Inherited a Mobile Home in Florida?
★★★★★ 4.9 from 58 Google reviews · Licensed Florida Mobile Home Broker
Brenton Basinger
Licensed Florida Mobile Home Broker
License BH 1149137-1. When you call, you get me or Marie, not a call center.
If a parent or grandparent has died or moved into assisted living and left you their mobile home in a 55+ community, there is one thing worth knowing before you do anything else.
Do not sign a lease with the park yet. Call us first. That single decision is the difference between walking away clean and owing lot rent every month on a home you cannot sell.
The trap, and why parks set it
Park offices know a death has happened. They will often approach the family early, while you are still dealing with the funeral, and ask you to sign a lot lease so the home can stay where it is.
It sounds like paperwork. It is not. Signing that lease makes you the tenant, and it puts the monthly lot rent in your name.
That is fine if the home is worth something. If it is not, you have just taken on a bill that does not stop. We get calls from people several months into exactly this, still paying rent on a home nobody will buy, and the only way out is to pay to have it removed.
One date decides whether the home is worth anything
Look for the HUD certification label, a small metal plate usually near the rear exterior or inside a kitchen cabinet. It tells you whether the home was built before or after June 15, 1976.
Built after that date. The home can legally be moved and resold. It has value even if it looks rough, because somebody will buy it to fix up, to rent out, or to put on their own land.
Built before it. The home cannot be permitted to relocate anywhere in Florida, and no amount of paperwork changes that. In most parks it also cannot be sold in place to a new resident. Its realistic value is close to nothing, and clearing it costs $5,000 or more in demolition and haul-away.
That is the whole reason the lease matters. Sign one on a pre-1976 home and you are paying rent until you also pay to demolish it.
Not sure what you have? Send us the year and the community and we will tell you straight, before you sign anything.
Transferring the title is simpler than people expect
This is the part that stops families in their tracks, and it should not.
A mobile home in Florida is titled through the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. It is titled like a vehicle, not like a house. If someone left you a car or a boat, you already understand the process.
Where you are the sole heir, or there is a trust naming you, it is usually a matter of a death certificate and a couple of forms at the tax collector. No title company. No closing. We have done hundreds of these and we will walk you through it, or handle it with you, at no charge.
Where an estate is contested, several heirs disagree, or the home is caught up in a formal probate, that is a different conversation and sometimes it does need a lawyer. Tell us the situation and we will say honestly which one you are in rather than guessing.
Two things worth checking early, because both are slow to fix and neither is difficult if you start now: whether the title was ever retired into the land, and whether the person named on it is the person who died.
What we do from there
If the home is worth selling, we list it. A flat $2,500, paid only when it sells, nothing up front and nothing if it does not sell. Around 80% of our listings go under contract within thirty days. That is the process we follow, and everything signs online, which matters because a good share of the people who call us about this live in another state.
If the home is genuinely worth nothing, we will tell you that too, and point you at the removal options rather than list something that cannot sell. If it has to come off the land instead of selling with it, that is a mobile home that must be moved and there is a real buyer market for those.
Before you call the park back
What a mobile home broker actually does explains why this takes a different license from a realtor’s, and why most agents will not take these on at all.
You can also compare listing against a cash sale once you know what the home is worth, and read what other sellers have said about working with us.
Call (727) 201-0189, 9am to 6pm Monday through Friday. If you have already signed a lease, call anyway. It is a harder problem, not an impossible one.
Start with the free market analysis. No obligation, and the numbers are yours either way.
Brenton Basinger, President, Florida Mobile Home Solutions, Inc. Licensed Mobile Home Broker, State of Florida, license BH 1149137-1.