Stealth Auto Liability

Most of our manufactured home community and retail center operators don’t own a corporate vehicle or drive their own vehicles as a revenue generating part of their business. Nevertheless, most still have some auto liability risk. Examples include owners or employees using their own vehicles to go to the bank, pick-up supplies, take customers to …

Planning for an Emergency

A recent report by a national small business council revealed that 80% of the small businesses significantly damaged by a major storm or other calamity that didn’t have a disaster recovery plan failed within a year of the disaster. As for those that did have a disaster recovery plan, only 20% failed. Here are five …

Risk Transfer

“Risk Transfer” means making contractors who work for you responsible for their own negligence and mistakes. For example, if you hire an installer to setup a manufactured home for your customer and a faulty installation results in damage to the house or injury to its occupants, you not only want the installer to fix the …

Community Management: The $20,000 Dog

It’s exciting. You just purchased a manufactured home community. It has fifty sites, 48 of which are occupied by home owing tenants paying $300/month in rent. You were pleased to purchase it for $960,000, or $20,000 per site. And now that it’s time to begin managing the community, you discover three things: First, four of …

Replacement Cost vs Actual Cash Value

If you have replacement cost coverage and one of your insured manufactured homes is damaged due to a covered peril such as wind, hail, or fire, then you should expect to be paid for the reasonable cost to repair your home less your insurance deductible. If you have actual cash value cost coverage, then you …

Transport – Installation

Recently, one of our manufactured home retailers sold a home and hired a contractor to transport and install the home on the home-buyer’s property. The home buyer wanted his new manufactured home set where his current site built house sat. The contractor was hired to move the site built house to another location on his …