Rhino Deal Lab

What changes when the park stops behaving like a spreadsheet.

Illustrative mobile home park underwriting cases designed to isolate one variable at a time: infrastructure, financing structure, occupancy, and execution risk.

Illustrative case 01

The 8% cap park with a lagoon problem

Headline yield can disappear when private wastewater risk is left outside the purchase-price conversation.

50 sites / 40 occupied

$450 monthly lot rent

Private lagoon

Illustrative $175K near-term infrastructure reserve

Model input / outputIllustrative

Annual lot income$216,000

Normalized expense assumption45%

Illustrative NOI$118,800

Value at 8.0% cap$1,485,000

Less infrastructure reserve$175,000

Risk-adjusted indication$1,310,000

Underwriting lesson

The correct question is not whether the park trades at an 8% cap. It is whether the buyer is being paid for the operational and replacement risk embedded in the lagoon.

Illustrative case 02

Seller financing that changes the executable price

Terms can improve certainty and bridge a financing gap, but the note has to be priced as a real liability—not free money.

Illustrative $2.40MM purchase price

70% senior financing

$360K seller note

5.5% interest-only seller note

Model input / outputIllustrative

Senior debt$1,680,000

Seller note$360,000

Buyer equity$360,000

Annual seller-note interest$19,800

Combined non-equity capitalization85%

Buyer equity at close15%

Underwriting lesson

A seller note can widen the set of executable transactions, but lien position, maturity, subordination, default remedies, and senior-lender consent matter as much as the note rate.

Illustrative case 03

The occupancy story that should not be valued twice

Vacant-site upside is valuable only after the cost and time required to create occupancy are separated from current NOI.

60 total sites / 42 occupied

$425 current lot rent

$475 verified market-rent assumption

18 vacant sites

Model input / outputIllustrative

Current annual lot income$214,200

Current occupancy70%

Current rent gap$50 / occupied site

Annual current-site rent upside$25,200

Vacant-site potential18 sites

Day-one value of vacant-site income$0 until occupied

Underwriting lesson

Do not capitalize projected vacant-site income as if it already exists. Model infill costs, home availability, setup, absorption time, resident demand, and execution separately.

Run your own scenario

Change the assumptions yourself.

The Valuation Lab exposes the cap-rate, NOI, rent-upside, and capital-need assumptions so you can see how quickly value changes.

Open Valuation Lab