Residents of two Roaring Fork Valley mobile home parks submitted offers to buy them on Friday in what could be the start of a weekslong negotiating process.
The owner of the parks, Park City-based Investment Property Group, has seven calendar days (though the Fourth of July holiday may impact that timeline) to respond to the offer. The owner can either accept it and kick off a 45-day due diligence period or reject it and stipulate what terms and conditions must be included in a subsequent offer to accept it.
Aspen-Basalt and Mountain Valley mobile home parks are pursuing a resident-owned community ownership model for their respective parks in which a cooperative of residents own the land on which the manufactured homes sit.
They submitted offers with the assistance of Boulder-based nonprofit Thistle and financing from ROC USA Capital. Aspen-Basalt’s price is $26.5 million and Mountain Valley’s is $15.5 million, totaling $42 million, based on an offer on the table from a Dallas-based investment group that has not publicly confirmed its interest.
Tim Townsend, ROC program director with Thistle, said the offers largely meet the terms dictated in the existing offer. If the owners reject the offers, the residents still have until 120 days since the last notice, Aug. 7, to submit offers that the owners must consider “in good faith.”
It is possible that the owner could accept one offer and not the other. Local governments and private community partners have pledged $12.6 million toward the residents’ purchase, which will bring down the respective mortgages.
Thistle estimates that they’ll need $20 million between the parks to keep lot payments close to what the parks’ averages are now, and fundraising efforts will continue.
Antonio Martinez, an Aspen-Basalt park resident and cooperative board member, said the mood in the park has shifted from anxiety to hopeful anticipation.
“We’re feeling better than we did at that first meeting,” he said, referencing the first community meeting by the playground in the park just a couple of weeks after their first notice.
Meanwhile, IPG notified at least three Aspen-Basalt park residents on June 23 about an incoming rent increase. One of the notices says the resident will face an approximate $60 rental increase starting in September, bringing the lot rent to over $1,600.
Maria Romero, a Mountain Valley park resident and member of their cooperative board, said she has not heard of any of her neighbors receiving a rental increase notice. Their most recent increase was in April, she said, and concurred that newer residents have a higher base rent than residents who have lived in the park for years.
The attorney representing IPG in the sale did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
A real-life example
Nicholas Salerno, the chief program officer of ROC USA, spoke at Ideas Fest on Sunday during a discussion on “Designing the Ownership Economy: A New Vision for Work, Wealth and Democracy.”
He joined Phil Reeves, managing partner of Apis and Heritage Capital Partners, a private credit fund that finances the conversion of privately held businesses to employee ownership, and Jack Moriarty, the executive director of Lafayette Square Institute, the nonprofit data analytics and public policy platform arm of the investment platform Lafayette Square.
The three discussed the concept of ownership in today’s economic and political landscape in relation to the workforce and the housing market. Facilitating ownership for those facing economic insecurity and inequality translates is a market and societal benefit, they said.
One of the biggest issues preventing that from happening is a lack of access to capital beyond the individual, Moriarty said, but the American response to the Great Depression and the creation of Federal Housing Administration loans, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and government-sponsored enterprise juggernauts Federal National Mortgage Association, Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation and Government National Mortgage Association, or Ginnie Mae — also known as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae.
“We created a broad, deep, liquid secondary market that we all now take for granted,” Moriarty said. “The idea that we need to promote and support broad-based home ownership in America, we created the financing conditions for that to be possible.”
Reeves said employee-ownership models translate to value creation within the business when the employees have a stake in the profitability and performance.
“It takes people doing that at an individual level, day in and day out, on small little things. And employee ownership actually does that,” he said. “It’s obviously a net benefit for us, for our investors, but it also makes the share price go up for [the employee owners].”
For Salerno, he said that manifests in civic engagement for mobile home parks under the ROC USA model because it starts at the park with neighbors electing a board and deciding how to reinvest into their neighborhoods.
“We’ve seen residents run for mayor. We have them sitting on state legislative committees,” Salerno said. “We have them speaking on behalf of other residents in other communities where they don’t have the same opportunity, and they’re fighting for their rights as well.”
Salerno invited two Aspen-Basalt park residents to speak during the panel.
Lorena Vargas said this is the residents’ only shot for ownership and they won’t let it go to waste.
“If we were to get displaced, which historically has happened in this valley, that will influence how and where we work, how we spend time with our families, where we go to school, where our children will go to school,” she said. “It would disbalance this whole valley.”
Martinez stressed that the residents in the parks are the local workforce.
“We’re all not only losing residents, we’re also losing essential workers that have been [keeping] Aspen running,” he said. “We’re talking housekeepers, construction workers, cooks, teachers, bank tellers and whatnot. There’s many professions in our small community.”
After the talk, Salerno told the Aspen Daily News that what’s happening with these two parks is emblematic of national trends in mobile home park sales.
“It’s very similar in the sense that we’re needing to identify public subsidies to lower the cost of these communities, because land’s not getting any cheaper,” he said. “Because of the market changes, there’s more competition. Through the resale of these communities, it’s only increasing the value of it, which is making the purchase of these communities more expensive.”
He said he’s seen governmental entities start setting aside funding for preserving this type of housing to retain local workforces.
Pitkin County has its new affordable housing property tax revenue fund and many municipalities have affordable housing funds or bond funding earmarked for affordable housing, but the pressure extends far beyond mobile home parks.
