In this conversation, I sit down with real estate entrepreneur Robert Howell to explore how he built a thriving business around mobile home parks and land-home packages. We discuss his journey from event marketing to full-time real estate investing, the lessons learned from scaling a business, building remote teams, working with virtual assistants, leveraging private money, and creating affordable housing opportunities. If you’re looking for practical insights on growth, delegation, and using leverage to build a business that supports your life, you’ll find plenty of takeaways in this episode.
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Hello and welcome. I’m Adrienne Green and today I have with me Robert Howell, and get ready as we are going to talk about how you can escape the grind and get the life that you really wanted in the first place through real estate. Robert, thank you so much for being here with me today.
Thanks for having me. Excited to have this conversation.
Now to ground our listeners, can you give me a quick snapshot of your current real estate business?
For sure. I invest in mobile home parks as a long-term strategy and tax saving strategy. And that’s a great part of my business. I love it. I’m always looking to buy mobile home parks. And then second to that, really first to that, I should say, is my land home business. I buy raw land and put brand new manufactured housing on it, and then sell that land and the home together as a package.
You are the first person that I’ve had on the podcast, and we were talking about before I recorded, I think we’re on episode 94, who has done these land home packages. What I’m always interested in first is how did you get into this niche?
That’s a good question. If I back up the story a little bit, I started my career doing event marketing and traveled around the US, traveled around the world doing event marketing for Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies. I was working actually in Tokyo, Japan when COVID hit. I was working the Tokyo Olympics for Coca-Cola and COVID hit. I was like, crap, what are we going to do?
I’ve got to do something different other than events, because there may never be an event again. And so I got into real estate. I said, I’ve always had a passion for real estate. I’ve owned a few rentals, not anything really that intentional, but I had bought a few rentals. And so I had pivoted at that moment. I said, hey, I’ve got to do something different. Started buying and selling, wholesaling really houses. As a result of that, I ran across a guy that owned a mobile home park.
And he said, hey, you want to buy this mobile home park from me? I said, I don’t know anything about mobile home parks, but I do know about affordable housing because that’s what I was really focused on. And so I bought that mobile home park. And as a result of that, I got my mobile home dealers license. And that allowed me to buy directly from the factory in order to get the best prices. And in South Carolina, you have to have a mobile home dealer. You’re supposed to have a mobile home dealers license to be selling more than two mobile homes a year, whether that be inside your mobile home parks or separate.
Anyhow, I got the mobile home dealer’s license. I was doing some house flipping by that point too. I said, well, instead of house flipping, maybe I should just buy land and put a new mobile home on land. And so I did that, started to do it, loved it. I said, I’m never going to flip a house again, because there are so many surprises with flipping houses, and started doing land home packages. It started slowly, probably did a handful a year. And last year we did 50 land home packages. This year in 2026, hoping to do maybe 100, we’ll see. But love it. It provides a need, doesn’t solve it but helps to solve the huge need we have in affordable housing.
Well, and what I love about your story, something we talk about a lot here is the process of going from, a lot of people are occasional or part-time or hobbyist real estate investors at first. And that often goes one of two ways. Not many people stay hobbyist real estate investors for decades. They either realize that to do it well, they’re going to have to put in more time and energy than they want to, and they sell their properties and get out. Or they lean into it and scale up, which is what you decided to do.
That’s right. And I’d left out, when I started, I was doing event marketing and I was buying and selling a little bit because it hit and we were still doing a little bit of events. In the meantime, I bought a roofing company. And so I had the roofing company really as my day to day. But I knew I wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, which was in the roofing company, but still really had this burning desire to be a real estate guy.
And so I ran the roofing company really as my day to day. And then at night or on the weekends, I would be looking for mobile home parks to buy or doing land home packages. And then in 2024, I sold the roofing company and turned full-time focused on real estate.
Our journeys are often not like these straight paths. We always wish they were, I think. We can sometimes loathe the winding nature of getting to where we eventually end up, but that’s the most common one.
There’s no straight path, that’s for sure. Every day is a curvy road, how about that?
