MHC Database · Manufactured housing transaction intelligence
How to Find Mobile Home Park Sale Comps from Public Records
Quick answer: A community sale comp is a recent arms-length sale of a similar mobile home park, expressed as price per site (sale price divided by site count). Comps come from recorded deeds and assessor rolls, the same public records the enterprise terminals repackage. You can pull and normalize them yourself, no enterprise subscription required.
If you are buying, lending against, or appraising a mobile home park, every number you produce eventually leans on one question: what have similar communities actually sold for? Those reference sales are called comparable sales, or comps. The reassuring part is that community comparable sales are not a proprietary dataset locked inside an expensive platform. They are public records, and with a little method you can assemble a clean comp set on your own.
This guide covers what a community sale comp is, where the data lives, how to build a comp set, how to adjust it, and the traps that quietly ruin one.
What is a mobile home park sale comp?
A community sale comp is a recent, arms-length sale of a mobile home park similar enough to your subject property that its price tells you something about your property's value. The word that does the work is arms-length: a sale between unrelated parties, each acting in their own interest, with the property exposed to the market. A transfer between affiliated companies or a family member is not a comp, because the price was not set by the market.
Because communities come in wildly different sizes, you cannot compare raw sale prices directly. A $40,000,000 sale and a $9,000,000 sale tell you nothing until you normalize them. That is what price per site does.
Why price per site is the unit
Price per site is simply the sale price divided by the site (lot) count. A 100-site community that sells for $9,000,000 traded at $90,000 per site. A 300-site community that sells for $40,000,000 traded at about $133,000 per site. Now the two are on the same scale and the comparison means something.
Price per site is the lingua franca of community comparable sales for one reason: it lets different-sized communities be compared at a glance. It is not the whole story (it ignores how the communities earn), but it is the anchor every other valuation method circles back to. For how per-site comps feed a full valuation, see How to Value a Mobile Home Park: Methods, Cap Rates & Comps.
For sale vs. sold comps: why a listing price is not a comp
A community that is currently for sale tells you what a seller hopes to get, not what the market paid. An asking price is an opinion; a recorded sale is a fact. When people search for a "mobile home park for sale," they are looking at listings, but a defensible valuation leans on sold comps: closed, arms-length sales that actually settled and were recorded with the county.
Listings still have a use. They show you what is live in the market, and a stale listing that keeps cutting its price is a signal in its own right. But never drop an asking price into a comp set as if it were a sale. The moment a for-sale community closes, its deed becomes the comp you want: a real price, real parties, and a real date in the public record.
Where do mobile home park comps come from?
Three public sources hold almost everything you need:
- County recorder deeds. When a community changes hands, the deed is recorded with the county recorder or clerk. The deed (and often an accompanying transfer-tax declaration) carries the parties, the date, and, in most jurisdictions, the price.
- Assessor rolls. The county assessor lists the parcel, its use code, and frequently the site count and an assessed value. This is where you confirm the property is a manufactured housing community and recover the site count you need for price per site.
- Disclosed filings. When a community sells inside an entity-level or portfolio transaction, the deal may surface in corporate or securities disclosures rather than a simple deed.
Here is the part worth internalizing: the legacy industry terminals do not have a secret pipeline. They largely collect these same county records, clean them, and license them back at enterprise prices. The records themselves are public. What you are paying for with a terminal is the aggregation, not the data.
How to build a comp set
A good comp set is a small group of sales that resemble your subject property on the dimensions that drive price. Match on three things:
- Quality and class. Compare like with like: a five-star resort-style community and a tired roadside park live in different per-site worlds, so a high-end sale is not a comp for a value-add property. Utility type (public vs private) is part of this match.
- Market. Prefer sales in the same metro or submarket. If the local set is thin, widen to comparable markets (similar demand drivers and rent levels) rather than reaching for a distant region.
- Recency. Favor recent sales. The market drifts, so a sale from several years ago is a weaker signal than one from the last year or two, and may need a date adjustment.
How many do you need? There is no magic number. A handful of close, recent, arms-length sales beats a long list of loosely related ones. Gather what you can that genuinely matches, then let quality, not count, govern how much weight you give the set.
