By Gary E. Wilson, President & Designated Broker, Wilson Management, Inc.
In most manufactured home communities the operator owns the water mains, the sewer collection system and often the electrical distribution — buried, decades old, and invisible until something fails under a road in February.
This is a checklist for finding out what you actually have and what it is doing, before it tells you.
Start here: establish what you own
Communities where each home is separately served by the utility have a dramatically simpler operating picture. Establishing which model applies is the first task and it is not always documented — a surprising number of communities do not know with certainty where their own pipes run.
The single most valuable number
That gap is unbilled consumption. It is either a leak, an allocation that has drifted from reality, or vacancy being absorbed — and each calls for a different response. A gap that is widening year over year is almost always a leak, and it can be established entirely from documents without anyone digging anything up.
This is the highest-return check available in the whole asset class, and most communities have never run it.
Leak detection
In a master-metered community a running toilet costs the operator and costs the resident nothing, so it goes unreported for months. That is not resident bad faith — it is the incentive structure, and it is exactly what submetering corrects.
Valves
This item looks trivial and is not. A community whose valves have seized — common where nothing has been exercised in decades — cannot isolate anything. Which means a leak that could have been contained to one zone requires excavation to find, and a repair that could have affected six homes takes water from the whole community.
Exercising valves is cheap insurance against a genuinely expensive failure mode.
Sewer and lift stations
Lift stations deserve particular attention because they are mechanical, they have shorter lives than the pipe around them, and their failure is immediate and unpleasant rather than gradual.
Recovery method
Submetering readiness
If you are considering submetering, the questions that decide feasibility:
Submetering typically reduces total consumption noticeably once residents see their own usage, and it makes site-level leaks visible immediately. Whether it pays depends on installation cost and the size of the current gap, and it is worth running the numbers against your own consumption history rather than a general rule.
Freeze protection
Split lines under homes produce both a repair and a substantial water loss, and both are avoidable with a reminder that costs nothing.
When the community is the water utility
Some communities do not buy water from a municipal supplier at all. They draw it from their own well or source — which changes the operator's position entirely. The community is no longer a customer of a utility. It is one.
That brings monitoring, testing, reporting, treatment and operator certification obligations, along with responsibility for the quality of water delivered to residents. It is a genuinely different undertaking from maintaining distribution downstream of a municipal meter, and the compliance burden is continuous rather than occasional.
The failure that matters here is assuming the obligations are lighter than they are. A community that has drifted out of its testing and reporting schedule is not merely non-compliant on paper — it has stopped verifying the quality of the water it supplies to the people living there.
This is also a significant diligence item on any acquisition. A buyer taking on a community with its own water system is taking on a regulated utility, and the cost of bringing a lapsed system back into compliance is not always small.
Replacement planning
Failure history predicts the future better than any expected-life table. A main section repaired three times in five years is telling you plainly what the next few years hold, and that information usually exists in old invoices even where no formal record was kept.
The sequencing point is where real money is saved. Replacing a water main under a road and then resurfacing that road as separate projects costs substantially more than doing them together, because opening and reinstating the ground is the expensive part. See Capital Planning.
Where residents fit in
Residents own their homes, which means the boundary between the community's infrastructure and theirs runs somewhere under each house — and where exactly should be stated in the rental agreement rather than argued about after a failure.
The conventional split is that the community maintains distribution up to the site connection, and the resident is responsible from there: the connections under and into their own home, and the plumbing within it. Residents also own the consequences of what they put into the sewer, and blockages traced to a specific site are frequently recoverable where the agreement provides for it.
Two practical points follow.
Tell residents where the boundary is. A resident who does not know they are responsible for the line under their own home will not maintain it, and will be surprised by the bill.
Give them a reason to report. In a community with utilities included, a resident has no financial incentive to mention a running toilet or a damp patch under their home. Asking them to report it anyway — and responding when they do — recovers water that would otherwise leak for months.
Where to go next
Our Utility Infrastructure page covers how we manage these systems, and Mobile Home Park Management covers the wider service.
To discuss your community, contact us or request a free analysis.
About the author
Gary E. Wilson is the President and Designated Broker of Wilson Management, Inc., which he has led in serving property owners across Bellevue and the Greater Seattle area since 1982. With more than 40 years of hands-on experience, Gary helps owners protect and maximize the value of single-family, multi-family, and commercial properties.
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