Giant Blackstone Group of New York buying area mobile home parks

Even as Carlyle Property Investors garnered headlines this summer for buying the Citrus Park mobile home and RV park in Bonita Springs for $72 million, another major investment house was quietly buying up similar properties around the Gulf Coast.

Blackstone Group affiliates have purchased at least a handful of mobile home parks in Polk, Pasco, Collier and Pinellas counties since April for in excess of $30 million, according to county property and state records.

That month, Blackstone affiliate BREIT Tarponaire MHC LLC purchased the Tarponaire Mobile Resort, in Tarpon Springs, for $4.55 million, according to Pinellas County property records.

The 136-site park, on 15.6 acres, is a waterfront community open to residents 55 years and over — attributes that many of Blackstone’s new investments share.

In July, New York-based Blackstone, one of the largest owners of commercial real estate nationwide, followed that purchase with a pair of acquisitions in Collier and Pasco counties.

In Collier County, a BREIT entity bought the 147-unit Endless Summer RV resort, in Naples, for $3.95 million. To the north of Collier, in Pasco County, Blackstone affiliate BREIT Hunter’s Run MHC LLC purchased the Hunter’s Run RV Estates, a 55-plus community with 375 mobile home sites, for $7.1 million, records indicate.

Blackstone’s most recent Gulf Coast mobile home park acquisition occurred last month, when it spent $12.15 million — its biggest outlay of capital regionally in the sector to date — to buy the Orange Manor East mobile home park in Winter Haven.

As has been the case in its other purchases, Orange Manor East, in Polk County, is a 55-plus community that was developed decades ago, records show.

Mobile home park deals have proliferated along the Gulf Coast in the past year.

Carlyle’s purchase of the 420-acre, 1,536-site park followed that of Cove Communities’ deals involving the Camelot East Village and Camelot Lakes parks in Sarasota County in October 2018 for a combined $165 million.

There, the Phoenix-based company added a total 224 acres to its portfolio in a pair of project developed in 1981. Citrus Park, another 55-plus community, also dates to the 1970s.

The mobile home park deals come amid corporate changes at Blackstone and as the company has been acquiring apartments and especially industrial properties along the Gulf Coast and nationwide.

In April, Blackstone announced plans to alter its corporate structure from a series of funds into a unified corporation to make it easier for investors to own company stock.

The following month, Blackstone bought the 381-unit Verandahs at Brighton Bay multifamily rental complex, in St. Petersburg, for $65.2 million.

Then in June, Blackstone unveiled plans to spend $18.7 billion to acquire a portfolio of industrial projects nationwide — including buildings in Tampa and Lakeland — totaling 179 million square feet, one of the largest commercial real estate transactions ever executed.

The company followed that deal up with the purchase of the six-building, 955,000-square-foot Tampa Distribution Center for $69.25 million.