That Mobile Home Park Could Be a Condominium

I always like to think that a condominium is really an agreement by neighbours to manage very, very, localized communal infrastructure.

If you live in a city, you belong to a localized communal group that exists to manage common infrastructure and services required to maintain and build a local community. In regards to your city, that generally means garbage, power, transportation, zoning, and community services (pools, parks, gardens). If you look at the list, both are generally the same issues – it’s all just a matter of scale and how local the services and infrastructure are. Importantly, both a municipal government and a condominium corporation have the unilateral rights to raise funds (through taxes and, for condominiums, contributions) to meet their respective budget.

Given that definition (and importantly, government legislation), condominium corporations can take all forms, shapes, and sizes. One of those shapes being a mobile home park.

Mobile home parks share a lot of common infrastructure and services – road structures, sewage, gardens, and community enforcement. They make a great candidate to be condominium corporations. They are also very inexpensive for a developer to create – in this case they don’t even have to provide the units, just the basic infrastructure. They are also a great target to convert from a rental property to a self-managed corporation. We see conversions happen a lot with apartment rental buildings changed over into a corporation, and the process is very similar for rental parks.

Are mobile home corporations better than rental parks – for the resident I would think so. The people you have living beside you have a stronger stake in maintaining a better living standard, and you have local residents determining how to best spend the contributions.