What Is My Florida Mobile Home Park Worth in 2026?

If you own an older mobile home park in Florida, one where you own most of the homes and they were built somewhere between 1970 and the mid-90s, your park is probably worth less per door than you hope and more in total than you fear. Both things are usually true, and I'll show you why. But first I need to clear up something, because most of what's written online about park values isn't about your park at all.

The internet is describing a different park than yours

Search "what is my mobile home park worth" and every article tells you the same thing. Lot rent is king. You're selling the dirt, not the homes. Park-owned homes are worthless to a buyer. Cap rates in the fives and sixes.

That's all true, for a certain kind of park. The nice ones. Tenant owns their own home, you own the land underneath, city water and sewer, paved roads, maybe two hundred lots. Those trade like gold and the REITs fight over them at tight cap rates. If that's your park, congratulations, and honestly you should call me because those are a joy to sell.

But that's not the park most Florida owners actually have, and it's not the park I mostly sell. Mine are older, I own the homes, single-wides from the Carter and Reagan and Clinton years, tenants renting the whole home from me, sometimes on a well, sometimes on septic, sometimes on a sewage plant I'd rather not think about. That park gets valued completely differently, and if you price it off those internet articles you'll be wrong in both directions.

Your park gets priced like an apartment complex, mostly

Here's the honest math on an older park-owned community. A buyer looks at it a lot like an apartment complex. Full rents, real expenses, a cap rate on the bottom line. Not the pure lot-rent model, because you're not running a pure lot-rent park. You're a landlord renting homes.

In my tertiary Florida markets, those homes rent in the $800 to $1,100 a month range, similar to a modest apartment. You carry landlord expenses to match, because you own the roofs and the plumbing and everything that breaks. A buyer runs that income, subtracts honest expenses at today's insurance and the tax bill they'll inherit after the sale, and puts a cap rate on it.

That cap rate is wider than an apartment's, and fairly so. The buyer is inheriting old homes that lose value every year like trucks instead of gaining it like real estate. They're inheriting tenants who turn over. And they're inheriting a financing headache I'll get to in a minute. For a clean older park with the price per door in a sensible place, I generally see cap rates land somewhere in the 8.5 to 10 percent range. Rougher parks go higher.

The ceiling nobody tells you about

Now the part that surprises owners the most. There's a cap on what buyers pay per door, and the cap rate math can't override it.

No matter how good your income looks on paper, a buyer isn't paying apartment prices per unit for aging mobile homes. Roughly speaking, older park-owned communities tend to run into resistance somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000 a door. I want to be careful here, because that's a soft anchor, not a law. I've seen rough parks trade higher and nicer situations fall lower, and honestly, when a park sells that I wasn't part of, I don't know the story behind the number, whether the buyer overpaid, whether there was seller financing sweetening it, whether something was going on I can't see from the outside. So take the per-door number as a gravity, not a rule. It pulls prices toward a range even when the cap rate wants to fly higher.

What that means in practice: your value is whatever's lower, the number the income and cap rate produce, or the number the price per door will bear. Owners get in trouble when they run a fat cap rate on strong home rents, get a huge number, and never sanity-check it against what buyers actually pay per unit for forty-year-old homes.

The strategy that can change your park's value

Here's where it gets interesting, and where a good broker earns their keep. There are two ways to own a park like yours, and they're worth very different things.

The first is what you're probably doing now. Own the homes, rent them out full, act as the landlord, fix the toilets. Steady income, but you're on the hook for everything, and a buyer prices in all that responsibility and all those aging homes.

The second is the one a lot of savvy park buyers are chasing, and it's why they might buy your park. They sell the homes back to the tenants with seller financing. Small down payment from the tenant, and now the tenant owns the home. The tenant fixes their own roof. The owner collects a note payment plus lot rent, and has shed almost all the landlord headaches. If the tenant walks away, the owner takes the home back and sells it to the next one. People in the business call this the closest thing to a triple-net park, no landlord responsibility, just payments coming in.

That conversion is a real lever on value. A buyer who sees a clear path from "tired landlord park" to "hands-off note-and-lot-rent park" will pay up for the upside. If you understand this before you sell, you can either capture some of that value yourself or at least market the park to the buyers who want it. This is exactly the kind of thing that never shows up in an online valuation calculator.

Why financing quietly sets your price

One more thing that shapes what your park sells for, and it happens behind the scenes. Banks don't want these older parks. The homes are old, the collateral makes lenders nervous, and a lot of conventional lenders simply won't touch a park-owned community from the 80s.

That thins your buyer pool, which affects price. In practice, my park deals close one of three ways. Cash. A 1031 buyer rolling gains out of another property. Or seller financing, where you hold the note yourself. Plenty of park sellers only sell because they're willing to hold paper, since they know a bank won't lend on it. When sellers do hold, competitive terms tend to look like 25 to 35 percent down, interest somewhere around 6.5 to 8 percent, on a shorter note with a balloon. Some go interest-only.

Not every seller wants to hold, and I get it. Some don't want to risk getting an old park back in worse shape after a foreclosure. That's a real consideration and we talk it through honestly. But if you're not open to any creative financing, you're fishing in a smaller pond of all-cash buyers, and a smaller pond means a lower price. My last park deal actually did get conventional bank financing, but the buyer also happened to own a manufactured-home dealership, which probably helped the bank get comfortable. That's not most buyers.

What I'd do first

Not list it. Price it, honestly, the way a buyer will. Run your real rents, your real occupancy, real expenses at today's insurance and tomorrow's reassessed taxes. Put a fair cap rate on it. Then sanity-check that number against what parks like yours actually fetch per door, and take the lower one. Then, and this is the part most owners skip, think about which buyer you're really selling to and whether the seller-financing conversion play makes your park worth more to the right person.

Sometimes that whole exercise says sell now, because parks are one of the few corners of real estate where sellers still have leverage and buyer demand is deep. Sometimes it says hold and keep collecting. Either way you'll know your real number instead of an internet number built for a park that isn't yours.

That's what my valuation model does. It runs the income approach the way I'd run it pricing your park for real, built for older Florida park-owned communities, not for the institutional parks every other calculator assumes you have. Takes a few minutes, and it'll get you a lot closer to the truth than a national average ever will.