From Marine Corps to Mobile Home Mogul: Joseph Jackson’s Real Estate Journey

Glenn Today my guest is Joseph Jackson, General Partner of Prime Oak Capital. Welcome, Joseph. Joseph Jackson Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me on. Glenn Yeah, great to have you. I've met you at the Seco conference and another fellow mobile home operator figured it'd be a great conversation. Joseph Jackson Yeah, absolutely. Glenn So, if you could just tell us a little bit about your story. Joseph Jackson Yeah, yeah. So, I grew up in a mobile home park that my grandparents owned, and they actually sold it in ‘99. And it's, you know, it's an amazing park. It's still named after us for whatnot Jackson mobile home park. But, but yeah, no, grew up there helping do all kinds of things around the parks, you know, maintaining the homes and everything like that. I grew up and from there I went to the Marine Corps. I served in the Marine Corps for 21 years, finally said, you know, it's time to retire. But about a year before I retired, I realized I was going to have to get a grown-up job, and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up. And so, I had a buddy that suggested duplexes. Let's get into duplexes and stuff. I kind of, you know, I did the numbers, and I told him, said, hey, man, like we're to have to have like 100, 200, 300 of these things to even make sense for, know, for me not to get a job when I get out. And, from there, I just started doing research and said, why not mobile home parks? Right. And, I've had a lot of good mentors come in as I jumped into, the game that's really helped me. And, yeah, I just, the biggest thing was I took action and, started trying to find deals and felt deals and then found a couple of partners that, believed in me and We jumped in and then yeah, I mean we've bought five parks now. We sold a park and the history is still right in itself. Glenn That's awesome. Yeah, some of my best mentors in all work have been military guys. And the one thing I would say about as much as we could point out the flaws, I would say that they are running the biggest operation and the way of management and the leadership skills that they teach when you're there are invaluable. Joseph Jackson Yeah, absolutely. It really has helped me transition with everything from tasks, know, management to dealing with different personalities that live in the mobile home parks, the different personalities of managers, maintenance people, vendors, and just having that diverse background of dealing with everybody from every walk of life and, you know, coming from a mobile home park. And then going to these conferences and rubbing elbows with people that have already made it right. So, I get I get a little bit of everything in there and it really has helped me. You know, really kind of be a chameleon and fit in exactly where I need to be at that time. Glenn Yeah, the conferences are pretty interesting. I went to my first one this year and I quickly saw what I was doing different than everyone else. I'm like, well, I was like, these guys, it's either I'm onto something or else they know something I don't and that's why they don't do what we're doing. So, it's kind of like, you know, we're buying all the small parks and they're like, wow, you know, just because a lot of people always ask like, why are you, how are you buying in Florida? was like, well, we're just buying a bunch of terrible small parks and making them nice or trying to convert them to financeable parks. And yeah, that's the one thing I got from this. There is a really good conference that I went to. I'm planning on going to two a year is ideal. Joseph Jackson Same here. Same here. I really enjoy MHI and then I enjoy Louisville. And then since CECO is right here in Atlanta, I will always go to that one. Glenn Yeah, definitely. So how did you get teamed up with your partners and how to buy real estate or to buy mobile home parks? Joseph Jackson Yeah, so it's kind of two different groups, right? When I first started out, I got with a group. It's called ADPI. It's Active-Duty Passive Income group, right? If you're a veteran, retired or if you're active duty, it doesn't matter. It would be a good group to check out. Cause it's nothing but military members in there and I went through their mastermind class and everything and from there, I made my partnerships with four other gentlemen and formed a group called Valhalla. And we bought three mobile home parts together. As I said, two of them were smaller. And then our last one we bought was 86 pads. And from there, we just started kind of learning how to do it. Glenn Nice. Joseph Jackson Then we sold one of the really small ones and the other one is a development RV development one that we're still working on. It's been about a year and a half now, but when I was doing all that I was posting all my wins on LinkedIn and everything like that and kind of showing what I was doing. Then my current partner, his name is