The mobile-home-park idea was getting harder to call an idea.
My partners and I had started by asking about a park in Indiana. I grew up there, understood the area, and thought the property matched what we wanted. I wrote the broker as a serious buyer.
That park was already under contract.
I checked again a few weeks later. The deal was still moving, but the broker had other parks in Missouri. One of those became the next project.
We were using Blue Sky Capital Partners for the effort. By July, we had spoken with the people around the property, received an appraisal and operating information, and started making a much longer list of questions.
The spreadsheet was not the business. We needed to see the place and meet the person running it.
My partners and I traveled to Columbia, Missouri. I sent a friend a short update from the park: “getting even more interesting.”
That could mean good or bad in real estate. Usually both.
The visit produced enough new information that we asked for another call the following week. We wanted to explain some of the data we had gathered, work through more questions, and see whether the deal could keep moving.
At the same time, I was telling friends to send us strange small businesses that needed help growing. Service companies, technology companies, weird niches. It was a broad search held together by the same belief: a good operating problem could be more interesting than a fashionable idea.
Nothing was finalized. We had not bought the park.
We had moved past browsing listings, though. We had a name, partners, documents, a flight, a site visit, and another call scheduled.
That was enough to make the side project real.