Tag: Mobile Home University

Why would any RVer pay Frank Rolfe?

Frank Rolfe, with an assist from his sidekick, Dave Reynolds, is at it again, trying to cash in on the RV park acquisition craze by passing himself off as an expert on something about which he knows squat.

To be clear, Rolfe does have a lot of expertise in the trailer court/mobile home park industry. He’s garnered quite a reputation for buying up trailer parks and then squeezing his captive tenants for every last dollar, while also slashing amenities and maintenance to the bone—then selling his cut-throat tactics as nothing more than good business. That selling comes in the guise of something he unabashedly calls the Mobile Home “University,” which in fact is nothing more than a slew of CDs and printed manuals that explain how you, too, can rationalize predatory practices on the way to personal enrichment.

Okay. Repulsive though that may be, it nonetheless falls squarely within the parameters of modern capitalism, and the devil take the hindmost. But where Rolfe steps over the line is in his blurring of the differences between trailer parks and RV parks, contending that the latter are just a variation on the former and that both can be managed according to the same principles. (I’ve been repeatedly critical of this bait-and-switch in the past, but to be honest, the RV park industry has done itself no favors by increasingly converting transient sites into long-term rentals, not to mention its embrace of cabins, park models and other fixed dwellings.)

While Mobile Home University remains Rolfe’s flagship, he’s again touting its slighter sibling, the equally hubristic RVPark University. This past week he sent out an email-blast promoting an “RV park investing boot camp,” which from all appearances is just an online presentation of material that’s already contained in the “university’s” home study course. There is no boot “camp,” and as it happens, the CDs and printed materials in the home study course can be purchased on RVU’s website for just $497 (or $397 for an electronic copy); watching the boot camp, meanwhile, requires “an investment” of $997. You do the math. Then again, Rolfe claims that the materials in the home study course actually have a total value of $4,688, so any way you slice it you get a heckuva deal!

(You also can count yourself lucky not to be interested in mobile home parks: that online “investing boot camp” will set you back $1,749. Where do all these numbers come from? Apparently, it’s all a matter of what the marks can be convinced to shell out.)

But back to RV parks. Part of Rolfe’s sales pitch is a helpful section headlined “Why Invest in RV Parks?” followed by eight bullet points of varying truthfulness and questionable assertions. Among them, for example, is “low capital expenditure requirements,” explained with the notable phrase, “RV parks are—for the most part—just blocks of land that people park their RVs on.” Oh, sure, “there are other amenities such as clubhouses and pools,” Rolfe concedes, “but what’s lacking are sprawling time bombs of maintenance like roofs and foundations.”

All of which lets me know that Rolfe has never had to fix a broken water main, or snake out a sewer line clogged by RVers insistent on flushing wipes, or repair a pedestal laid low by an errant fifth-wheeler. And with average per-site RV park construction costs approaching $25,000, there clearly are a lot more capital expenditures going into an RV park than Rolfe understands, not to mention all the maintenance issues they will incur.

There are several other howlers of the sort in Rolfe’s pitch, but the one that really illustrates his cluelessness—and that attests to his utterly contemptuous approach to mobile home park management—is the sub-head, “low reliance on personnel.” As Rolfe notes, correctly, “owning a business that relies heavily on employees is becoming a nightmare,” but not to worry! As Rolfe goes on to explain, “The RV Park industry is basically a ‘parking lot’ model in which the customers park their RVs on your land and that’s what you get paid for. It’s not like trying to run a restaurant where just one weak link on your employee base can ruin your business.” Easy-peasy—when it comes to RV parks, no employees required!

Again: clueless. Completely. Because while Rolfe’s description may be apt for a (poorly maintained) trailer court, an RV park that isn’t given over entirely to year-round or seasonal campers is going to need at least some maintenance workers, not to mention desk clerks and housekeepers, plus activities directors, swimming pool attendants and assorted other personnel as those “other amenities” proliferate. But that hasn’t prevented Rolfe from repeatedly representing himself as some sort of authority on RV parks, subbing in his experience as a trailer park mogul to mask his ignorance. In that regard, for example, it’s telling that all of the glowing evaluations and testimonials that litter both “university” websites relate solely to motor home parks.