Herschel Shaw with Primo Capital, an awesome guy who reached out to me on LinkedIn and just wrote, I love your vision. I love what you're trying to do. I love everything about it. I'm trying to break into the Southeast part of the United States. That's where you're located. Let's talk. So, we jumped on a phone call. And since then, we've bought two large mobile home parks. And yeah, like it's been, it's been great, and I love working with him. He's an awesome guy. And I think that our future is huge. Glenn Awesome. So, with those two mobile home parks… So for us, it's like easy to find the smaller mobile home parks because they're like, they're everywhere. To find the large mobile home parks, it's like so hard. I almost never even see them for sale. I'm in Florida though. I think the market's a little, it might be different, but how did you come across finding the larger mobile home parks? Joseph Jackson Yeah, so I will tell you that relationship with brokers, wholesalers, and also building your own list of mobile home parts, right? So, you find the mobile home parts, then you do the work to find out who owns them, and then try to get to those owners. That way your cold calling will actually mean something. And I will tell you that that's been our strategy to just build relationships, really close relationships with brokers because nobody is really selling a 200 lot mobile home park off market. It's just that, I mean, maybe, but for the most part, they're gonna hit the market, but they're gonna be on the market for a very short time because somebody is gonna get it under contract fairly quickly. Just because who you're dealing with, you're going against, I don't want to say going against, but you're bidding against institutional buyers at that moment. Glenn Yeah. So what was the size of the two parks that you bought? Joseph Jackson Yeah, 253 lots and then 137 lots. Glenn Wow, I couldn't imagine what 253 units at one time would be like. Joseph Jackson Going from the largest one that I had currently ran at 86 lots, then jumping to 253 lots. That's a huge difference. It really, it really is. It brings a whole different element to it just because of how many how many tasks each day there are. How many you know tenants you have to deal with and stuff like that, right? Because you could have you could be having five or six evictions going on, three or four move-ins coming in, moving mobile homes out, CapEx projects going on, maintenance problems over there. So, it really starts to get to the point where when you go for big mobile home parks like that, you really need your operations in stone at that point. Really understand how to grease the wheels, how to get things done, what the order of things needs to be done in, stuff like that. Glenn Going back to it, I think that's where having the military background, you have to put together a really good team to really manage those. Cause 250 units, like if we added 250 units, we'd have to add like five, at least five field employees, you know, just to like figure out leasing or selling and construction maintenance. There’s a lot to it. And, we have, I mean, we have like one area that's like about 100 units and we have about two or three people consistently working, you know, at those places to buy something that large. It's the reason why they're institutional grade is because you can pretty much buy a business at 250 units or anything over 100. I would imagine it would get to that level. Joseph Jackson Yeah, absolutely and you know so what's great about it is that we got it for a reasonable price too because the guy that owned it was the original owner, like the original builder of it back in the seventies. Glenn Nice. Joseph Jackson And it's an amazing location too. It's surrounded by million-dollar homes all around it and stuff like that. It's right. mean, it's like a mile to downtown, the downtown area. It's in Lafayette, Louisiana, right? And so you really think of that area as being like that, but I mean, it's an amazing area. It's great. But it had slipped - probably talking to the tenants and everything said - within the last five years, things have started going downhill. And that's because the owner couldn't be as active in there and all this other stuff, right? So, it's going to be absolutely amazing park. We have a ton of CapEx going into it. We're revamping a lot of stuff in there. But I will tell you, yeah, like we are learning sales right now and with this many homes, it's absolutely crazy. Glenn Yeah, that's awesome. So when you buy a park like that, is it like, your park manager is like a real park manager. Like they pretty much manage the whole park, including construction and maintenance. Is that how it works? Joseph Jackson Yeah, so our manager, she lives there in the park. We actually brought in a home for her. And so, she has a brand-new house there and everything. So, she lives right across from the office, which could be, it's a great thing, but it's also a