Another Okanagan mobile home park is for sale
It will take years to redevelop the Green Bay Mobile Park in West Kelowna if a developer buys it and wants to redevelop the site.
If that happens, another 38 affordable housing units will disappear from the Central Okanagan marketplace.
The park is listed for sale by Steve Neil, managing broker at Macdonald Realty, for $7,250,000.
“One of a kind mobile home park investment opportunity with canal access to Okanagan Lake!” his listing reads. “Exceptional location in West Kelowna. 6.25 acres in one of the hottest developing areas in B.C.”
There is room to expand, the listing says, noting 10 to 12 more rental units will have a “significant upside” to the park’s current gross income.
“Exceptional future development potential - subdivide into 30+ single family residential lots with canal access to lake (or possibly multifamily) with excellent holding income in the meantime,” the listing says.
Many homes in the Green Bay neighbourhood are valued at $2 million or more. Most in the mobile home park are assessed at $100,000 or less, some as low as $50,000. A couple are assessed at more than $250,000. One of those is a double-wide and another is almost new, built in 2020.
According to B.C. Assessment, many of the mobile homes were built before 1990, which is generally the cut-off date for relocation, according to Al Kemp, executive director of the Manufactured Home Park Owner’s Alliance of B.C., who spoke to iNFOnews.ca in 2021.
In the late 1980s, new regulations changed so that, rather than the old mobile homes on wheels, the newer units were made into manufactured homes, he said.
That means most of the older homes, if they could be safely moved, probably wouldn't be accepted by other manufactured home parks.
There are rules in place that protect mobile home owners.
If a developer can’t buy them out, owners can be given a year’s notice and a year’s free pad rental then be paid the assessed value, Kemp said. Or they can pay to move them. Either way, it's time consuming and expensive.
READ MORE: With demise of mobile home parks in Kelowna, affordable home ownership slips away for many
Some Kelowna parks have already disappeared or are at risk of doing so.
The Hiawatha campground and mobile home park on Lakeshore Road in Kelowna was bought by Westcorp in 2007. It took them six years to buy out the 94 owners, then they demolished 36 of the units.
The remaining units were rented out until March 2021 - 14 years after the park was bought. Those tenants were forced to move out in order to make room for the 1,000 rental units in what is now called Ledge on Lakeshore. It's under construction and includes towers up to 17 storeys high.
In August 2020, Kerkhoff Construction – the builder of the One Water Street towers in downtown Kelowna – bought Central Mobile Park for $15 million.
It has 133 older units along Casorso Road, about one kilometre from Gyro Beach on Okanagan Lake.
The Shasta Mobile Park, next to Ledge on Lakeshore, also across from Rotary Beach, has 140 older units. It’s owned by the Callahan family who have been fighting for years over its redevelopment. A court ruled in November that the property can be liquidated.
B.C. Assessment shows two properties at that address totalling almost 19 acres. Those were assessed as being worth more than $22 million.
READ MORE: $300 million Callahan family feud leads to liquidation of Kelowna 'Crown Jewel'
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