Mobile Homeowners Unite

Homeowners Against Equity Lifestyle Properties came into existence when one person just would not accept the unacceptable. My journey started when I retired to Florida from Pennsylvania on April 30 2021. My experience was a complete opposite of what it should have been . I asked all the right questions I researched where I wanted to live by going to the MHvillage website and I bought a home through a realtor instead of a homeowner. I thought everything was great and couldn’t wait to get here. Upon arrival to my new mobil home in Down Yonder Largo Florida I sensed something wasn’t right when I pulled in the park and saw a man dragging a tarp or blanket with personal belongings towards the entrance. I entered my home and walked around and told my wife I need to use the bathroom. As I sat down the toilet went right through the floor and if it wasn’t for a steel beam I would have hit the ground. My next stop was the office to sign my paperwork and this is when it things really went wrong. As I am being presented with forms to sign I was given one that said on January 1st my lot rent was going to be raised 100.00 and now Im confused because I corresponded with Fran the office manager about 14 times through email and asked several times about the lot rent and the response was the same every time. Yes that is the amount of your lot rent but not once was there any mention of a 100 dollar increase to bring me to market value so now Im mad. I ask for to speak with park manager and he comes out with this attitude because he heard the entire conversation I was having with his office manager. He starts off by saying “ I dont know why you Yankees think you can come down hear and reap the benefits that people who have been here for years have” That really wasn’t a acceptable answer so I said lets just get this done. The next document that was placed in front of me was a document saying that I will be responsible for all the trees on my property trees that I haven’t even met yet and I said are you kidding Im not signing that and then I was told if I dont I cant move in so I did but then I walked out and stewed all the way back to my house.

So now I’m home no furniture yet because it’s still being shipped from Pennsylvania but we bought enough things with us in our car to be able to be comfortable sleeping on the floor. As soon as it started to get dark that evening we noticed that they were all kinds of bugs flying in our house I mean not a couple this is like hundreds we didn’t know what they were and then the next day when I got home again we started looking around you know the house is empty at this point and we find all these termites we didn’t know they were termites at the time but we were told later on that they were and they were everywhere they were in the cabinets they were in the furniture the built-in furniture they were everywhere you could think of even the paneling on the walls. So we called Terminex and they told us our house would have to be tented because it was to infested for any other treatment. Now we have to go stay in a hotel for two weeks until they could get out to us to tent our home and there’s no way my wife will stay in that house until our appointmentin so we left. In the meantime I started calling the realtor who sold me the home because I wanted some answers first of all they were missing things that were supposed to be left with the house secondly the shed was supposed to be emptied and it was left with just garbage and trash and all kinds of stuff left behind by the owners none of which was any use to me and then there was the issue of the toilet going through the floor and his answer to me was “well you should’ve gotten your own inspectionthe “ Now Im really pissed but my wife is trying to calm me down and said there’s nothing we can do about it now so lets just move on. I wrote the manager Bob about a dozen emails pertaining to the lease agreement and I asked to exercise my right to a hearing with the Equity Lifestyle Properties regional manager and was completely ignored but hes not a very bright guy and he contradicted himself in almost every emai so I held on to them and the others I had between Fean the office manager and I started my own investigation into this company ELS I joined the HOA but that was a joke and I decided to do this my own way. As time passed we quickly realized this was not a 55+ park nor was it a retirement community , what it is is a trailer park plain and simple. Felons, drug attic’s and thieves is what you will find at ELS owned Down Yonder Village mobil home park. Police are in here every day, we have to have a security guard at our HOA meetings that ELS hired because residents are constantly fighting yes fisty cup fighting and so I started this journey to hold someone accountable. I asked to speak with regional management on multiple occasions and was just ignored but In not going to be ignored anymore. I started a group page a website and a blog page to get the answers I deserve and would you believe that after 3 months now of posting my blogs all over Facebook and the web not one person has reached out to me from the company. So now we are attacking every single investor in the company and paying for ad campaigns on the web and Facebook targeted at the entire REIT community as well as the department of justice ,the department of commerce, The Vanguard Group Black Rock , Fidelity management SsgA , linked in , twitter ,instagram, every ELS Facebook page, MHvillage Facebook page, Suncoast Communities Facebook page and anywhere else they allow us to post and we are starting to get some good feedback. There are people out there who care about how their investments are being used regardless of how much money they are making and hopefully one person will take my story and thousands of others to the right person. I just started this part of my journey so its going to take a little while for the crawlers to crawl my site and for my site to be indexed properly but it will happen so for now Im stuck here. I cant sell my home for even half of what I had to put into it just to make it habitable but the high lot rent causes people to walk away. Someone will be held accountable for this horrible experience and this is going to be my way of doing it until I can get out of here or go broke financing my campaigns.

I started buying domains and a website then formed several groups on Facebook and promoted my Facebook page and group to other groups that lived in Equity Lifestyle Properties and they started reading the content I was collecting and posting. Next I gathered a few volunteers to visit ELS owned mobil home parks and see what’s going on and I shared the results on my group page. Then I started putting my blog into action and upgraded my hosting service to include search engine optimization SEO and thats where we are at now. Our website when completed will have direct links to every managing office of mobil homes in Florida including the Health Department DPBR , FMO, Division of Condominiums Timeshares and Mobil Homes as well as forms and videos on how to go about filing the proper forms. We have made tremendous progress and our next step is to take our fight to Tallahassee sometime soon,very soon so stay tuned. We’re just getting started