The Fundamentals of Manufactured Housing
Can you give us a sense of what manufactured housing is, who it serves, and why you find it so compelling as a sector?
Manufactured housing communities are a form of housing where the ownership of the land is bifurcated from the ownership of the homes. The basic structure is that the tenants own their homes, but they rent the land underneath. As community owners, we own the land, the roads, the utilities infrastructure, and we manage the community – it’s kind of like being an HOA.
What’s compelling about it is that it’s a hybrid home-ownership model that allows people with more moderate incomes to own their homes and start building equity at a lower starting price point. And from the community owner’s perspective, it’s a stable, tax efficient cash flow stream with a lot of inherent downside protection.
A lot of it also comes down to the fact that manufactured housing is the most affordable form of non-subsidized housing that exists in this country. Because of that, there's a big demand base.
First, there are people with low or moderate incomes who don't qualify for Section 8 housing or other subsidies. They still need a place to live. If they have a family with kids, it can be hard to find apartments that cater to them, and even if they do, those apartments are expensive. Manufactured home communities provide the experience of living in a standalone, single-family home, but at an affordable price point, and with potential opportunity to start building equity.
Then, in times of economic downturn or increasing unemployment, it's a form of housing that people downsize into to save money or reduce spending.
There is also literal downsizing, where people who are retired, empty nesters, or want less maintenance decide to sell their large single-family homes and buy a home in a manufactured home community instead. They can do this without sacrificing quality or experience (unlike moving from a house into an apartment), but they save money on their housing costs at the same time.
So, whether it’s a good economy or bad, there is sustained demand for this form of housing, at this price point.
And how does that translate to tenant behavior? Is the turnover profile materially different from traditional multifamily?
It's extremely resilient on that front. Apartments turn over frequently – roommates move out, people have life events – get married, have kids, need more space. But in manufactured housing, the home is more akin to a single-family home – the space is already there, and many of the residents are owners, so there is less of a transient mentality.
The data backs this up, though it's worth taking with a grain of salt. This isn't a very institutionalized asset class, so the data is both an opportunity and a flaw – there simply isn't a lot of it. But where data was tracked, studies have shown that the average tenure of a manufactured home tenant is 14 years. An apartment tenant, depending on the unit size and life stage, could be as few as one to three years. It's a compelling fundamental play, especially given the housing world we find ourselves in today.
How is the institutional world viewing the sector? Is it gaining legitimacy?
Manufactured housing is tracked as its own subsector in the NAREIT index, and institutional investors are definitely taking note. That said, it's hard to get into manufactured housing at an institutional level because of the size of the deals – it's not easy to do at scale, and it can be management intensive.
From a fundamentals perspective, the supply-demand dynamics are strong, the value proposition to tenants is attractive, and the macro trends and demographics all paint a very compelling picture. There are a lot of reasons to feel good about the sector beyond just institutional recognition.
Inside the Manufactured Housing Investment Landscape
The MHC investment space has been attracting more attention and capital. Is the deal environment getting crowded and where are you finding opportunities today?
Yes and no. There are, on some counts, about 43,000 manufactured home communities in the country, and only about 25% of them are institutionally owned. There are a lot of MH operators out there who are strong operationally, entrepreneurial, and very active in the industry, but they don't come from a finance, private equity, or institutional real estate background. They bring a variety of investment styles and strategies to the market, which keeps the competitive landscape pretty dynamic.
Then you have the institutions, firms like Apollo, MetLife, and other big private equity funds, each with their own platforms. Apollo has Inspire, Invesco has Homestead, and Brookfield has been in talks to buy Yes! Communities. Those are focused on larger or high-end, almost resort-like communities, which trade at very tight cap rates.
And then there's the opposite end of the spectrum, where the vast majority of manufactured home communities are still held by legacy, mom and pop owners.
Our first acquisition was purchased from a local attorney who bought the property from a client and just held it as an income-producing land bank for 14 years. Over those 14 years, he raised the lot rents a total of $20, from $165 to $185 per month, in a market where rents are $500+ today. Those opportunities still exist. It's definitely more crowded and the secret's out, but people have been playing in apartments, office buildings, and hotels for eons, and there's always opportunity.
How does buying a manufactured home community differ both from a transactional and operational standpoint?
From an acquisition standpoint, it's not very different. You put it under contract, get a due diligence period, and do a complete review of the property – both physical and financial. The difference is what you're actually diligencing. While you spend time on leases, it's equally or potentially even more important to understand what's underground. A lot of the utility systems are septic tanks or wells, and even if it's serviced by public utilities, the community owner is often responsible for maintaining that infrastructure.
