The Mobile Mogul

Even by some of the U.S. housebuilding industry's more bulldozer-prone members, mobile-home parks are looked down on as defoliated eyesores crammed with aluminum boxes and propane-gas tanks. But to Arthur Carlsberg, a 39-year-old California builder who piled up a $305 million financial empire by sniffing new trends in real estate development, mobile-home parks are the hottest thing going in residential real estate. Carlsberg is cutting back on the ventures that made his fortune --housing subdivisions, shopping centers, apartment complexes and office buildings--to become the nation's largest developer of mobile-home sites. Since buying his first in 1971, he now has 83 parks with 26,000 "pads"; he plans to add in the neighborhood of 60 more parks this year.

A Carlsberg mobile-home park is hardly a mere parking lot. Amenities in his projects typically include a clubhouse, recreation center, golf course, swimming pool and careful landscaping. At Oak Ridge, a 950-home park near Syracuse, N.Y., the manager arranges barbecues, dances, clambakes, wine tastings and ice-skating parties. At a park near St. Paul, Minn., mobile homes are stacked, apartment-style, on space-saving three-story pads. The Colony, under construction at Palm Springs, Calif., will have a surrounding wall of imported Mexican stone, a sauna, gymnasium, swimming pool, golf course, individual wine cellars, a Rolls-Royce shuttle to the Palm Springs airport and a security system ("an increasingly important attraction," says Carlsberg) with round-the-clock guards and its own radar network. The 400 eventual residents at The Colony will pay from $265 to $350 a month rent for about a quarter-acre on which to put their mobile homes. By contrast, mobile-home pads at most other comfortable parks, including Carlsberg's, rent for $45 to $95 monthly. But the young builder senses that, increasingly, elaborate facilities are where the money is parked. "We are appealing to an entirely different person than the old trailer park did," he says. "We want people who can afford more, people who go into a park for its social orientation."

Metal Castles. Last year Americans bought about 590,000 mobile homes, double the number four years ago. More significant, many of the homes are not-so-portable palaces with three bedrooms, cedar shingles, wood-burning fireplaces and central air conditioning. Ironically, says Carlsberg, mobile-home owners actually move less often than apartment dwellers. Many have their sheet-metal castles trucked to a homesite, lowered onto a foundation and never again moved. The average purchase price of the mobile homes in Carlsberg's parks is $14,000; at The Colony most homes will cost around $40,000.

For a developer, mobile-home parks carry most of the advantages and few of the disadvantages of other real estate projects: construction costs are at a minimum and tax benefits at a maximum. Since a park contains few permanent structures, Carlsberg pays lower property taxes than he would on a shopping center or an office building. Tax benefits accrue to his tenants as well. Owners of mobile homes, which are regulated by state motor-vehicle bureaus instead of by local assessors, frequently pay lower taxes than they would on conventional homes--a system that many mayors consider unfair. For that reason, some communities have placed a moratorium on new mobile-home parks. By taking advantage of tax shelters and using mostly borrowed money, Carlsberg aims at a 9% return on his investment. Often he does much better. Last year the Carlsberg Financial Corp., which he owns outright, had after-tax profits of $4,000,000 on revenues of $20 million.

Shrewd as he is on most business dealings, even Carlsberg can come out second best in some real estate matters. Convinced that the $18,000 annual property-tax bill on his palatial marble-columned home in Bel Air was too steep, he recently paid a visit to the tax assessor to complain. After looking into the matter, the assessor agreed that there was an error; he raised Carlsberg's bill to $19,000.

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