Should You Sell Your Florida Mobile Home Park in 2026?
Here's my honest read, and then I'll show you the reasoning. For a lot of Florida park owners, 2026 is a good year to sell, because the buyers came back this year while none of the things that make running an older park harder actually eased. That gap, motivated buyers on one side and the same daily grind on the other, is the whole reason I'd tell many owners to at least run the numbers now instead of next year.
I sell mobile home parks in Florida for a living, so most of my week is spent on the phone with owners talking through exactly this. Let me walk you through it the way I would on a call.
The buyers are back, and it's not a fluke
For a couple of years the market sat in a standoff. Sellers wanted 2021 prices, buyers wanted a discount for higher interest rates, and not much traded. That logjam broke. Park sales volume in the first half of last year jumped about 66 percent over the same stretch the year before, according to industry transaction data. When rates settled down, the money that had been sitting on the sidelines came off it.
And it's serious money. Institutional and private-equity buyers were roughly half of all park transaction volume last year, up from under a third a few years ago when the buyers were mostly private individuals. The big, well-capitalized players are back on offense. That matters to you because those buyers set the top of the market, and when they're active, the whole pricing conversation firms up.
Why parks specifically are drawing buyers
Parks have a reputation among investors as a recession-resistant asset, and the numbers back the reputation. One industry dataset pegged manufactured-housing loan delinquency at about 1.4 percent recently, against roughly 6 percent for apartments and far higher for office and retail. When a tenant owns the home and only rents the land, they don't walk away easily, and that stickiness shows up as steady collections.
Florida makes it better. Park occupancy in the state has been running around 96 percent, and you effectively can't build new parks anymore because of zoning, so the supply is fixed while people keep moving here. Buyers know all of this. It's why a well-run Florida park gets attention that a lot of other property types don't right now.
But be honest about what you own
Here's where I slow owners down. The rosy national numbers describe a market that might not be your park. A lot of what I sell is older, park-owned-home communities in secondary and tertiary Florida markets, and those trade differently than the institutional-grade, tenant-owned, city-utility parks that drag the published averages up. National median price per lot actually fell about 11 percent recently. So the headline says "record demand" and your reality might say "buyers are careful." Both are true at once. Pricing your park means knowing which story is yours.
The value of your park comes down to lot-rent income, real occupancy, who owns the homes, and your utilities, not a number you saw for a park three counties over. I ran a Sarasota 55-plus community, tenant-owned, strong lot rent, into the multiple millions. I've also sold a small park-owned community in Lake City in the low six hundreds. Same asset class, wildly different math, because the fundamentals were different. Yours has its own number, and it's knowable.
Who should probably hold
Not everyone should sell, and I'll be the first to say it. You're likely better off holding if your park is stabilized, your lot rents have room to grow toward the market, your infrastructure is sound, and you're not tired of running it. Lot rents in Florida have been climbing 5 to 11 percent a year in recent times, and if you've got city utilities and tenant-owned homes, you own the kind of park the big buyers will still be competing for in five years. Time is on your side there.
Who should seriously look at selling
Take a hard look if any of this sounds like you. You're carrying a lot of park-owned homes and you're tired of being a landlord to aging structures. Your infrastructure is on borrowed time, an old well, a septic field, or a private treatment plant that's one inspection away from a six-figure bill. You've owned for years and you're sitting on real equity from a low basis. Or you've got a loan with a balloon coming due, and you already know the bank isn't eager to refinance an older park-owned community.
That last one is the quiet clock. When cheap debt isn't available for your kind of park, and often it isn't, the choice becomes selling on your timing or scrambling on the lender's. I'd rather help you pick the moment than watch a maturity date pick it for you.
What I'd do first
Not list it. Price it. Those are different things, and skipping the second is how owners either leave money on the table or scare off every serious buyer with a number that can't be underwritten.
Run your real inputs, actual lot rent, true occupancy, how many homes you own versus your tenants, and your water and sewer setup, and see what the park earns and what a buyer would actually pay for that income today. Sometimes that number says sell. Sometimes it genuinely says hold, and I tell owners that all the time, because the fastest way to lose your trust is to push you to sell a park you should keep. Either way you'll be deciding with a real number instead of a hunch.
That's exactly what my valuation model does. It's built for these older Florida parks, the ones every generic online calculator gets wrong because it assumes you own an institutional community. Run yours through it and you'll have the honest number in a few minutes.