Real estate is supposed to make you rich, not raise your blood pressure — unless you're Dave Ramsey hearing a caller explain her mobile home park "investment."
Andrea from Missoula, Montana called into "The Ramsey Show" with what sounded like a simple question: Can she use profits from one business to pay off the debt in another? Turns out, the businesses in question were a trio of Airbnbs and a mobile home park. The Airbnbs were doing great — bringing in $150,000 a year. The mobile home park? Well, let's just say things went downhill faster than a trailer in a windstorm.
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Ramsey, who owns hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate himself, wasn't impressed. "You've got a really bad deal," he told her, flat out. "Mobile home parks generally aren't that bad. They generally are cash money." But Andrea's wasn't printing cash — it was draining it.
Despite pouring $200,000 to $300,000 in upgrades into the park, the numbers just didn't add up. "You don't have a $650,000 mortgage on a mobile home park that makes 60 grand," Ramsey said. "That does not make sense. It literally should be making 300."
And then he drove the point home:
"That thing ought to be cash flowing like a bandit."
Andrea explained there were only 13 mobile homes on the property, along with a four-bedroom house. Some of the units had below-market rents because it was low-income housing, and she was reinvesting profits into improvements. But Ramsey wasn't buying the math. "You're not charging," he said. "It's a trailer — of course it's lower income housing."
And that's when Ramsey launched into full-on coach mode.
"If you did not already own this mobile home park," he told her, "and you had the chance to buy it today with $650,000 in debt to make $60K a year, would you buy it again?" His answer: a hard no.
He didn't mince words about the investment either. "If you really are $650,000 in debt on depreciating, losing-value mobile homes and you're only cash flowing 60 — you got a really bad deal. And you need to get out of it if you can. It just sucks as an investment."
Ramsey's advice? Forget the cosmetic upgrades. Stop building redwood decks and "giving them all a hot tub." Focus on paying off the mortgage. "Let's get rid of the mortgage and then we'll go back and do our improvements… once we're debt-free and we've got real cash flow."
Andrea's situation wasn't just a one-off lesson in bad ROI — it also opened the door to Ramsey's broader philosophy on mobile homes as investments. He made it clear: never buy one to live in.
"They go down in value," he said. "It's a car you sleep in… Financially, that's what it amounts to."
But as investments? It depends on the numbers. Ramsey pointed to another woman he recently advised who was, in his words, "breaking even every 20 seconds" on mobile homes she picked up for $20,000 apiece. With low buy-in and high cash flow, that made business sense. "She was making bank," he said. "She was printing money."
The contrast couldn't be sharper. One investor's mobile home park is a cash cow. The other? A money pit dressed as a passive income stream.
"If you can get someone else to buy it, you should sell it and get rid of it," Ramsey told Andrea. "That's a horrible ROI."
In the end, his advice was simple: pay off the mortgage fast, stop throwing good Airbnb money after bad, and don't confuse a fixer-upper with a solid investment.
Because when even Ramsey — a guy who loves real estate — says, "That thing ought to be cash flowing like a bandit," it might be time to trade that park in for, well, just about anything else.
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