In Laramie’s mobile home parks, a notorious national firm is forcing residents out of their homes
Impact Communities has bought out at least four of Laramie’s largest trailer parks through an interconnected web of LLCs. Residents face skyrocketing rents as evictions are handed out “like candy.”
Courtney Walker doesn’t have time to sell her blood.
She already has a full-time job with HIVIZ Shooting Systems — a manufacturer of sights for handguns, shotguns and rifles — and she makes a healthy salary doing it.
But it might not be enough to satiate her landlord’s greed. Lot rent has nearly doubled in the last three years at Blake’s Mobile Home Ranch, the West Laramie trailer park Walker calls home.
“There’s just no reason for it,” Walker said. “A lot of us have resorted to going to BioLife and donating plasma — which is fine, you’re helping, you’re saving somebody — but that can just be a hassle after a while. We’re doing DoorDash and stuff like that, just to make ends meet.”
There is indeed a reason for the rent hikes, however, and its name is Impact Communities.
The notorious national firm — noted in the press, by activists and even by late-night hosts for its “cold” business practices — has been buying up mobile home parks in Laramie through an interconnected web of subsidiary companies, nabbing four properties since 2020 and coming to lord over some 280 total lots, or roughly a quarter of all manufactured homes in the county.
Once a park is acquired by Impact, the company aggressively raises rent, showing little leniency for those on fixed incomes or those facing medical emergencies.
“They won’t work with anybody on anything,” Walker said.
If residents don’t pay the new rate exactly on time, they are promptly served an eviction notice.
In just four years, the company, through its subsidiaries, has attempted 28 evictions, while an untold number of other residents have fled, unable to afford what was once the cheapest housing in town.
The residents who remain are facing tough choices about how to cover rent and utilities. Sometimes, that means selling plasma. For other residents, that has meant taking overtime, or leaving a dream job, or delaying plans for children.
And it’s all in the service of lining Impact’s pockets.
Walker’s lot rent was $350 when she moved into Blake’s at the start of 2021 — a figure that included water, sewage and other utility costs. Impact had already purchased the park, but the company had not yet raised rent or introduced any of the changes that have caused their residents so much grief since. However, before long, the company started nudging up the rent every few months.
Today, for the exact same lot, Walker is paying $539 — plus the various utility bills that used to be included in the base rate. Water and trash are now separate charges. Between lot rent, utilities, and a “utility service fee,” Walker is now paying about $590 a month — meaning she’s seen an almost 70 percent real increase in three years’ time.
And there’s no indication the rent hikes will stop anytime soon.
“I don’t know what they’re gonna cap it at,” Walker said. “I have no idea.”
When she has asked about when it might stop, about when rent might cap out, she’s been fed a line that will sound familiar to Laramie renters. Walker is told her landlord must “keep up” with the market.
“They are ‘still going to be the cheapest in Laramie,’” Walker said. “But they’re ‘trying to keep up with the times.’”
But “the times” are coming to be defined by Impact Communities and the other private equity-backed firms that have been gobbling up trailer park communities nationwide. So where the rent hikes end no one can say, but amidst a local and national housing shortage, the price point where supply meets demand for the cheapest shelter around is likely to leave many homeless.
Walker is not the only one weathering these developments.
Across Laramie, hundreds have suddenly found themselves under the thumb of Impact Communities and are facing similarly difficult decisions about how to make ends meet, whether to move, or whether to start a family.
All the while, a hungry group of investors keeps demanding more — and the relentless firm that feeds them keeps expanding, siphoning money from the BioLife cards and overtime bonuses of Laramie’s poorest residents to those faraway landlords.
Those who can’t pay are removed from their homes.
“They’re threatening evictions left and right,” Rep. Karlee Provenza (HD-45) told the Laramie City Council last fall. “They’re just throwing them out like candy.”
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.
Impact advances through Laramie
Impact Communities came to town in 2020, purchasing Country Meadow Estates in July of that year. A few months later, it started raising the rent. Since then, Impact has filed seven eviction notices for lots in Country Meadows, all for failure to make rent.
In December of 2020, Impact added two more Laramie trailer parks to its portfolio — Mountain View Estates and Blake’s Mobile Home Ranch — each purchased by subsidiary LLCs. Since then, it’s filed eight eviction notices across both parks, all but one for failure to make rent.
In the summer of 2022, Impact bought Shadow Ridge MHC (also known as Seven Acres) and began evicting residents that winter. In 2023 alone, the company filed 11 eviction notices. Two more evictions were filed in the summer of 2024.
In less than four years, across the city, Impact has filed for a total of 28 evictions. All but one of these evictions were served to residents who had failed, or allegedly failed, to make a newly raised lot rent.
The actual number of residents who lost their homes during this time could be more or less. Not every eviction notice results in an actual eviction or an actual vacation of the property. Sometimes an eviction notice functions as a threat — one delivered by the county sheriff’s office — that residents could face homelessness if they don’t pay up. Sometimes that threat is effective and the residents pay.
But the number of evictions does not represent the total number of residents forced out of their homes by the rent hikes. Others have left, seeking opportunities or shelter elsewhere, being unable to pay the new, higher rates.