As a community owner, what we really own are the utilities infrastructure, the roads, the driveways, and the lot leases. It's less to diligence, but in some cases, harder, as most communities, especially those sold by non-institutional owners, don't come with construction plans or drawings, so nobody knows where the water and sewer lines are underground. We bought a property where we actually hired a ground-penetrating radar technician to trace out the location of our utility lines.
Unlike other property types, manufactured home communities often prefer to keep tenants on month-to-month leases. You get comfortable with that because the tenants are inherently sticky, since they own the homes, and moving a home is genuinely difficult. Dismantling the home, trucking it to a new location, and setting it back up on a new lot costs anywhere from $7,000 to $20,000+, depending on the size of the home. That's a significant sum for someone paying $500 a month in rent.
Operationally, it's almost like managing an HOA. You're not making day-to-day repairs. If a toilet leaks, that's the tenant's responsibility. What you're managing is utilities delivery and community rules: no parking on the grass, no dogs running wild, making sure the tenants maintain the exteriors of their homes – things that impact curb appeal. You're enforcing community standards that protect the comfort of the residents and bring up the value of the whole property – as well as the value of the tenants’ homes located there.
Without physical buildings to improve, how do you think about value creation and your hold period?
For Cooper Square, these aren't fix-and-flip plays. We're looking at them as long-term holds, both from a fundamental investment perspective, believing in the supply-demand dynamics, and from a long-term cash flow generation standpoint. From a personal perspective, I also thought about what I want to own myself, and the idea of having passive income that's tax-efficient, and that continues to grow long-term, was really appealing to me.
Some deals are heavy value-adds with a lot of turnaround work in the early years, but we take those and manufacture them into institutional-quality assets. The cash-on-cash once stabilized is strong, and contrary to what some operators do, it doesn't require dramatically increasing rents on tenants. There are certain situations where rents have been so under-trended that outsized increases become necessary to keep the property viable, but the NOI growth year-over-year can be attractive even without meaningful rent bumps.
From Institutional to Entrepreneurial
Your career after CBS spanned restructuring and traditional real estate private equity across all asset classes. What drew you toward starting something of your own, and specifically in this sector?
My career has covered virtually every property type: multifamily, office, hotel, industrial, retail, student housing, debt. I've been well trained in how to think about investments, supply and demand, tenant behavior, macroeconomic trends, and how capital markets influence value. But I've always wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I think a lot of real estate people eventually do.
What attracted me to manufactured housing was feeling like the playbook on all the traditional asset classes was already written. Sure, there are different ways of executing, and certain groups can execute better than others, but there are only so many ways that you can renovate an apartment or redesign an office building. In niche sectors like this one, there's room to bring that institutional mindset, while also being creative, leveraging technology, and finding new ways to drive value that others might not see.
When did you know it was the right time to make that leap?
The timing crystallized when I was at Prospect Ridge and interest rates had just started spiking. I looked at how our pace of investment had slowed in the face of all the market uncertainty, and it felt like there may be a value reset ahead, which creates buying opportunity. On a personal level, it came down to whether I wanted to commit to the private equity world for another seven or eight years until the next potential promote realization, or if I do this now.
I'm fortunate to have a very supportive partner in life who's also in the industry. He really encouraged me to sit down and think about it, because I had this massive fear of not knowing if I had the right business plan, not knowing if it was going to be viable, and feeling as though I needed to replicate my income. What ultimately made it feel achievable was realizing that I wasn't trying to replace an entire private equity income, I really just needed to cover rent, food, and basic living costs. That made the whole endeavor feel a lot less daunting.
And so then it was: how do I know if it's succeeded or failed? And there's never really an answer to that question. But what I decided was: I'm going to commit X dollars, and no matter how I spend it, I'm allowing myself to use that amount of money toward launching this business. And as I approach the end of those dollars I'd allocated, I make a decision: do I re-up and allocate another X dollars, or do I call it quits? That takes the pressure off of needing to know that I'm going to succeed today, it puts the money issue in a box (at least temporarily), and it reframes the situation as: all right, I'm giving myself a runway to focus on this idea, I'm going to give it a shot, and I will re-evaluate once I am further down the road.
What advice would you give younger professionals who want to build toward something entrepreneurial? Do you specialize early, or build broadly first?
Do it, don’t wait. Maybe it's a side hustle for a while, or you give yourself a certain amount of time to try something and then reevaluate. You can always go back to having a corporate job, and most places will respect you more for trying to build something – even if it doesn’t work out. But you won’t always have the freedom to take this kind of risk – at some point, things like mortgages, school tuition, and life obligations in general will make it harder to walk away from that paycheck. Looking back on starting Cooper Square, I wish I had done it sooner. It's genuinely rewarding in a way that's hard to replicate.
