What a mobile home park is worth in Tennessee
Mobile home parks are valued on income, not on comparable sale price per acre. The arithmetic is short: gross potential lot rent, less operating expenses, gives net operating income; NOI divided by a capitalisation rate gives value. Everything that moves the number moves one of those three inputs.
Tennessee has roughly 1,300 mobile home parks holding about 74,000 lots, so the average park in the state carries around 57 lots. At the state's average lot rent of $425 a month, that average park generates about $291K a year in gross potential lot rent before vacancy and collections.
Applying a 35% expense ratio — typical for lot-rent-only operations where residents own their homes and pay their own utilities — leaves roughly $189K of NOI. Capitalised between 5.5% and 7.5%, that is about $2.5M to $3.4M, or roughly $44K to $60K per lot. These are illustrative figures from state averages, not an appraisal of any specific property.
Gross potential rent across the Tennessee market
Across all 74,000 lots in Tennessee, the state's lot-rent economy runs to roughly $377.4M a year in gross potential rent. That figure is what makes the asset class interesting to institutional buyers: it is recurring, it is spread across many small tenancies, and the resident typically owns the home, which makes turnover slower than in apartments.
Average park size matters as much as rent. A 57-lot park in Tennessee sits at a scale where professional management has to be paid for out of a relatively small NOI, which is why per-lot values compress at the small end and expand once a park clears roughly 80-100 lots.
Gross potential rent is a ceiling, not a forecast. Physical vacancy, collections loss and any park-owned homes in the mix all sit between GPR and the number a lender will underwrite.
From NOI to a cap rate in Tennessee
The cap rate is where most of the disagreement in a mobile home park deal lives. It is not a state-specific constant — it moves with interest rates, the buyer's cost of capital, the condition of the infrastructure, whether utilities are master-metered or submetered, and how much of the income comes from park-owned homes rather than lot rent.
The 5.5%-7.5% band used above is a national working range for stabilised, lot-rent-driven parks, applied here as an input so the arithmetic is transparent. A park with private utilities, deferred capital work or a heavy park-owned-home component will trade wider than that; a large, stabilised, public-utility park in a strong submarket can trade inside it.
Run the numbers on a specific park with the <a href="/calculators/park-valuation/">park valuation calculator</a>, which takes your own lot count, rent, expense ratio and cap rate rather than state averages.
What moves valuation in Tennessee
Tennessee does not cap lot-rent increases at the state level, so rent growth is governed by the lease, notice requirements and what the local market will bear. That flexibility is usually reflected in what buyers will pay. The governing statute is TCA Title 66, Chapter 28.
Utility structure is the other lever buyers price hardest. A master-metered park where the operator absorbs water and sewer carries both a higher expense ratio and more exposure to rate increases; submetering and billing back moves that cost to the resident and can lift NOI materially without a single rent increase.
Occupancy and home ownership mix round it out. Vacant lots are the cheapest growth in the asset class because the infrastructure is already in the ground, which is why infill programmes are usually underwritten separately from in-place income.