curse for her, you know. But yes, she manages the maintenance guys. We have two maintenance guys that work there doing everything from maintaining the pool to cutting the grass to maintenance issues with the sewer and the water lines, stuff like that. And she manages it all from there, because I'm eight hours away and Herschel is, I think he would probably be, 13 to 15 hours away in California. Yeah, I mean you have to have a very strong team to do that. Glenn Yeah, mean, definitely. So, let's talk about some things that happened after you bought the park. Things that you learned right away almost. Joseph Jackson Yeah, yeah, so the first thing is terracotta. We have terracotta sewer lines, right? So, it's city. It's on the city sewer. We had done the due diligence we had had a company come out there and look at the lines and everything like that. And from what they were saying the lines looked really good and everything like that, right? Well, what we weren't expecting was that this park is beautiful because it has so many trees. But just like you probably know that trees are not the friends of a mobile home park. Glenn Yeah. Joseph Jackson So, we, we found out really quick that the trees were, were getting into the tree roots were getting into the sewer lines and then we're spending an exorbitant amount of money repairing these lines, getting them jetted and stuff like that. Right. And so what we, what we found is that what we needed to do instead of replacing all the lines. We sleeved them so they come in with this machine and then they sleeve all the lines. That's going to keep all the tree roots out and everything like that. So what did we learn? Glenn What is sleeving? What material is that? Joseph Jackson Yeah, so it's like a foam plastic, right? I mean, it's like a substance that's super hard that they blow through the lines and it adds like millimeters to the lines, right? And so it seals up all the cracks and everything and makes it like almost like PVC pipe all the way down. So you don't have to worry about the trees growing in it anymore, stuff like that. And it makes sure that there's no cave-ins from the terracotta. A lot of the city's infrastructure is now with this sleeving stuff because they don't have enough money to tear these old lines out and so they're getting their stuff sleeved also. And so we learned all about that. Deep dived into all of that stuff is supposed to last, you know, 90 years or so. They give you a 10-year warranty on their work and stuff, but they assure us - like I said, we're new at this also - they assure us that it's going to last. And so we took a big leap of faith with that, because there was no option to replace these lines because the old owner, he put the water lines, the sewer lines, the electrical lines and the gas lines all in the same hole, all in the same ditch, you know? And then it looked like he moved the mobile homes, in there because they're running in between the mobile homes. And then the mobile homes are so close to each other. You can't get equipment back there the dig even if you wanted to So this was really the only option for us. The only viable option. Now man, the second part of that is the same we got our water lines checked out and everything but there was no way to tell that our water lines were thin wall PVC. And come to find out a lot of them had, it's been kind of piece milled between galvanized steel and this PVC, this thin wall PVC. And so, with the water lines though, we can just leave them in place and then put down new water lines in front of the mobile homes and connect them together. So that's the way we're going with that. And that's actually in progress right now. And so, what did we learn from that? If you get terracotta, make sure you do the price correctly on that, knowing that terracotta has probably been in the ground for 40 years or so, it's coming to the end of its life most likely, right? Glenn It sounds like a huge endeavor, but the good thing about buying a park like a 250-unit park is that you have a 250-unit park. If it was a small park, you would have been screwed. Joseph Jackson That's right. And so once we're done with this park and we're able to put it back on the market, you know in 10 years, or whatever we decide, we can hand it over and say hey, all the infrastructure is brand new. There you go. The roads are new. We did all the CapEx for the clubhouse, the pool and all of that. We did all the tree work for you. And by the way, we filled the 43 vacant lots that we're filling up and now they have tenants in it. So, once we do all that and we decide to sell, it'll definitely be a major accomplishment. Glenn Yeah, it's totally a, you know, a lot of people look at like somebody like yourself or me that, you know, when we're buying these parks, it's like, you're not really getting paid until the very end. It's kind of like you're, you're doing all this work with, and you're like, you can get criticized, but at the same time, you're