Charles Crane/MDN Holiday Park residents who own their trailers will see their lot rent increase over 50%.

On Sept. 30 a post was made on the Facebook group page Minot Whiners and Complainers, leaking a letter dated Oct. 1 revealing that residents of the Holiday Park mobile home park would see their lot rent rise from $390 to $695. Holiday Park was recently purchased by Homes of America, LLC, the same entity that purchased the Parkview and Western Village trailer parks last December.

All three parks under the ownership of Homes of America LLC have been experiencing difficulties communicating with the revolving door of local managers in the last year, who are hired to oversee all of the company’s parks entirely on their own.

North Dakota law requires the owners of all mobile home parks to designate a local office that must be operational on the first day after acquiring ownership. This office must keep weekly hours, and have an emergency number manned at all times. The law also requires that owners employ at least one individual on the site of the property who has the authority to make decisions without having to consult with the owners themselves.

The HOA community manager is only accessible through a single telephone number and voicemail box, and doesn’t maintain a physical office. With this manager responsible for the three parks, some residents have been experiencing delayed or in some cases no response to their queries regarding approvals for construction projects, maintenance issues or public safety concerns.

Tiffany McKell has been a resident of Parkview for about a year, and has described her experiences under the current ownership to be, “not good at all.” According to McKell, after experiencing issues with her toilet and stove in her rented trailer, she was forced to buy parts and perform repairs herself after not receiving a response to her maintenance requestfours.

“My stove needed two burners fixed, and I waited 4 months before I paid to fix it myself,” McKell said, “My lease is still with the old management company, and they haven’t provided an updated lease yet. I spoke to the manager about it but they don’t know when we’ll be getting them.”

A resident of Holiday Park who wished to remain anonymous shared an email sent to all residents by management informing them that $50 fines would be applied to residents who had unkept yards. However, a large number of vacant lots and empty trailers in the park that are the responsibility of management to maintain, have only been mowed once this summer.

“It is impossible to get ahold of anyone. As a matter of fact, I have never been able to speak to someone,” the resident said.

Another current Holiday Park resident is Lexi Anderson, who was able to speak to a woman who identified herself as a regional manager for HOA. Anderson was reaching out to HOA to determine their interest in buying her out of her own trailer, as she isn’t inclined to remain in Holiday Park given the lot rent increase.

“She told me, ‘I can tell you no if I don’t like the trailer. We have to work with the economy’,” Anderson said, “I could understand paying a little more, everyone is paying a little more these days. But it’s not like we have a playground here. We don’t have speed bumps and the roads haven’t been worked on in a year. With the lot rent as high as it is, it’s a tough time getting people to move in here. There are 20 vacant lots in Holiday right now. Just in my row there are 5 or 6.”

HOA, LLC, has recently posted a job listing for a new community manager on Indeed.com as well as another for a full-time maintenance/handyman, signaling that further lapses could be on the horizon if the positions aren’t filled.

Who is Homes of America, LLC?

The answer to who exactly is behind Homes of America, LLC, has remained shrouded by the nesting nature of the various out-of-state corporations that own and manage the parks. The few times that The Minot Daily News was able to reach and speak with an employee or representative of the company they would not identify themselves or the business they work for before ending the call without comment.

It is also difficult to track down much about the company using public records and search engines, with most results directing the query to an unrelated rental company in central Florida called Homes of America Realty Group LLC.

“That is not us. We do not own trailer parks, we are a home rental company,” an HOA Realty Group LLC employee told The Minot Daily News. “I don’t know who they are, but we’ve been getting a lot calls asking about them.”

Red herrings aside, what threads did exist do provide some answers. The Indeed.com account used to make the job listings for the community manager position in Minot. This account posted 14 other job listings in nine other states seeking community managers and maintenance techs that were worded identically to the Minot listings.

This account appears to have been at one time used by the management of Six-0-Five Village Mobile Home Park in Louisa, Virginia. This park was purchased in September 2021 along with another in Bowling Green called The Hill Mobile Home Park by HOA, LLC, for $3.7 million, according to a Virginia Business article from that time.

Further digging also led to the Linkedin account of a man named Bryon Fields Jr. from Charlotte, North Carolina, who lists his current employer as Homes of America, LLC, and his current position as the company’s chief operations officer.

Fields is a graduate of Duke University, and played cornerback on the Blue Devils football team. After graduating, Fields interned at Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund described as a “ruthless corporate strip-miner” by the Washington Post due to its reputation for buying newspapers like the Denver Post and brutally cutting budgets and culling the pool of journalists employed by them.

According to Field’s Linkedin resume, after leaving the “grim reaper of American Newspapers,” he spent a short time in the NFL as an undrafted free agent on the New York Giants. He then began his employment with Homes of America as a real estate analyst. Fields has been COO of HOA since the beginning of January 2022, shortly after his company began purchasing the Minot trailer parks.

The Minot Daily New’s attempts to contact Fields were not responded to.