I know. To help us, because I think what I love here is you’re really a real estate entrepreneur. I think there’s a lot we’re going to be able to pull out as you’ve gone on this journey. To give us an idea, I’m curious with these land home packages that you do now or focus on, are you focused in a certain geographic area? Are you doing just South Carolina, just certain communities, or are you doing this all in person remotely? What does this look like in terms of geography first?
For sure. I do 90, 95% in South Carolina here in the upstate where I live and then down in the low country. But I have also expanded to, we’ve done a few deals in Tennessee, done a few deals in Georgia and North Carolina. So really the Southeast. I’ll do land home packages anywhere, but we really want to be the expert in the market. Don’t want to spread ourselves too thin. But primarily focused on South Carolina, we’ll do it in other states. And when you ask virtually or in person, in the upstate, it’s in person, of course, because I’m local here and I can easily drive around and see the projects. Down in the low country of South Carolina, that’s about three and a half hours for me. And so I’ll still go down there every other week and see the projects, but pretty much virtually on a day-to-day basis.
I love that. You’ve got your regional expertise, where you can really master and know that area well and that’s what you focus on. And yet you don’t have to be the boots on the ground going by the property every day or anything like that, like you might have when you were flipping. Now as you’ve grown and you continue to grow this year, I think what our listeners often enjoy is hearing about the things that broke and how you fixed them. So as you’ve worked to really make this a business and scale up, what were some of the things that broke and how did you fix them?
Learned a lot along the way, that’s for sure. Been doing this for several years now. One of the very first projects that we did, just to talk about things breaking, we moved a mobile home. We bought a piece of land, moved a mobile home on the piece of land. Our neighbor next door to the land said, hey, you can’t put a mobile home here. And sometimes we get that and people think that they just don’t like mobile homes for one reason or other. We’re like, don’t worry about it. You’re just a neighbor that’s mad. So we kept installing it. Well, finally, he serves us, or the HOA actually, come to find out there was an HOA that the closing attorney missed, sends a lawsuit and serves us with papers to say, hey, in fact, you can’t have a mobile home here. And so that was probably one of the biggest oops moments, like, man, that was a big mistake. But again, the attorney missed it as a deed restriction. We were able to secure title insurance payments for that piece of land, but it was still a big learning as we went. That was probably our biggest, man, that’s a bummer moment. But it worked out in the end. We sold the house, we moved it to another parcel and sold it and were able to still maintain a profit. But that was an interesting one for sure.
That is, and I think a couple lessons that I’m hearing there. First, and this is something that I have also seen in my own experience as an investor and an agent, the title attorneys or the title companies, they miss things. If you do a decent number of deals, you will have a time when they miss things, and that title insurance is clutch. And then the second thing is, although you’re in the middle of what seems like a disaster, typically it’s not going to be as bad as you imagine it’s going to be. You were able to move the house to another property. What did you end up doing with that land since you couldn’t put the mobile home there? Did you sell it as is or what?
The title insurance company bought it back, or took the land back when they made the insurance payment to us.
Perfect, so it was their problem then. Well, that is a good lesson learned. Is there anything, I know we often depend on these title companies and title attorneys to do their jobs. Is there anything you found where you can kind of check those yourself? Have you added anything to your process where you try to check any deeds or restrictions or anything like that?
Yeah, now what we’re doing is being very clear with our intent for the property upfront when we’re purchasing the property from the seller, in case the seller knows something. And then also with the closing attorney, making sure it’s very clear, hey, in fact, we are going to put a mobile home here. Just want to make sure there’s no deed restrictions. Because in this instance, this HOA that I was mentioning, it was only five houses on a very busy road that you would never suspect to have an HOA. And so now we’re just very clear on our intent and it’s part of our process to double, triple check with a closing attorney.
I’m curious, in Tennessee, because I was an active investor in Tennessee from about 2020 until we started full-time travel in 2024, it was such a trip when we moved to Tennessee because there are counties where unless you’re in an incorporated city, there is no zoning. There just is no zoning. You can do whatever you want on this land. And yet there would also be these HOAs in these rural areas that would have certain restrictions, you could only have a house of a minimum size, like a minimum size of 2,000 square feet because they didn’t want tiny places to go in, no mobile homes, only permanent foundations, all these things. What do you find in South Carolina primarily and around where you work, are there any kinds of restrictions on the land or zoning? What do you run into the most?