like, well, look, I'm fully invested in this because even if I'm making a paycheck, my goal is to get the equity on the backside of this. And, that's the good thing about having an operator that's in the field doing exactly what you're doing. Joseph Jackson That's right. Yeah. And I will tell you that, one of my mentors, and it stuck with me forever, is find things that nobody else wants to do, and that's where the money is, right? And when, so when you go to these conferences and people are like, Oh man, I would never want to do that. I don't want to deal with that. I don't want to do this. Right? Well, you're, you're onto something. Nobody wants to do it. Most likely because they haven't figured it out or they have figured it out and they understand it's going to be really tough. So, your job to do now is to refine the process and make it simple for them. So, when you go to sell, you hand over that process. and you hand over the finished product. Glenn Exactly. Yeah, I agree 100%. That was kind of the idea that I got from that conference is like, yeah, I mean, because mobile home parks, they're not building anymore. So, you're having to find the ones that are being sold or - redevelopment's not even an option really, very, very rare. So yeah, and I agree. That's what I kind of think of our portfolio and just to continue to slowly buy properties that are in central Florida until we get big enough to maybe buy outside. But I also have young kids, so I like to be at home for dinner and everything. Joseph Jackson Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And that's kind of the reason I got involved. You know, the funny thing is I got involved because I wanted to spend more time with my family. The joke on that is, now that I'm doing this, I probably spend less time with them right now in the present. But I know that in the future it will pay dividends. So, it's like kind of like a little trade-off, but I'm still at home and I can pick and choose when I want to continue to work. And if there's something big, then I can take off. Glenn I think it's a give and take. I think about that regularly. Actually, this is kind of a going on a tangent, but it's, like, I feel like the way I was raised, my dad would go to work every day, and he'd come home and he'd pick us up from school around like 5pm, 5:30pm, and stuff like that. But it was like still showing the example that my dad's working and he's reliable, he’ll show up, pick me up. And both parents worked full-time jobs and it just showed me what hard work looks like. And that's kind of where I got it from. If I'm kind of lounging around in my carpet slippers in the middle of the day, I don't know what that's showing my kids, you know? Joseph Jackson No, you're absolutely right. You’re right on that. And you know, so since I started all this, my kids started homeschooling, right? My wife was a teacher. And once I retired from the Marine Corps and I started doing this, she was able to stay home now with the kiddos and do homeschooling for them. And so, part of their homeschooling though is that I get them involved in my business. You know teaching them Excel spreadsheets to… you know I go talk to a lawyer, I go talk to a broker, I go down some of our park so they're getting the exposure of speaking to these different types of, you know people, and different aspects of business. Just because I grew up the same way. My father he'd leave before the sun came up and he would be home after the sun set right. And so, there was no financial literacy passed down because my dad, hardworking guy, man, that's where I get my work ethic, I love him to death. But financially literate is probably not his strong suit, Which is fine. But I don't want that to be the rest of my story and then my kids’ story. So, every chance I get, I pass down as much knowledge as I can about this business, and about money, and about what we're trying to do, and how we're working it. That way they can always understand that money is a tool and it's not to be viewed any other way than that. Money's not everything, but money definitely helps. Glenn Yeah. Definitely man, I love it. So, let's talk about, since we're a day before New Year's Eve, we could just talk about your 2025 goals, what's the plans? Joseph Jackson Yeah, so my 2025 plan. So, with Prime Oak, our goal is to acquire another 1000 pads this year and then on the personal side I want to purchase a park. That's my own just outside of outside of that. Whether that be a JV or if that you know be by myself a smaller park from 20 lots to 50 lots. But that’s my two goals, business-wise, I have a lot of personal goals and stuff, but that's my business goals. Glenn Awesome man. So, where can people find you? Joseph Jackson You can find me on LinkedIn at Joseph D Jackson. And then, I'm on Facebook as Joseph Jackson also. Glenn Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Joseph Jackson I appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me.