Impact’s business philosophy demands ‘the rents must go up’ in Laramie’s mobile home parks
Rents are skyrocketing. Evictions are piling up. But while residents make tough choices about work and family, their multimillionaire landlords see “everything to be won” in “the game of business.”
Across Laramie, a notorious national firm is buying up mobile home parks and raising rents, forcing out those who can’t pay from what was once the most affordable housing in town.
Those who remain are making personal sacrifices — taking a second job, selling plasma or even delaying having children — to keep up with the rising cost of staying in their home.
Impact Communities bought its first Laramie park in 2020 and has since added three more parks to its investment portfolio. Today it lords over nearly 300 individual lots where residents have watched their rents rise 60-70% in three years’ time.
One resident of Country Meadow Estates — Impact’s oldest Laramie holding — is a former educator who said she had to quit her job and take up something more lucrative than teaching to keep making rent.
She and her husband have talked about leaving. But in a country and state short on housing, there are few other options.
“We don’t really have anywhere to go,” the former teacher said. “We might actually have to move out of state because we can’t afford Laramie if we can’t afford here.”
Impact Communities claims to be the fifth largest mobile home owner in the country. Despite its reach, it is not a faceless corporation. Impact has a highly visible figurehead in the form of its co-founder: Frank Rolfe.
Rolfe has spelled out his philosophy and strategy for mobile home investing in courses designed for would-be and future fellow investors. He also regularly shares his opinions in a public-facing podcast featuring lessons on every facet of “the mobile home park owning lifestyle,” which he has hosted since 2017.
Rolfe’s body of work sheds light on the mind behind a business that has radically altered the lives — and the future prospects — of those living in Laramie’s mobile home parks.
In this three-part series, the Laramie Reporter examines Impact Communities’ presence in Laramie, the philosophy driving its rent hikes and the solutions on offer to both residents and lawmakers.
Mobile Home University: ‘The customers are stuck there’
Impact Communities — “one of the industry’s largest owner-operators of high quality manufactured housing communities” — is the brainchild of investors Frank Rolfe and Dave Reynolds.
While Reynolds was “born into the business,” Rolfe started purchasing mobile home parks only after college. Both Reynolds and Rolfe have since become titans in the world of trailer park ownership, but Rolfe has bragged about the humble boldness of his initial investment 27 years ago.
“If you have $10,000, you could buy a mobile home park just as I did in 1997,” he writes in a post on his website.
But that $10,000 was simply the down payment on the park’s $400,000 price tag and it was chump change to Rolfe, who had sold a successful billboard business the year before for $5.8 million.
Promoting this “bootstraps” narrative is important, however, to the pair’s side business: training new and prospective trailer park investors, instilling in them the cold logic that underpins Impact’s own behavior. They do this through Mobile Home University, through which one can buy a 24-CD audio course for about $600 or attend an in-person “boot camp” for about $1,750.
Portions of this training have been made public through investigative reporting, character features in major news publications and even an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
The overall message of the training is clear and candid: trailer park residents are trapped in their homes and effectively powerless, so you should buy the land beneath them and start raising the rent.
“One of the big drivers to making money is the ability to increase the rent,” Rolfe says on one of the audio CDs. “If we didn’t have them hostage, if they weren’t stuck in those homes, in those mobile home lots, it’d be a whole different picture.”
The “hostage” comment mirrors a remark Rolfe made to Bloomberg News in 2014 about the reliable profitability enjoyed by trailer park tycoons.
“We’re like a Waffle House where everyone is chained to the booths,” he said.
Rolfe has since added a page to Mobile Home University to explain this quote was taken out of context, but his own explanation demonstrates that he fundamentally endorses the idea behind the quote and simply regrets the flippancy.
“The customers are stuck there,” Rolfe reiterates in other material from Mobile Home University. “They don’t have any option. They can’t afford to move the trailer. They don’t have $3,000. So the only way they can object to your rent raise is to walk off and leave the trailer — in which case it becomes abandoned property and you recycle it and put another person in it. So you really hold all the cards … So the question is: what do you want to do? How high do you want to go?”
Mobile Home Mastery: ‘Everything to be won’
In a 2014 feature published by the New York Times, Rolfe said candidly that his business model is built on the heavy and unforgiving use of eviction procedures.
He even told the Times reporter he avoids buying parks in California or New York, because the laws in those states are too “tenant friendly” and it takes a little longer to evict people from their homes.
Instead, Impact targets states like Wyoming, where renters and mobile home owners have almost no explicit protections and where those with the capital to invest in shelter often do “hold all the cards.”
