patchwork of local codes that govern site-built and even modular housing, said Rachel Siegel, senior officer on the Housing Policy Initiative at Pew Charitable Trusts. That allows manufacturers to build the same model for markets across state lines.
“It’s the only type of housing that has a federal building code,” Siegel said.
Top taxpayer
Westmoreland County tax assessor Camdon Porterfield said he noticed in April that UMH had become the top payer of property taxes with more than 900 mobile homes and 12 mobile home communities in Apollo, Belle Vernon, Export, Greensburg, Lower Burrell, Mount Pleasant, Ruffs Dale, and West Newton. A 13th UMH community, Pine Valley Estates, straddles the Westmoreland-Armstrong County line in Apollo, with some homes registered in each county.
Porterfield said the roughly 900 figure refers to individual home sites within UMH’s communities, not necessarily homes owned outright by the company. County records typically list an entire community under UMH’s name even when individual homes within it are owned by residents, he said.
The county has no way to distinguish which homes are company-owned rentals — held under the subsidiary UMH Rentals LLC — from those owned by residents, Porterfield said. Once a lease or financing arrangement ends and UMH takes title to a home, he said, that distinction simply isn’t something his office can track, regardless of which specific UMH entity holds it.
UMH has been gradually acquiring communities in the region for roughly 15 years, Porterfield said.
That’s part of a national growth strategy that the company, based in Freehold, New Jersey, said has more than tripled its portfolio since 2010.
“It’s not so much like this has been an avalanche,” Porterfield said. “This has been something that’s been years in the making.”
UMH’s tax payments “help support Westmoreland County, its fire and police departments, its teachers, its court system and parks,” spokesperson Angela Marriott said.
Who owns what?
Nearly every large mobile home operator incorporates each community as a separate entity, said Dan Vitek, a litigator at the Community Justice Project, a nonprofit law firm that represents people who can’t afford an attorney in civil cases addressing systemic economic injustice.
What frustrates residents’ day to day, in his experience, has less to do with the name on the deed and more to do with whether property management responds to problems. The bigger complication, he said, tends to fall on county and local code-enforcement officials trying to hold an owner accountable when it isn’t clear who to contact.
“In some cases, the residents have a hard time finding out who the actual owner is because of all the companies, the LLCs, that they put between themselves and the residents,” said Bob Besecker, a volunteer organizer with the Coalition of Manufactured Home Communities of Pennsylvania.
Besecker’s coalition — five years old and supported by two law firms working pro bono — represents residents in 169 communities across 31 Pennsylvania counties, covering about 27,000 adult residents, as well as roughly 665 resident representatives.
Gaede said the same pattern shows up nationally in her own research.
“There’s often multiple LLCs with the same addresses,” she said. “It’s very difficult to pinpoint who is the overarching entity of these parks, and that’s by design.”
UMH’s naming conventions are “a standard national business practice followed by every multi-location business and by insurers and lenders from coast-to-coast,”
Westmoreland County records show UMH owns holdings there assessed at more than $12.4 million, translating to a market value of more than $140 million.
The company ordered, installed and leased 55 additional units within its existing Westmoreland communities last year, Marriott said.
The company operates in the county under at least five different legal names.
One county record displays the company’s original, pre-2006 name, United Mobile Homes Inc – as owner of Port Royal Village in Rostraver Township.
The parent company’s current name, UMH Properties Inc., appears directly on other Westmoreland parcels such as Huntingdon Pointe in West Newton, Suburban Estates in Hempfield, Valley High in Ruffs Dale and Wellington Estates in Export.
UMH also owns properties through subsidiaries named for specific communities. Voyager Estates in Rostraver Township, for instance, is held by UMH PA Voyager Estates LLC, according to county records. Suburban Estates in Hempfield is owned by UMH DBA Suburban Estates.
Another subsidiary, UMH Rentals LLC, holds company-owned homes that UMH leases directly to residents. County records show the entity owns properties at Voyager Estates, Port Royal Village, Suburban Estates, Valley High, Huntingdon Pointe and Wellington Estates. The company says it owns roughly 11,200 rental homes nationwide, or about 41% of its total homesites.
RHP Properties, a private company based in Farmington Hills, Mich., also operates under several different names on its property records.
Its subsidiaries reflect the names of the communities it owns. Allegheny County property records show it owns Redwood Estates PA LLC in Oakdale and Virginia Hills PA LLC in Imperial. In Washington County, its companies are Washington Estates MHC LLC and Washington Estates II MHC LLC in Washington and South Park MHC LLC in Finleyville.
RHP acquired Redwood Estates, Virginia Hills, Washington Estates and Washington Estates II as part of a larger, 17-community purchase announced in 2019 — only four of which are in this region — Brown said. It purchased South Park in a separate transaction in September 2020, he added.
Castle Park & COARE
Castle Park Investments, a New York-based real estate private equity firm, formed a $500 million joint venture in 2023 to acquire manufactured housing communities, RV resorts and campgrounds nationally, according to a statement by its investment partner Newmark. That venture started with more than 700 existing home sites across Pennsylvania and Ohio, the statement said.
“Manufactured housing as an asset class is one of the only real
Castle Park Investment’s co-founder Brad Scott said the Newmark investment “facilitates our ability to provide affordable housing for years to come.”
Locally, the company owns Oakridge Heights in Oakdale, part of North Fayette Township in Allegheny County. It operates locally under the name Clear View Communities, according to its website.
County deed records show Castle Park bought the community for $3.7 million in October 2023. The title-holding entity, per North Fayette Township permit records, is Oakridge Heights MHP LLC.
A spokesman for Oakridge Heights did not respond to NewsWorks Lab’s request for comment.
Residents of Oak Springs, a manufactured home community in Cranberry Township, Butler County, learned in November 2023 that their longtime local owner had sold the property to COARE communities LLC, a Delaware-formed company headquartered in Miami. County records list the title-holding entity as Oak Springs MHP LLC, care of COARE Communities LLC.
COARE Communities did not respond to requests for comment.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of people living in Pennsylvania’s manufactured home communities. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s June 2023 report does not include a number of residents living in these communities.
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