As follow-up to a story we published this Monday, Aug. 6 about YES! Communities purchase of 42 MHCs comprised of 10,500 home sites from American Residential Communities (ARC), also of Denver, the NewsObserver reports from North Carolina ten of the communities and 2,500 of the home sites are in Greensboro and the Triangle area. Andrew Luter of YES!, which launched in 2007 with equity partner Stockbridge Real Estate, says the company grew on the heels of the subprime lending crisis believing a need would emerge for affordable housing. A large portion of its portfolio came with the purchase in 2008 of CMH Parks, a subsidiary of Clayton Homes comprised of 65 MHCs covering 18,000 home sites. Noting a lot of the MHCs in North Carolina are small compared to the large communities in Florida and California, Brad Lovin, executive director of the North Carolina Manufactured and Modular Homebuilders Association, says, “They (YES!) certainly bring new capital to those communities and maybe they can help stabilize them or bring them up to today’s standards with the infrastructure.” Luter says, “Our classic tenants are pretty under served and, by and large, I think they’re talked down to a lot and they’re not treated great by landlords.” As MHProNews has learned, Lovin says a lot of the bad actors are gone. “I guess that’s one good thing of a shrinking economy,” he says. “The bad players seem to go out first.”

(Photo credit: Jim Parker/Post and Courier–Southern Palms)