How Smart Investors Are Building Wealth with Mobile Home Parks and Flex Industrial Space in 2025
When Jonathan Tuttle’s father bought his first mobile home park right before the 2008 financial crisis, nobody in the family expected it to become the best-performing asset in their entire portfolio. While golf courses, bowling alleys, and multifamily deals crumbled around them, the mobile home parks thrived—rents rising, waiting lists forming, and valuations climbing. That early lesson shaped Jonathan’s entire investing philosophy: go where fewer people are looking, and you’ll find more opportunity.
Today, Jonathan is the founder of Midwest Park Capital, an investment firm focused on two asset classes that most investors overlook: mobile home parks and flex industrial space. In this episode of The Real Estate Investing Club, hosted by Gabe Petersen, Jonathan breaks down exactly how and why these two niches are producing outsized returns—and where the biggest opportunities exist right now.
Quick Answer: Why Mobile Home Parks and Flex Industrial Space?
Mobile home parks offer recession-proof cash flow with low competition, while flex industrial space meets surging demand from small businesses in high-growth markets. Together, they represent two of the most undersupplied, high-demand asset classes in real estate today—offering strong returns with relatively lower risk and faster development timelines than traditional commercial projects.
What Made Mobile Home Parks Such a Powerful Investment—and What Has Changed?
The short answer: Mobile home parks were once the most overlooked asset class in real estate, offering easy value-add plays to any operator who raised rents to market rate. Today the easy deals are gone—but the asset class is still one of the most recession-resilient investments available.
Jonathan’s introduction to mobile home parks came through his father, who had tried nearly every asset class imaginable: golf courses, bowling alleys, single-family homes, multifamily. The mobile home parks stood out during the worst economic downturn in a generation.
“Our parks went up—we were raising rents and we had a waiting list because people were downsizing,” Jonathan recalled. “Every other real estate was having such a terrible time, and our parks just kept performing.”
What made them work so well a decade ago was simple: almost nobody knew about them. Mom-and-pop operators had owned these parks for 20 or 30 years, hadn’t raised rents in a decade, didn’t have websites, and didn’t know what their properties were worth. When Jonathan’s team found a 48-unit senior-focused park in 2013—rents running about $200 below market—their value-add strategy was almost embarrassingly straightforward.
“You just literally had to hand them a new rules-and-regs sheet, power-wash the front, add a rocker up front, beautify the park, kick out the bad people, and raise the rents,” Jonathan explained. “Those deals don’t really happen anymore.”
The honest truth is that institutional capital discovered mobile home parks around the same time podcasts like this one started talking about them. Brokers now coach sellers to raise rents before listing so they can command higher valuations. The sleepy, overlooked asset class has become competitive. But it hasn’t stopped being excellent—the fundamentals are simply too strong.
For a deeper look at how this asset class works from the ground up, check out our guide to mobile home park investing.
What Is the Infill Strategy for Mobile Home Parks—and Why Does It Matter Now?
The short answer: Infill—bringing vacant pads back online by placing new or used homes on them—is now the primary value-add lever in mobile home park investing. It’s operationally complex, but it’s one of the last ways investors can manufacture real equity in this asset class.
With the easy rent-raise plays largely gone, sophisticated operators are turning to infill: filling empty lots with homes to increase density, cash flow, and ultimately the park’s value. Jonathan’s team has done it on a small scale, including a creative deal where a neighboring 550-unit park owner handed over three or four used homes free of charge—just to get them off his lot.
“As long as you haul it out, we had our collaboration. He’s like, ‘Just pick them up, as long as you transport them properly,'” Jonathan said. “He didn’t care. He had so much cash and he owned it all outright.”
Gabe has been navigating this same reality. His strategy—bring in a unit, rehab it, then sell it on contract to a resident—works, but at scale it demands a dedicated team, reliable transporters, and a systematic sourcing approach. Some larger operators run virtual assistants who scour Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace all day, hunting for homes available for cheap or free.
“The transportation is the big thing—having reliable transporters. That’s the hard issue,” Jonathan noted.
Gabe even built a website (MobileHomeToday.com) using AI website builders, ranked it organically, and started generating leads from sellers across the country—proving that with some creative thinking, the sourcing problem is solvable. Explore the full breakdown of this approach in our article on the mobile home park infill strategy.
If you want to build a full portfolio around this asset class, read our guide on how to build a mobile home park portfolio.
What Is Flex Industrial Space—and Why Is It One of the Best Real Estate Investments Right Now?
The short answer: Flex industrial space is a hybrid property type—roughly 80–90% warehouse with a small office or showroom component—that serves local contractors, tradespeople, and small businesses. In high-growth markets, demand is massively outpacing supply, and because buildings are prefabricated and can be built in under six months, development timelines are shorter than almost any other commercial product.
Jonathan calls this the “product-market fit” investment: identify a fast-growing market, find a location with high traffic and zoning flexibility, and build the type of space that all the new HVAC companies, plumbers, and contractors flooding into that market desperately need.
