A place to live...

**** Major Update ****

Ok, so here’s the story:

It all starts 10 years ago when the current owner of my Mobile Home Park bought the park. I actually feel kind of bad for the guy (now that I understand what he’s gone through). The park had extremely depressed rental prices (like less than $200 per month) for the space rent. The man saw an opportunity to make some money, and bought the park, intending to raise the rent to a more reasonable price (i.e. market value of about $375 at that time). When the sale had finished, he issued a notice of intent to raise rent. In the intervening 90-day period, the City of Concord rushed and put together a Rent Control Board, who told him he couldn’t raise rent.

A year ago, just after we had moved in, a 10-year-long lawsuit was settled, and he was allowed to raise rent, plus retroactive increases for the intervening time. The problem (for the owner) was that they didn’t raise it as much as he had wanted, so he started the process again. After about three months, and realizing that there was another major lawsuit ahead, he’s decided to take another tack.

He has applied to the City of Concord to put the land to Alternative Use.

That’s right, he wants to close the park. I assume that he wants to build condos or something. Basically he’s gotten tired of fighting with the City and is looking for some way out.

For a day or two after I found out, I worried, but with a little help from Heather, I got perspective and realized that God knew what he was up to. He’d provided the mobile home at a great price in the first place, and he wouldn’t do that just to take it all away again. But the odds are that the park is closing in about a year.

With that in mind, I became much more interested in the MLS emails that I had been receiving since I bought the mobile home. I opened them each day, and almost a month ago now, I saw a listing that looked too good to be true. There’s a house in Bay Point (which is 5 minutes from where I currently live) on sale for $250,000. It is 1,000 square feet, on a 5,000 square lot, which is an amazing deal around here. So Heather and I went to take a look.

There’s a reason its inexpensive… there’s a lot of work to be done. The home is a “short-sale” which is basically the same thing as a foreclosure, except that the bank is being kind to the family, and doing things the other way around. Rather than taking the house and selling it, the family that owns the house are the ones that listed it on the market, but the bank sets the price, and reserves the right to review every bid. That way the loan gets paid off “by the owner” and the bank doesn’t have to foreclose.

Unlike many foreclosures, this home is actually in decent shape. You can tell that the family was doing their best to keep the house up. It appears that they were actually trying to remodel it and then sell it again. There are new Pergo floors (that are mostly installed). There are new baseboards (that have been cut to fit, but are not installed). The closets have been re-made to allow more space (but aren’t quite done yet.) The interior is newly painted. The bathroom is about halfway through a remodel. There is new tile, but it isn’t grouted, and it needs a new sink, and at least some of the wall needs to be ripped out and re-sheetrocked. And that’s the interior.

On the exterior, the lawn is completely dead, and needs to get re-done. The windows need to be re-caulked (one of them is new and needs to be caulked for the first time). The stucco is cracked in places, and one corner of the house needs to be completely re-done (about 2-3 square feet). And then there are the two cars in the back yard. One of them is basically just a chassis, and has been beaten or demolished somehow. The other might run, it looks like it was being worked on. And then there’s a big machine that someone said is probably a stucco mixer, which is similar to a cement mixer, that was used and never cleaned, so probably doesn’t work, which means I can’t sell it.

So, anyway, we put a bid down on it. And we heard back from the Realtor today that the bid was received and that it would probably come back positive because it was a strong offer. Because of the short-sale process, it could be up to two weeks before we know the offer was accepted, but it sounds like it could be ours.

All that to say, Praise God, because he plans these things out. We’re still praying that this will work out for the best, and I’m still doing some other background work. But we’re on the road to home ownership.

(And at some point, we've got to sell the mobile home.)