How to Track Lot Occupancy Across Multiple Mobile Home Parks

Single-park operators can keep lot occupancy in their head. Multi-park operators can't — and the spreadsheet workaround stops scaling somewhere around park three. This is the lot-level data model we use across portfolios, and the four occupancy classifications that keep your reporting honest when you're rolling up a board deck.

Track at lot level, not unit level

Apartment software counts units. Park software has to count lots. The difference matters: a lot can be vacant with no home on it, occupied by a park-owned home rented to a tenant, occupied by a tenant-owned home paying lot rent only, or held intentionally vacant for an infill project. Apartment-style unit tracking collapses all four into a single binary.

When you treat the lot as the primary record and the home as a child entity, you get clean rollups: economic occupancy, physical occupancy, and infill pipeline are all derivable from the same data without manual reconciliation.

The four occupancy states that matter

We classify every lot in the portfolio into one of four states. Reporting downstream of this is straightforward.

• Occupied — paying
  A home is on the lot, a lease is active, and rent is current. This is the only state that contributes to physical AND economic occupancy.
• Occupied — non-paying
  Home is there, lease is active, but the tenant is in arrears. Counts toward physical occupancy but not economic.
• Vacant — available
  No home, no commitments, ready for infill or move-in. This is your true sales pipeline.
• Vacant — held
  No home, but earmarked for a specific incoming home or project. Don't advertise these.

Building rollups that actually rollup

Once every lot is classified, the rollups write themselves: park-level occupancy is a count by state, portfolio-level is a sum of park-levels, and trended-over-time is a snapshot per month. The mistake operators make here is computing rollups from individual park spreadsheets and ending up with three different occupancy numbers in the same board deck.

If the rollup lives in software that owns the lot record, the numbers reconcile by construction. If the rollup lives in a spreadsheet, plan to spend an hour reconciling before every investor call.

What lenders and lenders-to-be want to see

When you go to refinance or syndicate, lenders want trended physical and economic occupancy by park, not just current. Your software should produce a 24-month occupancy trend chart in two clicks. If it doesn't, build the export query yourself once and save it.