How to Tell a Lot About Your Mobile Home Park From the Grass
Of all the barometers of park performance, from a profit and loss statement to the annual license renewal, one of the crudest and simplest is the fine art of analyzing grass. Because you can tell a lot about a mobile home park just from looking at the grass.
The simplest first question is: “is there any grass?” If not, you may be in a desert, or under water. But if there is grass present, then here are some of the things to look for:
* Is the grass green in some areas when it’s brown everywhere else (in summer)? This may be a tell-tale sign of water and/or sewer leaks. Anything that puts moisture in the earth is going to result in healthier, greener grass. When you spot these lush oasis in an otherwise burned out park grassland, you will probably find it spongy and saturated. If the green grass is in the general line of the main (at the back of the trailer) then it may be a break in a main line. If it is near the house, it may be a break in the line that feeds just that one house. The same is true about the sewer line. A clay tile sewer system with a collapse or separation in the line will continually leak moisture and give grass a boost. When figuring out park leaks, green grass is the first place you head.
How to Get All the Leaks Out of Your Mobile Home Park Water System
Mobile home park tenants use, on average, about $30 per month of water & sewer. In some parks, however, that amount can run around $100 per occupied lot. Whenever you become suspicious that your water is running too high, here are the steps to find out where the water is going and proactively solve the problem.
Install water meters and read them.
Even if you have no interest in billing back tenants for their actual use, there is no way to track where the water is going without measuring how much tenants use. This will help you identify if your usage problems are tied to just a few tenants who abuse the system. I once had a tenant who was spending $600 per month in water. How? He sneaked into the park a large commercial construction water truck, and filled it up with his hose every night. That one tenant was the entire source of my water problem, and I found him through sub-metering.
Compare the master meter reading to the individual lot aggregate.
Once you have the individual readings, you can now add them up and see if they are the same as your master reading, from the main meter that you get your bill from. The difference between these two readings is the amount of water leaking in your system. Most parks have a small amount of leakage, so don’t demand perfection. If, however, the difference is significant (say many thousands of gallons), you have a real problem.