“In a high-growth market, people need locations. Plumbers aren’t going to drive all the way from Austin if they can put their shop right in New Braunfels—and there’s 10,000 homes being developed right behind our parcel,” Jonathan said. “There are only four flex spaces right now in that market. It’s a first-mover opportunity.”
The structural advantages of flex industrial development are significant:
- Speed: Prefabricated metal buildings can be erected in roughly six months—far faster than traditional commercial construction.
- Lower cost: Buildings under 12,000 square feet don’t require a sprinkler system, saving $200,000–$300,000 per building on water main connections and installation alone.
- Modular scale: Jonathan’s current New Braunfels project is structured as six or seven 12,000-square-foot buildings (84,000 square feet total), allowing tenants of various sizes to lease individual units of 3,000–6,000 square feet.
- Visibility: Unlike traditional industrial properties tucked in out-of-the-way zones, Texas zoning flexibility allows flex buildings to sit directly on major highways—giving tenants retail-like visibility that actually helps them grow their own businesses.
“It’s 90% warehouse. Think prime locations with street visibility like retail,” Jonathan explained. “They can build out 10% as office space, have their admin take calls, maybe have a little showroom. And because of the zoning in Texas, you can be right on a major highway.”
Pre-leasing starts with a large sign on the highway (Jonathan’s New Braunfels site sees 120,000 vehicles per day) and a relationship with a major industrial leasing broker. A headline story in a local business publication has also driven strong inbound interest.
For more on industrial real estate as an investment category, see our coverage of industrial outdoor storage investing and our 2026 breakdown of industrial open-air retail for passive investors.
Why Is Texas the Top Real Estate Market for Investors in 2025 and 2026?
The short answer: Texas claims eight to ten of the fastest-growing metro areas in the United States. Combined with no state income tax, a strongly pro-business regulatory environment, and massive infrastructure investment, it remains the single most compelling state for real estate investment—especially for development plays.
Jonathan was direct about his geographic thesis: “Texas, anywhere. There’s eight or ten of the top biggest markets anywhere in Texas right now. It’s a high-growth market—you want to go where the growth is, no state income tax, pro-business state.”
His firm’s current focus is New Braunfels, a city directly between San Antonio and Austin on the I-35 corridor. The market data is compelling:
- Between $8 billion and $10 billion in active development in the immediate area
- The State of Texas has committed $3 billion to widen the major highway adjacent to Midwest Park Capital’s parcel
- 10,000 new homes under development immediately behind the project site
- National retailers entering the market, generating sustained demand for small-business space
When you’re doing development, the fundamentals of the surrounding market can make or break the project. Jonathan’s formula—go where population is growing, where jobs are following, and where infrastructure spending signals long-term commitment—is a simple but highly effective filter for identifying the best locations.
For investors also interested in Miami as an alternative: Jonathan flagged it as a strong secondary market, noting sustained population growth even as its mayor’s second term concludes.
If you’re building a portfolio designed to withstand economic cycles, our guide to building a recession-resilient real estate portfolio is worth a read.
How Are Sophisticated Real Estate Investors Using AI Tools to Find and Underwrite Deals?
The short answer: The most effective investors aren’t just using AI to save time—they’re training it, questioning it repeatedly, and feeding it real-world data to improve its outputs over time. AI is now capable of geo-targeting markets, analyzing demographics, underwriting deals from an address alone, and even functioning as a personal health coach to keep investors performing at their peak.
Both Gabe and Jonathan are enthusiastic AI adopters, and their approaches reveal something important: the difference between basic AI usage and advanced AI usage is mostly about how aggressively you question and train the model.
Jonathan’s framework is specific. He starts every AI session by instructing the model to question everything he says, conduct deep research, and not default to agreement. Then he asks the same question multiple times and forces the AI to rate its own confidence.
“The better the question you ask, the better the data you input, and the more you question it—and then you give it real-world data back—the better the results are going to be,” Jonathan said. “A lot of people don’t think about that. They just instantly take whatever it throws out.”
On the deal-underwriting side, Gabe described asking Perplexity to underwrite a car dealership acquisition simply by providing the address—and getting back a pro-forma analysis that matched what an experienced underwriter would produce. Jonathan takes it further by using AI to assess market quality before even visiting a site: “Give it a geotag and say, ‘Is this a better long-term asset? What’s the market growth, are the jobs stable, what are the demographic trends?'”
Jonathan also uses AI as a personal performance tool—tracking macros, analyzing workout data from his WHOOP band, and adjusting daily nutrition and training based on precise AI recommendations. He dropped 42 pounds and reached 7-8% body fat using this system, which he argues directly impacts his business performance: more energy, better decisions, less brain fog.
For investors looking to implement AI in their own operations, see our full guides on AI real estate investing tools for 2025 and AI tools and strategies for real estate investors. And if you’re specifically interested in how AI is transforming mobile home park operations, check out our piece on mobile home park AI strategies for 2025.
What Do Deals Gone Wrong Teach Experienced Real Estate Investors?