Typically, like you said, in a lot of counties that we work in, there is no zoning. And people ask me all the time, do you have trouble finding places to put these? But the reality is not that often, because the counties don’t have zoning. They’re allowing you to have the property rights that you deserve. But when we do find a restriction, it’s either because we’re in city limits and we found a parcel that’s in city limits, or it’s in an HOA, or there’s a deed restriction when somebody originally subdivided the land. And typically that deed restriction is going to say no mobile homes or no trailer. If it’s really old, it’ll say no trailers. Sometimes we get square footage requirements, like maybe mobile homes are allowed, but it has to be a double wide or it has to be 1,300 square feet plus. But it’s a very small percentage of the deals that we do where we run into those restrictions.
Well, that’s great. And for our listeners who are in other states, like maybe California or Washington state, I know it can be a trip to be like, my gosh, there are counties and there’s land where there’s just no zoning. You can do whatever you want with it. Yes, it’s there. Crazy as it is to imagine, because it’s very different from your reality in some states.
If you’re in California, make sure you check your zoning.
Totally. It’s a different world. Robert, let’s talk about one of my favorites, which is leverage. We can have a couple different kinds of leverage. I’d love for us to talk about how you leverage other people, how you have a team, things like that. And then we’ll get into leveraging with finance. But as you’ve grown, as you’ve established this business, as you’ve sold a roofing company, I imagine it’s not a one-man show. What does your team look like and how did you get there?
Yeah, when we started, to your point, it’s just a one-man show. A land home package, they are pretty simple, pretty light work. But as we’ve done more, once you get over the 15 or 20 deals, you need more people to help you in the office. So we have a project manager that helps us manage the projects. And then we have a team of virtual staff, virtual assistants in the Philippines, that help us with different aspects of the business, whether that be finance or maybe it’s just helping with the project management software or a sales assistant, work that can be done virtually. And then on site, we have a great team of contractors that help us manage a project. Typically we’ll have between eight to 10 subcontractors that will do their specific niche of the trade and we’ll work with them to get the project done. And really we’re managing our timelines, scheduling them, making sure that they do a good job. We have a great team. For the last two, three years, we’ve worked with the same contractors over and over again on every single project, so we really trust them, they really trust us, and it’s a great team. It takes a lot of different types of people to be successful and to manage the project.
I was going to ask, with you covering a large geographic area, you have that same team of subs who, will they travel a few hours to do jobs in different parts of the Southeast?
We have different subcontractors. For example, for the upstate it’s one set, down in the low country, which is about three hours away, it’s a different set. There are guys that are willing to travel, but what we found is based on volume and based on just capacity, it’s better to have a localized crew that probably travels within about a two-hour radius of a central point.
And especially with these teams that are not local to you, how did you find them? Did you strike gold and get a great one the first time, or did it take a few tries?
Took a few tries for sure. And as we’ve grown and scaled, the guy that we started with maybe isn’t a great fit. He’s a good fit for doing one home a month, but he’s not a great fit for doing five homes a month. And that has to do with capacity, but also maybe the equipment that he has. But in order to find new contractors, word of mouth is really key for us, finding people that are in this industry, networking with those people and finding out who are the best subcontractors that we can work with. And a lot of the times that comes from the existing subcontractors that we have. I think back to when we started, we’re still working with several of the contractors that we started with in their specific niche, and they’ve referred us to other great contractors. The grader that we work with, he was referred to me by another real estate investor for a job that wasn’t even related to land home packages, but he did such a great job that we’ve continued to hire him for other things.
It’s funny how when you get started, it’s almost just random. You’re going to get the random plumber or the random electrician, but then you get one that’s good and you keep them, and they’ll tell you, hey, I worked with a great electrician on this other job, you might want to get him in here or something like that. And eventually you build out that A team.
I feel like we have it right now, which is great. It makes our life easier. But that may change a year from now. People’s life changes and their business focus changes, or maybe capacity changes. But right now we have an awesome team.
