[T]he owners of the biggest mobile home park in Chittenden County, and the second-largest park in the state, announced their intent last week to sell the property, giving those residing on the 250 lots six weeks to decide if they want to band together and buy it.
Even if the tenants match the $11.5 million asking price, the owners of Westbury Park in Colchester are under no obligation to accept the offer. An outside buyer would have to give residents 18 months notice to move out if it wanted to redevelop the property.
The owner of two other mobile home parks in Chittenden County rejected an offer earlier this year from residents to buy the park, though the fate of that property remains unclear. The owner said in March that residents were unable to match competing offers from private developers.
Last Wednesday, the owners of the Westbury Park notified tenants of their plans to sell the park. A person who answered the telephone number listed for the park said the owners were being represented in the sale by realtor Tom Weaver.
The Betty Boyer Atkins Revocable Living Trust owns the park. It is controlled by relatives of the park’s founders, Betty and Dave Atkins, who opened the park in 1972.
“Some of the members of the trust are of retirement age and it’s at the point where they want to sell it,” Weaver said in an interview on Tuesday.
Westbury Park’s 250 lots is second only to the Mountain Home Park in Brattleboro, which has 266 lots. The average lot rent at Westbury last year was $445 a month, according to the state’s records.
After owners declare their intent to sell mobile home parks in Vermont, state law gives tenants 45 days to decide whether a majority of them want to try to buy the park as a group — typically as part of a resident-owned cooperative.
To do that, more than 51 percent of the tenants would need to organize to form the cooperative: a corporation that would allow the tenants to become “shareholders” of the property and obtain a mortgage to buy it, according to Arthur Hamlin, the Vermont Commerce Agency’s housing program coordinator for mobile home parks.
If a majority of tenants approve a petition to attempt to buy the property, they would be given another 120 additional days to organize their collective and negotiate with the owners. Tenants could also convince a nonprofit developer to buy the park.
However, the owners can sell the park to whoever they want. “There’s no obligation either on the residents to buy the park, or the park owner to sell it to them, but they have to negotiate in good faith,” Hamlin said.
Out of the 240 mobile home parks in the state, only 13 are owned by resident cooperatives, according to Hamlin. Forty seven of the parks are owned by nonprofit housing developers.
Next month, Hamlin will be meeting with the residents of Westbury Park, nonprofit developers, and the Cooperative Development Institute, an organization that could help tenants band together and buy the park.
“That’s a place for the residents to kind of get together and decide what they’d like to do,” Hamlin said. “They might not take a final vote on a petition..but begin the process to see if they’d like to put a petition together to buy the park.”
Hamlin said that in their letter to residents about selling the park, the owners specified that the notice was not due to a potential closure. That means that if the park is put up for sale on the open market and purchased by a private buyer, the property will remain a mobile home park, at least initially.
“At this point the owners are just selling the park to be a park for someone else,” he said.
If the new buyers did want to find a new use for the property, they would have to give tenants at least 18 months notice to move out.
Colchester, mobile homes, affordable housing, Arthur Hamlin, Westbury Park