Evelyn, a resident of Country Meadows since 2021, has seen this happening in her neighborhood, where those unable or unwilling to pay have moved out or been evicted for failure to make rent. She’s put her own plans for having children on hold, knowing they would be a financial burden she could not meet on top of her ever-rising lot rent.
“I asked the manager, ‘When does this stop?’ A lot of our really tight, good community has left,” Evelyn said. “The answer I was told was: ‘We would like to stay competitive with rental prices.’”
Interview requests submitted via email to all four Laramie parks went unanswered. Reached by phone Friday, a self-identified “receptionist” for one local park directed the Reporter to “the main office” for comment, but provided two phone numbers answered only by automated advertisements for various insurance offers. A message left with Impact’s Cedaredge headquarters received no reply.
Pricing people out of their homes
Evelyn has narrowly avoided eviction herself, but it’s taken personal and professional sacrifices to remain in her home. Evelyn’s name has been changed for this story, at her request, to protect her from reprisal by the company or its representatives.
When she and her partner moved into Country Meadows, Evelyn was working as a preschool teacher at Head Start of Laramie.
“It didn’t make great money, but it was a good job,” she said. “And it was doing something that was extremely important.”
The couple had chosen Country Meadows for its affordable pricing. They paid just $360 for their first month in the new home — a dollar amount that included both the lot rent and utilities.
“I pay around $600 now for just the lot rent,” Evelyn said.
Pandemic-era Emergency Rental Assistance helped Evelyn and her partner keep up with the rising rent for a while. Those programs are now over, but the rent remains high.
“I had to leave teaching because I couldn’t make enough teaching in order to stay in a trailer park,” Evelyn said. “I got another job, and we’re still not doing okay.”
Evelyn and her partner are hanging on, hoping they can still make Country Meadows work for them. But they have talked about leaving. And many of their neighbors have done more than talk.
“I was very good friends with a lot of my neighbors, and a lot of my neighbors were forced to leave,” Evelyn said. “A lot of my elderly neighbors, which we were really good friends with, were on fixed incomes and they’re like, ‘We can’t afford this.’”
Buying up a community and pricing people out of their homes might seem like a flawed business practice — but with nowhere cheaper on offer, many residents, like Evelyn, will struggle and save or switch careers to make a place like Country Meadows work for them.
And if push comes to shove, and residents like Evelyn and her partner can’t pay, others will likely jump at the chance. In a country short on houses, there will always be another family seeking shelter and ready to move in.
“They know someone will pay the rent,” Evelyn said. “So [they] get us out of the way, so they can move new houses in, which is what they did with a couple of tenants. I think that we’re just here until they can move us out.”
This pattern — of buying up a park, raising rents, evicting those who can’t pay and forcing out those on the margins — is playing out in all four Impact-owned mobile home parks across Laramie. Evelyn’s park was simply the first.
With no clear end in sight, Evelyn and her partner have been weighing their options.
“We don’t really have anywhere to go,” she said. “We might actually have to move out of state because we can’t afford Laramie if we can't afford here.”
‘How high do you want to go?’
The struggles faced by Walker, Evelyn and so many others now living on Impact Communities’ land is not limited to Laramie.
Across the nation, private equity-backed firms are buying up mobile home communities, hiking rents and forcing residents out of their homes. These firms frequently target states like Wyoming, which do not have explicit protections for mobile home residents on the books.
In this new environment of widespread corporate ownership, Impact Communities stands out among its competitors in no small part thanks to the public profile of one of the firm’s leaders.
Frank Rolfe speaks publicly — and prolifically — about his own approach to making investments, running parks and dealing with residents. In various interviews, podcasts and the mobile home investing courses he sells through his website, Rolfe has been consistently transparent about the power he wields as a mobile home mogul.
“The customers are stuck there,” Rolfe tells junior investors taking his Mobile Home University course. “They don’t have any option. They can’t afford to move the trailer. They don’t have $3,000.”
This results in a power imbalance between the owner of the land and the owner of the home — an imbalance that, by Rolfe’s own admission, benefits him.
“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,” he continues. “You really hold all the cards … So the question is: what do you want to do? How high do you want to go?”
Courtney Walker said she fears what that philosophy will do to her neighborhood. While market forces let her landlord charge more for the ground beneath her home, those some market forces don’t always translate into raises for the people forced to pay the rent.
“Within the next five years, I can see our lot rent being well over $800 — well over $800,” she said. “And, you know, not everybody’s getting raises because the economy is going up.”
But as Rolfe’s public statements make plain, he doesn’t view the hardships imposed by his rent hikes as his responsibility — or even his fault.
The second installment of this series will examine Rolfe’s philosophy of mobile home ownership and the justification it provides for Impact’s activity in Laramie and beyond.
Thanks for reporting on this. The majority of people that they victimize are the poorest and least able to fight back. It's really sickening, it's high time Wyoming and Albany county stepped up to protect some of their most vulnerable citizens.
Thank you for writing this piece and all the others I have enjoyed reading!