Well, kudos to you. You have a lot of your team that’s remote, whether it’s the contractors that aren’t right in your backyard or it’s your remote team in the Philippines of virtual assistants. And that can be an extra level of management and leadership and oversight, to make sure they’re doing their job. Do you have any wisdom you would share with listeners to help them be successful with managing remote teams?
I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way. For the subcontractors that are local in terms of managing them versus managing the virtual assistants, it’s two different management styles. But for me, it’s treating people how you want to be treated. And so the subcontractors that we have, we really treat them like partners, and I would consider a lot of them friends. How do you treat a partner? How would you want to be treated? You want to be paid on time. You want to be communicated to effectively and efficiently. I like to go on site and meet them and have conversations with them. Even though I don’t need to go on site, I like to go and have them be there and meet them and talk to them and see how their life’s going and how the job’s going, how the business is going. We also have quarterly celebrations where we’ll get the whole contractor group together and we’ll have dinner. Last quarter we went to a barbecue place and it was awesome. Everybody got together and they said, man, this is great. None of our customers have done this. And it was really great to spend that quality time with them, and they brought some of their kids and their family, which was really cool. From a virtual standpoint, with the virtual assistants, same thing. I think a lot of people think, they’re virtual assistants, they’re in the Philippines or wherever they may be, and maybe they treat them differently because of that. But the reality is they’re still humans, and they’re still trying to make a career. They just happen to be living in a different place. And so we treat them just the same way I would treat my coworker here in the US, respectfully. We communicate with them. I would hope that most of them would say, hey, this is the best job I’ve ever had, just by the way that they’re being treated.
I love that. The way you work with your local team, it’s funny, as somebody who’s originally from California, I’ve lived in Washington state, I’ve lived in Virginia, and then I’ve lived in the Southeast for a bit. The way you’re managing that team is so stereotypically Southern. Let’s get together, let’s have meals, let’s celebrate and be in community. And it makes a difference. It really does make a difference. And it’s funny, that’s what keeps people in jobs more so than a high salary or something like that. It’s the connections and the community that they feel where they work.
100%.
Well, let’s switch to the other kind of leverage that I know you use as well, which is financial leverage. You use loans, you use other people’s money. How does that look for you?
We do a lot of projects and we use other people’s money to have leverage to be able to scale. We use a combination of banks, private money, people like me and you that have been successful in business or in real estate that are looking to make a good return on their money. We also use some hard money companies. We have some good relationships with hard money companies and we’ll use them to buy the land and also develop the project. And depending on capacity, our first preference is to work with private lenders. We have a lot of great private lenders that we work with and we structure deals with them, here’s the amount that we need. Typically a project for us is 150 to 175K and we secure them financially against the land and against the development. So they have a first position on their notes and mortgage and they get a good return. Typically we’re paying between 10 and 12%. That’s the way we work with private lenders and same with banks and hard money. Typically we’re working with a lender for four to six months, which is usually the term. And upon success, they usually come back and say, hey, let’s do another project together. It’s a good diversification from the stock market to get a solid return.
You explained that so well, what exactly it looks like working with these. Now, sometimes investors look at private money or hard money and they look at these double digit interest rates, and that can give them pause. Tell me how you’re still making money while paying these loans at double digit interest rates.
That’s a good question, and I hear that a lot from early investors, having to pay 12%, or even hard money, you might pay 14%. And it’s like, that’s crazy. But what I learned early on is, don’t count other people’s money. If I can borrow money from you and that allows me to go and make, on average we’re making $30,000 or $40,000 profit after paying you, I can go and pay you. On average we’re paying a lender somewhere between eight and 12K, or eight and 14K depending on the project and the amount of money we need and interest. And after I’ve paid you as the lender and paid all my closing costs, I’m still making $30,000 or $40,000. That’s huge. And so I’m not worried about paying 10 or 12 percent, because at the end of the day I’m still making money, and I need to respect your money because you need to make money too. Am I strategically thinking about my funding sources and how I can get more competitive interest rates and expanding my private lender network? For sure. I think about that every day. But I’m not worried about paying 10 or 12 percent.