While the most damning quotes highlighted by Oliver and others come from Mobile Home University’s pricey courses, Rolfe is not shy about offering his business advice publicly. He hosts a weekly podcast, through which he lectures on various aspects of mobile home park ownership and investing.
While some episodes explain “Everything You Need To Know About Road Widths” and “The Best Parts About The Mobile Home Park Owning Lifestyle,” other episodes rail against “the war on landlords,” federal laws, and the media’s coverage of mobile home parks, which often does not cast people like Rolfe in the best light.
The back catalog of these 10-15-minute essays paint a picture of Rolfe’s approach to business as well as his response to the criticism he’s faced.
In an episode from November 2023 titled “Churning, Burning And Learning,” Rolfe pushes back on the idea that his business or its subsidiaries are pushing people out of their homes.
“It costs you a ton of money when you lose a resident,” he says. “The media is clearly dead wrong on this one issue. There are so many articles that say that Mobile Home Park owners desire, their goal was to run off the residents, and that’s absolutely insanity. If there’s one thing a mobile home park owner would never want to do, that’s lose a resident.”
But Rolfe says losing residents is unavoidable.
“When you first buy a mobile home park and you start enforcing collections and rules and you start raising the rents, you will certainly lose some residents who are just not prepared to live in a modern world,” he warns prospective investors. “And those are the people that often ‘mom and pop’ fostered and empowered by letting them live there rent-free, sometimes for years at a time.”
There’s an inevitability Rolfe attaches to the rent raises he promotes. The market allows “new, professional, more institutional owners” to charge more than the “mom and pops” they’re replacing; therefore “rents have to go up.”
In an August 2023 episode titled “The Mechanics Of A Successful Rent Raise,” Rolfe objects to the suggestion that business moguls like himself would do otherwise.
Mobile home park owners are simply held to a different standard. In every other business when you raise the price of your goods or service, it’s considered good business. But in our industry, you’re told that it’s evil, that it’s bad. I’ve had many interviews with many publications over the last 30 years, and the craziest ones are the ones who ask me, ‘Why do you raise rents? Why can’t you lower rents?’ Well, it’s kind of an insane question when you’re trying to run a business because a hallmark of good business is that you set your rates appropriately. And the problem is, as a mobile home park owner, we’re often taking on properties that have never had their rent, ever, set to market levels. And as a result, as an owner, you have to raise them.
In that same episode, Rolfe recommends raising rents gradually rather than all at once, not raising rents during the holidays and pairing rent hikes to park improvements.
Residents of Impact properties in Laramie said they have seen some small improvements, such as potholes filled. Mostly, they have seen their bills go up.
Rolfe is a capitalist in every sense of the word. For the trailer park titan, the capitalist competition that has made him rich is built on an unimpeachable fairness.
“Business in fact is the only fair thing there is out there today because business is all about access and the game of business is open to all,” Rolfe says in a January 2023 episode titled “Life Isn’t Fair.” “Capitalism, which is what our country is based upon, is based on meritocracy. It’s 100% egalitarian.”
Those who label capitalism — or Rolfe’s business practices in particular — as unfair are, according to Rolfe, “jealous” they didn’t make the same smart investments.
“Ignore false cries of unfairness,” Rolfe says. “They’re simply meant to confuse and distract you from what’s actually completely fair.”
Business, he adds, is a matter of winners and losers. And that’s true even if you’re in the business of shelter.
“In every downturn, there are winners and there are losers,” Rolfe says. “You want to be a winner. You want to go ahead and choose smartly the venue that you participate in and work it to its fullest. There’s absolutely nothing unfair in business, nothing unfair in the mobile home park industry, and everything to be won.”
Broken dreams
But “the game of business” does not feel “open to all” for Charlotte, an Impact resident living in Mountain View Estates with her husband and children.
Charlotte’s name has been changed for this story, to protect her from the retaliation she and other residents said they fear for speaking out.
More than a decade ago, Charlotte and her husband made what they viewed at the time as the temporary decision to buy a mobile home and set it up in the Mountain View neighborhood.
“The plan was we would hunker down and rent to save money,” Charlotte said. “And then in about five years, we would have enough money to make a down payment and either get into a real house in Laramie, or be able to get property — whether that was on a city block, or whether that was out of town.”
Rent was $350. Technically, it was $400, but the couple always earned the $50 discount stipulated in their lease by keeping the lot manicured and tidy. Charlotte and her husband were planning to eventually turn the mobile home into a rental, maybe even a short-term rental through a service like AirBnB, and make a little cash each summer around Cheyenne Frontier Days.
But it didn’t pan out that way. And now, it looks increasingly like it never will.
