Insurance for Manufactured Housing and Mobile Home Park Owners
We offer a comprehensive property and casualty product, covering all aspects of the mobile home park owner’s responsibilities. The policy is designed to cover every aspect of coverage needed by the park owner.
PROPERTY COVERAGE
The property piece covers all of the park owner’s owned buildings and contents, loss of rental income due to catastrophic exposure, such as in case of a hurricane. The policy also covers contractors’ equipment and just about anything you could put into any kind of property policy.
SLIP & FALL LIABILITY COVERAGE
The second piece is the liability section, which provides coverage for any suit brought against the park owner for bodily injury or property damage. Slips and falls in these parks is the largest liability exposure.
OPEN LOT COVERAGE
We also write coverage for what’s known as open lot exposure, which covers new and used units held for sale, such as model homes, or homes the park owner has purchased from somebody in the community that are being renovated for resale. If that unit catches fire or is vandalized, open lot insurance will cover those risks.
Other coverage for park owners:
- Commercial Automobile
- Worker’s Compensation
- Umbrella Liability
- Bonds
PRICING
Many years ago liability insurance for mobile home park owners was rated on the basis of gross rental receipts, which vary from year to year. So, every time rents went up, so did the park’s insurance premium.
Mobile home parks and manufactured housing communities in New Jersey are also assessed a Pad fee, which is paid by the tenant but goes directly to the municipality where the park is located. Years ago, an insurance auditor would come to a community and audit the books. If a community began the year with $1 million in gross rents and ended with $1.2 million, the park owner paid premium on the extra $200,000 of rents, even though a portion of that rent included the pad fee to pay municipal taxes.
That’s when Schechner Lifson Vice-President Bruce Callen and his then-partner, Bill Blemmings, came up with a new way of rating mobile home parks based on a flat price per pad, with no audit. “If a park has 250 units, for example,” says Bruce, “and they’re all tenant-owned units, they calculate a rate per tenant-owned unit, then multiplied it by the number of units in the community, resulting in the premium price.
Bruce was the principal architect of an association program approved for the New Jersey Manufactured Housing Association and is a long-time member of the association’s Board of Directors. “Most of the units in a community are owner-occupied,” says Callen. “They pay a Lot Rental Fee to the landlord. And most parks also own a few units in their communities and rent them out, just like an apartment. The flat price-per-unit premium easily covers both tenant-owned and park-owned properties.