The short answer: The biggest deal-killer in real estate isn’t bad numbers—it’s slow people. Partners, investors, and sellers who hesitate, delay, and hedge create conditions where deals die. The most valuable skill an investor can develop is identifying who moves fast and building their network around those people.
When Gabe asked Jonathan about deals that had gone sideways, his answer wasn’t about a specific bad property—it was about a pattern in people.
“Make sure they follow through with the action they say,” Jonathan explained. “A lot of people reach out framing themselves as someone who’s going to invest or do something big—and then you watch what their actions dictate. The people who put stuff off, who you have to drag along? Those are by far the worst and hardest deals to get done.”
He put it plainly: “Time kills deals. More layers kills deals.” The investors, sellers, and partners who move with high velocity—who make fast decisions and follow through immediately—are the ones who actually close. Everyone else creates drag that accumulates until a deal collapses under its own inertia.
Gabe echoed the point from his own experience: “If somebody’s dragging their feet, I almost just stop thinking about the deal. If you’re not taking action, it’s not even in my head anymore—because a million things can happen to kill a deal.”
This lesson applies whether you’re syndicating capital, negotiating with sellers, or partnering on a development project. High-velocity decision-making is a skill to cultivate and a trait to screen for in every counterparty you work with. See our related guide on how to solve common real estate deal problems.
How Do You Raise Capital and Find the Right Investors for Mobile Home Park and Flex Industrial Deals?
The short answer: Midwest Park Capital targets experienced, high-net-worth investors with a $250,000 minimum—typically other real estate fund managers or executives who understand the asset class. This selectivity keeps operations smooth and avoids the friction that comes with investors who need extensive hand-holding.
Jonathan was candid about the investor profile his firm seeks: “Our typical investors are pretty seasoned—a lot of them are already other real estate funds or real estate executives. We get along with those clients way more easily than a typical ‘I’m going to put in $50K’ investor, because they like how we do it, they like the team.”
The $250,000 minimum investment threshold is partly practical (it keeps the investor count manageable for a smaller fund) and partly philosophical—experienced investors ask better questions, move faster, and understand that real estate development involves navigating uncertainty rather than following a guarantee.
For investors interested in raising capital at scale, our guide on raising real estate capital from family offices offers detailed strategies. And for structuring development deals with limited capital, see our post on how to structure development deals with minimal capital.
If you want to connect with Jonathan’s team directly, you can find him on LinkedIn (search Jonathan Tuttle) or visit Midwest Park Capital for mobile home park opportunities, or Land-Play for the commercial real estate and development side.
What Books Do Elite Real Estate Investors Recommend?
Jonathan’s three book picks offer a window into how he thinks about business, communication, and capital allocation:
- Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger — “The best business book. It’s about the psychology of reading people and understanding people.” Jonathan did the audiobook version of this dense, 500+ page collection of Munger’s wisdom on thinking, decision-making, and human psychology. Warren Buffett’s longtime partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Munger passed away in late 2023, but his mental models remain essential reading.
- Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff — “You have to read it six times. The first time, it’s literally changing how you think and how you communicate.” Klaff’s book teaches frame control—the idea that in any negotiation or pitch, someone’s frame will dominate, and the winner is the person who owns the frame in the first ten seconds. Jonathan credits it with helping him close high-profile clients who might otherwise dismiss a pitch as a sales approach. “They recognize you as a peer, not somebody that’s selling them.”
- Am I Being Too Subtle? by Sam Zell — The memoir of one of history’s greatest real estate investors, who famously sold his massive office portfolio right before the 2008 crash while simultaneously doubling down on mobile home parks through Equity LifeStyle Properties. “He basically talks about being in an oligopoly—dominating a market so the competition is more open.”
Key Takeaways: Building Wealth with Flex Industrial and Mobile Home Parks
- Find the niches before they go mainstream. Mobile home parks were once what flex industrial is today—obscure, misunderstood, and undervalued. Jonathan’s father found parks before institutions did; Jonathan found flex industrial before it saturates.
- The easy mobile home park deals are gone—but infill still works. The days of buying parks with rents 30% below market are largely over. Value creation now requires filling vacant lots and improving operations systematically.
- Texas is the best development market in the country right now. No state income tax, pro-business zoning, eight to ten of the fastest-growing metros in the US, and billions in active infrastructure investment make it the clearest high-growth bet available.
- Flex industrial has a short construction window. Six months from groundbreaking to occupancy. If you’re in the right market, that speed is a massive competitive advantage.
- AI is a deal tool, not just a productivity hack. Use it to underwrite, geo-target, analyze demographics, and stress-test your assumptions. And question it repeatedly—the first answer isn’t always the best one.
- Time kills deals. Screen for velocity. The quality of your network matters as much as the quality of your deals. Build relationships with people who make decisions fast and follow through.
Listen to the full conversation with Jonathan Tuttle on Episode 622 of The Real Estate Investing Club podcast. And for more on building a diversified real estate portfolio across asset classes, see our guide on how to diversify your real estate portfolio across asset classes and the capital stack.
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