The trailer park has changed hands several times during Charlotte’s residency. But in December 2020, Impact bought the park through a subsidiary company and soon after started implementing their standard set of changes.
First, Charlotte was moved to a month-to-month lease — a development that has empowered the company to raise rent at more regular intervals than a typical annual lease would allow. And nearly every utility or service once covered by the flat monthly rate was pulled out and charged separately.
The latest rent hike went into effect this March — a $59 jump from the previous month, bringing Charlotte’s base rent to $514. In a typical month this summer, she paid an additional $80 for sewer, trash and water.
This means she has seen a 70 percent increase in the amount of money her family has to shell out every month just to stay in their home.
They’ve thought about leaving, trying to pick up their home and move, but — despite the name — mobile homes are not that easy to move. Such a move is expensive, usually several thousand dollars, and the structure often requires repairs once it’s set down in a new location.
Charlotte always makes rent. But given the stakes, the couple lives in constant fear of eviction.
“We don’t have any place else to go,” she said. “I have to stay in this contract. If we don’t sign the contract, we’re evicted. And it’s been explained very thoroughly that if we’re evicted — even though the house is our property — we have 30 days to remove the house from the [lot]. If the house is not removed from their property within 30 days, they just absorb the house, and it becomes their property. But I get to still continue to pay the mortgage.”
Unlike other forms of shelter, mobile homes depreciate in value over time. But this depreciating asset is a significant portion of everything Charlotte and her husband own.
So they’ve stayed. And instead of dreaming for that future house, they’ve shifted their attention to keeping up with their landlord’s greed.
The increasing demands and the receding dreams of home ownership have led Charlotte to some pretty dark places. She jokes about someone like the late Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner taking an interest in her.
“Probably the easiest way to make money, that kind of money, is to sell me,” she said. “I’m not exactly the friendliest person on the block so that probably doesn’t work very well — in addition to my husband doesn’t like that.”
It’s dark humor but there’s a kernel of truth in it. When you don’t have much cash, it’s difficult to make more. And working overtime won’t be enough to make rent if Impact keeps demanding more.
Charlotte knows other park residents, who — like Courtney Walker over in Blake’s — have contemplated or started to donate plasma.
“But BioLife isn’t going to give you that much; I mean, it might give you an extra 100 bucks a week,” Charlotte said. “We’re fortunate because we’re young so I can pick up a second job; I can figure something else out.”
But they have kids now, and that makes working around the clock more difficult.
“What it boils down to is me getting an online job, and getting three hours of sleep to survive,” Charlotte said. “We haven’t taken that leap yet. But it’s just gonna get worse. We both take as much overtime as any job allows.”
That’s not an option for everyone, Charlotte said.
“We have multiple people in [Mountain View] that are disabled or earn social security because they’re retired,” she said. “And that’s part of the reason why they chose these places. Because it’s a neighborhood and it’s a community feel, and people can help take care of you and your property if you need.”
Turning profits
Like Charlotte, many Impact residents in Laramie chose the parks they did because, until recently, they were the cheapest quarters a family could find. With rents skyrocketing and evictions mounting, they’re being priced out of their homes and possibly out of Laramie.
The kicker, Charlotte said, is that Impact could have made plenty of money by keeping rent the same or raising it modestly. She said collecting $350-$400 a month for the nearly 300 lots Impact has purchased across Laramie would provide a sizable revenue for the company and its investors.
“We understand that you need to make a profit, rent income is how you make your profit … but you have the capability to strike in the middle ground so we can survive,” Charlotte said. “You’re telling me that that’s not enough money?”
But as Impact’s behavior makes plain — and as its founders’ podcasts, online courses and in-person bootcamps make clear — the answer, evidently, is no.
“You can listen to this guy’s seminars — and the whole situation is that he’s targeting mobile homes and mobile parks because we are uneducated, we’re poor — insert any horrendous, awful, derogatory term for human beings you can use … and we’ll just pay out the money,” Charlotte said. “We’re just at their mercy.”
Taking on new jobs and working longer hours will only get one so far if the rent keeps rising. So Charlotte and other residents have been asking themselves how to find a more permanent solution. They’ve been wondering, sometimes together, sometimes aloud: how does one get out from under the thumb of trailer park titans like Frank Rolfe and Impact Communities?
The answer, it turns out, might involve firing their landlord.
The third and final installment of this series will examine the solutions available to Laramie’s mobile home park residents … and to the state and local officials who seek to help them.
An infuriating, heart-wrenching, and absolutely vital piece of journalism. Thank you.
It's a second level of evil when you don't give a damn about going after poor people.