Fort Meade completes sale of mobile home park for $4.85 million

Fort Meade has ended its decades-old status as a residential landlord.

The city's official duties will no longer include collecting rent payments from residents of a mobile home park.

Fort Meade completed the anticipated sale of the Fort Meade Mobile Home Park on Sept. 7 to a New York company. Wildflower Communities is paying $4.85 million for the 23-acre facility, which the city has owned since at least 1956.

The final price is higher than the company’s initial offer of $4.2 million, Fort Meade Interim City Manager Maria Sutherland said. The city will also receive about $850,000 in interest payments, she said.

Wildflower Communities has already renamed the park Fort Meade Estates.

“We are committed to creating a vibrant, high quality, affordable community for our residents and have them be proud of a place where they can call home,” Karen Fan, Founder and Principal of Wildflower Communities, said by email.

The park, which borders U.S. 98 just west of the Peace River, originated as a tourist camp in the 1940s, according to a city staff report. Ledger research found no other cities in Florida that own and manage mobile home parks.

The 55-and-older community contains a mixture of single- and double-wide homes, and many appear to be several decades old. Of the park’s 180 dwellings, about 100 are used by seasonal residents and the rest by year-round residents, a city staff report said.

Fort Meade received an initial payment of $873,000, which Sutherland said has been placed into an interest-bearing account. Fort Meade’s net proceeds were reduced by such factors as real estate taxes, tenant security deposits, state transaction fees and a broker payment of $145,500 to Keller Williams.

Starting in November, Wildflower Communities will make monthly payments averaging about $14,300 through October 2028, at which point the remaining “balloon mortgage payment” of about $3.6 million will be due.

Interest from the investment of the initial payment will go to the Fort Meade Fire Department’s budget, as will the monthly interest payments from Wildflower Communities, Sutherland said.

Fort Meade received an offer of almost the same amount last year from another company, and former City Manager Jan Bagnall presented it to the City Commission. After some residents raised questions about the condition of other properties owned by the prospective buyer, commissioners voted against the sale but said they were open to other offers.

Bagnall, who resigned in August, said in July that Fort Meade was losing about $70,000 a year on the property and provided records to support the statement, though some residents questioned the claim. Bagnall said that lot rents in the park had remained well below market rates for decades, with some residents paying as little as $325 a month.

Under an agreement signed in 1993, the city was only allowed to raise rents by 10% per year. Bagnall said that previous city managers deferred adding amenities in order to avoid rent increases.

Fort Meade and the park’s homeowners’ association signed a Memorandum of Understanding in August 2022, under which the city planned to raise rents 10% per year for five years, yielding an overall hike of 61% by 2027. Bagnall said before his departure that a new owner would be bound by terms of the agreement.

But the HOA filed a request for mediation in January, listing four points of dispute — among them, that the lot rent increase was unreasonable.

Fan said that Wildflower Communities has reached an agreement with the homeowners’ association on rent increases of $65 per lot next year.

The sale occurred as Fort Meade was in the process of compiling its budget for the next fiscal year. Sutherland said the city drew up a balanced budget without using any proceeds from the park transaction.

“The Commission takes very seriously the impact of such a large quantity of funds, but there is no designated use for the proceeds at this time,” Sutherland said.

Mike Marchand, president of the homeowners’ association, offered little comment on the sale of the park.

“That’s between the HOA and the city and the new owner,” Marchand said when reached by phone. “We have things that we have to work on, for sure, but we're hopeful that it'll be good.”

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Wildflower Communities owns at least three other Florida mobile-home parks — in Jacksonville, Belleview (Marion County) and Sebastian (Indian River County).

Wildflower Communities has installed a community manager and a maintenance worker at the property, Fan said.

“We are also building a brand new pickleball court to be completed in Fall 2023, resurfacing our shuffleboard courts, introducing a community newsletter, continuing a partnership with a local agency to provide free weekday breakfast and lunch meals in our clubhouse, bringing in brand new beautiful manufactured homes for sale on vacant lots, and introducing special events for our residents planned by our new community manager,” Fan wrote in her email.

Wildflower Communities is repaving internal roads in Fort Meade Estates, improving the electrical infrastructure and repairing the clubhouse roof, Fan said. The new owner is working with a local artist on an entrance sign.

Some residents interviewed by The Ledger in July said they opposed the potential sale, even as they criticized the city’s management of the park. Residents complained about a lack of amenities, citing the demolition of a recreation hall that hasn’t been replaced. They also said the city regularly rents out the community center in the park.

Fort Meade is scheduled to adopt a budget at its City Commission meeting on Tuesday. Sutherland said the city has funded full-time positions in the Fire Department for the first time and provided cost-of-living increases for all employees and merit raises for hourly employees while lowering tax rates.

The infusion of money from the sale of the park will bolster the city’s move to a “hybrid” fire department combining full-time paid staff and volunteers, Sutherland said.

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Fort Meade sells city-owned mobile home park for $4.85 million