Right. And you said it really well. I feel like it’s often the newer investors who really freak out about that. I get it because there’s a little bit more of a scarcity mindset when you’re new to it. Everything’s a little scarier as well. Once you get into it for a little bit, you realize, hey, it’s a win-win. They’re enabling you to do more deals so you can make more money, because you can scale more than you could if you were only using your own funding.
Yeah, 100%. It’s the difference between, do you want to make some money or do you want to make no money? If my option is to pay a lender an interest rate and maybe some points to make some money versus I don’t do the deal because I don’t have money, then I’m going to choose to do the deal. Assuming I can make a comfortable and conservative profit, then I’m going to do the deal.
Exactly. As we wrap up here, I’d like to focus a little more on land home development. What sort of investor is land home development a good fit for?
That’s a great question. My opinion is it’s good for everybody. But if we’re going to niche down and think about who this is for, we work with lots of different types of people in our education program. I’ll just list some of the people that I’ve seen to be really successful. One is the wholesaler. You’re a wholesaler, you’re making good money, but maybe you want to go to the next level in real estate. This is a great opportunity. You know how to find good deals. Your next step is how do I learn something else in real estate to add additional value, make more money?
The second person maybe is a land flipper. We have a decent amount of land flippers. They’ve been doing land flipping, they have a lot of deal flow, they know how to find good deals on land. But maybe there’s some land that you haven’t been able to sell that you didn’t buy at a big enough discount in order to wholesale it, but it’s at a big enough discount where you can still be profitable in land home deals.
And then the last example I’ll leave you with, there’s a couple of guys that I work with and they’re really good friends of mine now. They’re in their 60s and they both had jobs, but they were kind of semi-retired, but they didn’t have quite enough built up for retirement and they wanted just a little bit of extra retirement income. And so they started doing land home deals and have been extremely successful in a different way than I have in terms of how they find deals, which is interesting to see. They’re now doing two deals a month, and their so-called retirement has built up so much so that one lives in Chicago, one lives in South Carolina, and the guy that lives in Chicago is now moving to South Carolina with his family. His wife is able to quit her job and they’re going to work together closely in South Carolina, which is really cool to see. So that’s another example of, hey, maybe you’ve got a W-2 or maybe you’re older and you’re thinking about retirement but you want to stay busy. Probably a good thing to look at.
Love that. Those are some really great avatars, examples of who’d be great for this. And is this something somebody can do in any state in the nation, or are there certain regions that are ideal?
There are definitely places that are better than others for land home packages. The way I look at it is, I’ll go to Zillow and look at sold comps. And typically I want sold properties to be above $225,000 in order to be profitable. The Southeast is really good, Texas, but there are people that are doing it in California and people doing it in North Carolina. And there’s a guy I know, he lives in Texas but he’s doing deals in Florida, or there’s a guy that lives in Boston and he’s doing deals in Tennessee. Geography doesn’t necessarily limit you in terms of being able to do land home packages, but of course there are better places than others to actually execute.
And that’s great to hear. You can do it in a totally different state, 100% remote. And then the last question I had, what are the typical requirements or barriers to entry that people need to keep in mind?
Typical requirements or barriers to entry, for me there are two things. One is finding good land deals. That is really your first objective, go find a good land deal. Don’t worry about everything else. If you find a good land deal, call me, reach out to me and I’ll help you with the rest. That’s the very first step.
The second barrier to entry is funding. When we started several years ago, funding was really hard. It’s gotten easier, but it’s still not the easiest. There are a handful of companies that will fund these or private lenders that will fund it. But as you know, if you have a good deal, most of the time the funding will follow. And then from there, it’s about operations, and operations is something you can follow a process to get done.
Perfect. And that sets us up well. Robert, if people are interested in learning more or connecting with you, what is the best way for them to do so?
The best is just to reach out to me on my cell phone. People think I’m crazy for handing out my personal cell phone, but I like talking to people and I like talking real estate. My cell phone is 864-293-2798. Just shoot me a text message and say, hey, I saw you on this podcast and would love to have a conversation with you.
I love it. Easy access. Well, thank you so much, Robert, for coming and sharing all of your wisdom and experience with us. And thank you to our listeners for listening. Please be sure to join me again next week for another amazing guest. I’ll see you then.