At a time when mainstream RV park leaders are in a full-throated embrace of their self-assigned role as “the hospitality industry,” with its emphasis on personal connections and personnel training, Rolfe sits at the other extreme. It’s an interesting bifurcation, problematic at both ends. But the Rolfe end of that spectrum, while seeming to offer a cheaper, more streamlined operating model, is a sure-fire guarantee of bad press, bad reviews and bad feelings. Caveat emptor, whether it’s $397, $497 or $997.

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‘Tis better to give than to deceive

This being the holiday season and all, Frank Rolfe is dressing up his miserly predations on the impoverished classes by claiming that higher prices are actually beneficial to them. That’s right: Frank Rolfe, who extolled “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap as the epitome of effective corporate leadership and who regularly notes that residents of trailer parks are fish in a barrel, is taking a leaf from George Orwell’s 1984 to convince us that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and black is white.

Writing on his Mobile Home University blog—cousin to his equally problematic RV Park University blog—Rolfe has presented a Yuletide parable under the headline, “The interesting story of why Dollar Tree raised their prices from $1 to $1.25.” The uninitiated might think the increase was forced by higher wholesale costs, or because Dollar Tree needed bigger margins to fuel its relentless expansion across the American landscape. But no. As Rolfe breathlessly (and without a shred of attribution or supporting evidence) assures us, “Dollar Tree raised prices to actually HELP their customers.”

This selfless act of charity, Rolfe goes on to explain, was prompted by Dollar Tree’s realization that it was “limited in what it can offer in its stores because of the $1 price point.” By raising its one-price-fits-all approach to $1.25 per item, “they found they could offer a substantially larger range of items to meet customers’ needs.” The moral of the story? “It’s not a case of the ‘evil business owner raising prices on the downtrodden’ but instead ‘progressive business owner expanding their product range at the request of customers.'”

Where to begin to address this logic-deficient defense of greed? The absurdity of claiming that Dollar Tree raised its prices to be helpful to “the downtrodden”? The equally absurd and unsubstantiated claim that Dollar Tree’s customers were seeking a broader product range, even if that meant higher prices overall? Why stop at $1.25? Why not $2? $5? Think how many more products Dollar Tree could offer if it became just like Kroger or Food Lion!

But why would Frank Rolfe care about Dollar Tree in the first place? Because he clearly recognizes that it pitches to the same demographic as do his own trailer courts and RV parks. And as he further asserts, what’s going on at Dollar Tree “is very similar to the mobile home park business, in which lot rents go up to allow for reinvestment in the worn-out property to bring it back to life, as well as to provide competent, professional management. It’s a win/win concept, not a win/lose concept.”

As if.

As one news story after another has documented, Rolfe and his kind have been steadily jacking up rates at their mobile home and RV parks because they can, not out of any sense of “customer service.” Such parks are the bottom end of a housing market that has been squeezed without mercy for several years, and especially since the onset of the pandemic, resulting in an unending supply of would-be tenants who will take whatever they can get at whatever price it takes. As Rolfe himself acknowledges, lot rents around Denver that were around $400 a few years ago have more than doubled, yet not only are mobile home parks full, but most have waiting lists.

As for having that extra income go to “reinvestment” in “worn-out” property, or to hire “competent, professional management”? The headlines are replete with stories of trailer parks literally falling apart from neglect, their residents coping with intermittent utilities and streets flooded because of improper drainage maintenance, while management—professional or otherwise—is either absent or nonresponsive.

Dollar Tree may or may not have perfectly valid reasons for upping its prices, but no one can reasonably conclude that it is preying on its customers. The same can’t be said of Rolfe, whose quick dismissal of “the evil business owner raising prices on the downtrodden” trope suggests what’s really bugging him: Frank Rolfe, meet Ebenezer Scrooge.

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