How to adjust comps
No two communities are identical, so raw per-site numbers need adjustment before you trust them. You are asking, for each comp, whether it should read higher or lower than your subject and by roughly how much. The five factors below cover most of the gap.
| Adjustment factor | Why it matters | How to handle it |
|---|---|---|
| Quality / class | Per-site values cluster by quality; a premium sale overstates value for a value-add subject | Keep comps in the same class band; if you must reach, adjust the per-site down or up |
| Location / market | Demand, rent levels, and barriers to entry differ by submarket | Weight in-market comps most; treat out-of-market sales as directional only |
| Sale date | The market drifts over time, so an older price reflects an older market | Discount older sales; lean on the most recent transactions |
| Utilities / condition | Private wells or septic and deferred capital lower effective value | Adjust down for private systems and deferred capital; note assumed infrastructure obligations |
| Transaction type | Distressed, related-party, or portfolio sales do not reflect normal market pricing | Exclude non-arms-length deals; flag distressed sales rather than blending them in |
The goal is not false precision. It is to move each comp toward what it would have sold for if it were your property, so the adjusted set clusters in a defensible range.
The pitfalls that ruin a comp set
Most bad valuations trace back to a bad comp that looked fine. Watch for three in particular:
- Portfolio and bulk sales. When several communities trade in one transaction for one price, the recorded figure is a blended number. Allocating it evenly across properties invents a per-site value that no single community actually traded at.
- Related-party transfers. A sale between affiliated entities, or a transfer into a new ownership vehicle, can record a price that was never market-tested. These show up as deeds but are not comps.
- Non-arms-length deeds. Gifts, estate transfers, foreclosures, and nominal-dollar deeds all appear in the record. Each carries a price that does not mean what a market sale's price means.
The discipline is simple to state and easy to skip: verify that each comp is a true, arms-length market sale before it earns a place in the set. One contaminated comp can pull a whole valuation off.
From comps to a value (and a confirmed owner)
A clean, adjusted comp set is the sales-comparison input to a community valuation. You apply the per-site range to your subject's site count, then reconcile it against the income and cost approaches, which is the full method in How to Value a Mobile Home Park: Methods, Cap Rates & Comps. Comps anchor the conversation; the income approach usually leads it for a stabilized community.
One more check belongs alongside the comps. When you trace a sale, confirm that the recorded seller is the property's real owner and not just a single-purpose entity standing in for someone else. The how-to is in Who Owns That Mobile Home Park? How to Find Community Owners in Public Records. The same public record that holds the comp holds the answer to who actually sold.
The public-record method vs the enterprise terminal
You can do all of this by hand: pull deeds at the county recorder, cross-reference the assessor roll for site counts, screen out the non-market transfers, normalize to price per site, and adjust. It works, and it is honest, because every number traces to a source you can cite. The cost is time, county by county.
The enterprise terminals sell you the time back, repackaging the public record into a polished interface behind an annual contract. That is the trade. The data is the same public record either way; the only question is whether you assemble it or rent it.
Frequently asked questions
Where do mobile home park sale comps come from?
Community sale comps come from the public record: deeds recorded with the county recorder or clerk when a property changes hands, the assessor roll that lists site counts and assessed values, and disclosed filings for entity-level or portfolio deals. The expensive industry terminals largely collect those same county records and license them back at enterprise prices.
What is price per site?
Price per site is a community's sale price divided by its site count. It is the standard unit for community comparable sales because it normalizes for size, so a 120-site sale and an 80-site sale can be compared on the same scale. A $9,000,000 sale of a 100-site community is $90,000 per site.
How many comps do you need?
There is no fixed minimum, but a useful set usually has several recent arms-length sales of communities of similar quality and a similar market. More comps tighten the range; fewer but closer comps can beat a larger set of loosely related sales. Quality of match matters more than raw count.
Are mobile home park sale comps public record?
Yes. Real estate transfers are recorded at the county level, and assessor rolls are public, so the sale price, parties, and date for most community sales are matters of public record. Some details, like an allocated price inside a portfolio deal, may not be itemized, which is why each comp should be verified as a true market sale.