On learning, I was fortunate to have had exposure to a broad variety of investors and investment strategies. Working with incredibly smart people gave me a foundational set of skills and the confidence to commit to a deal and execute with conviction. I also built a network of smart people, both peers and mentors, who have become my sounding boards, operational advisors, and potential investors. Even though they're doing completely different things from what I’m doing today, there are still a lot of synergies and referrals. That experience and network has been invaluable.
What are the key skills younger professionals need to develop early in their careers to succeed in real estate?
The two I'd highlight: first, learn how to execute a deal from cradle to grave, acquisition through disposition. Seeing how things play out in a business plan will inform how you underwrite your next acquisition, and gives you the knowledge to identify opportunities (or risks) that others might not see. I’ve learned that value creation doesn’t really happen on the “buy” – it happens in the execution and asset management of the deal. One of my former partners put it well: the moment you close an acquisition is when you sign yourself up to potentially lose all the equity you just committed. The real work starts there.
The second is the ability to be nimble. Nothing will play out the way you think it will. Real estate is not rocket science – a lot of it is basic logic, blocking and tackling, staying organized, and problem solving. But you have to roll with the punches, pivot as you learn more, and not let the fear of not having all the answers stop you from moving forward.
I like to ski, and the analogy that comes to mind is standing at the top of a steep, no-fall zone that you hadn’t planned to take, but it’s your only path down. It can be paralyzing, and trying to head downhill from that particular spot might feel impossible. But, if you just traverse across the hill a little bit in one direction or another, new turns reveal themselves, and every turn thereafter creates more confidence. So many of the deals I've done over my career were nothing like any deal I'd done before, and you figure it out. As long as you're diligent about asking questions and thoughtful about the risk you're taking, you will find a path forward, one step at a time, and then one day, you will look back and realize how much you learned and accomplished.
What Comes Next
When you sit for this interview in a few years, what would success look like for Cooper Square and what obstacles do you think you'll have had to overcome to get there?
Success would mean having a portfolio that’s meaningfully larger but also cohesive – communities that create operational synergies rather than just adding scale for scale’s sake. The biggest obstacle is getting there without compromising on quality or overpaying just to grow.
That’s why the thing I think about most right now is growth, specifically growing for the right reasons and in the right ways. We have a very lean team because we have very little fee income coming into the management company. Growing the portfolio would solve a lot of those constraints and create a virtuous circle. But I've seen a lot of operators acquire properties solely to build scale, and they end up with portfolios that don't work together, creating more burden and risk than synergy.
So, the questions I'm working through are: where do we grow, and what's our strategic advantage? There are a lot of people in this space competing for deals. Combining the core competencies we've built over the last few years and thinking about how they give us a competitive advantage, whether that means buying deals others aren't looking at or executing strategies others can't, that's where I spend a lot of my time.
What I know from building the operation from scratch is that it was actually a blessing, even when it didn't feel like one. When the co-GP partnership we expected to lean on early on didn't come together, we had to set up our own property management infrastructure on the fly, figuring out the right vendors, the right software, lease documents, tenant relations, phone systems. None of that is stuff you'd normally encounter in your day-to-day, working in real estate private equity. But doing it ourselves meant we could build it the way we thought was best. We're constantly refining the way we do things, our lease agreements, our policies and procedures. And as we do that, we're building a foundation that will make our growth path much smoother than if we'd scaled first and tried to implement systems later.
Fortunately, managing manufactured housing turned out to be a lot less foreign than I expected. From a subject matter and terminology standpoint, some of the content is different, but the fundamental practices – making sure people pay rent, managing the asset properly, mitigating liability and risk, maintaining the physical infrastructure – none of that is any different from what I had done before.
My hope is that in five years, Cooper Square is a much bigger platform in the manufactured housing space. Exactly what that looks like is still taking shape, but I’m learning every day and starting to see new opportunities – that's the most exciting part of building something from scratch.
Henry Everitt '26 is a 2nd year MBA student at Columbia Business School and a Bodini Fellow, with a focus on real estate and finance. Henry spent the summer at Related Companies in the development group and is the VP of careers for the Real Estate Association, where he is responsible for the annual career forum. Prior to CBS, Henry worked at Greystone, where he was responsible for underwriting, structuring, and financing of real estate equity and debt investments across the United States. Prior to Greystone, Henry worked in the Global Markets Division of Goldman Sachs. Henry holds a BA from Wake Forest University.
