Your home mix changes both the price and the type of buyer

Two different income streams, valued two different ways

Lot rent is land income. It carries low expense, low turnover cost, and no depreciation: the resident owns the structure and maintains it. Home rent is housing income. It carries repairs, turnover, appliances, roofs, HVAC, and an asset that gets older every year.

Most buyers, including us, therefore treat them separately. The lot income is capitalized. Park-owned home income is usually credited more conservatively — often closer to a value per home based on age and condition — because a buyer is really buying depreciating inventory plus a repair schedule. This is not a trick to reduce your price. It is why a heavily park-owned community with a strong-looking gross income sometimes appraises and finances differently than the owner expects.

Titling in Tennessee: common gaps, usually fixable

Manufactured homes in Tennessee are titled through the Department of Revenue's vehicle title and registration system, and a home can also be treated as real property once it is permanently affixed and the title is surrendered under the applicable statutory process. Older Tennessee parks frequently have gaps: homes abandoned by former residents with no title in the owner's hands, homes bought informally years ago, homes where the title was never transferred after a rent-to-own arrangement ended.

These gaps are ordinary. They do not stop an evaluation and they usually do not stop a sale. What they do is create work — replacement titles, abandoned-property procedures, or county-level steps — and buyers price known work far more favorably than work they discover late. Tell us up front and it becomes a line item instead of a renegotiation.

Rent-to-own and seller-financed homes deserve their own review

A resident paying "rent" that is really a purchase installment is a different legal relationship than a tenant. Depending on how the agreement was written, the arrangement may look like a lease, an installment sale of personal property, or consumer financing with its own disclosure obligations. A buyer inherits whatever was actually created, so the written agreements — not a verbal summary — determine how those homes get valued and whether they transfer at all.

Vacant homes: asset, liability, or neither

A vacant park-owned home is not automatically upside. A buyer sorts vacant homes into three buckets: habitable and rentable after light work, rehabbable with real capital, and better removed than repaired. Removal has cost in Tennessee too — transport, disposal, and site restoration — so a row of derelict homes can reduce value rather than add it. Being blunt about which bucket each home falls into is one of the fastest ways to get a credible number.

What to send us

• A site-by-site list showing which homes you own and which residents own
• Titles you hold, or a note about which ones are missing or unclear
• Year, size, and rough condition of each park-owned home
• Current rent for each home, separated from the lot rent portion if you bill them together
• Copies of any rent-to-own, lease-option, or seller-financed home agreements
• Which homes are vacant, and whether each vacant home is habitable, needs work, or needs removal

Estimates are fine. See the information checklist for the rest of the file, and cash vs. seller financing for how a heavy park-owned mix often points toward a structured sale.