The Lot Rent That Doubled Overnight
“Mr. Eastman, this is Dale Weymouth.”
“Mr. Weymouth.”
“I’d like to come see it. Would Thursday be all right?”
I said it would.
He came Thursday in a rented sedan, in loafers, and he stood in the gravel and looked at his shoes. He was sixty-one, with gray in his mustache, and he had been a drywall contractor in Tempe before he went into buying mobile-home parks with two partners and a bank. He told me that in the first ten minutes. I did not ask. He just said it, the way a man says what he is when he is not sure what else to say.
I walked him down Lane A and Lane B. We went to the lagoon at the back, and he looked at it a long time, and he said, “Nobody told me it was that big.”
“Rollie kept it up himself.”
“I’ll bet he did.” He rubbed his jaw. “I haven’t walked one of these in years. We buy on a spreadsheet. A person in an office puts in the lot count and the rent and the occupancy. It’s all a number until you’re standing here.”
“Edith Nunley is in lot fourteen. She’s eighty-eight.”
“Trevor told me.” He did not say anything else for a minute. Then he said, “I’m not going to tell you it’s the wrong price. It’s not. We carry a lot of debt on this park. If it sits at $400, I lose money every month. That’s the truth, and I’d rather you heard it from me.”
“What would not lose you money?”
He thought about it, honestly, I could see that. “Four hundred fifty. Held for three years. That doesn’t pay the whole note. It makes it so I’m not bleeding.”
Fifty dollars more than we had asked for. Fifty dollars times forty-one homes times twelve months is $24,600 a year. I did not say that out loud. I said, “I’d have to ask them.”
“I understand.”
“And the notice?”
“Withdrawn. In writing.” He looked at the lilac hedge over by Edith’s, which you can see from the lagoon road if you know where to look. “And if I ever sell this park, you get the first chance to match any offer. A hundred and twenty days. I put that in the letter. It’s not a promise to sell to you. I’m not selling. But I won’t do it behind your back.”
“That’s all you want to give.”
“It’s what I can sign without calling my partners, and I’m not going to call them.” He gave a short tired laugh. “I should have come out here before I sent that notice. I know that.”
That is as far as he went. I did not ask for more.
We put it to the households that Saturday, in the same room. Thirty-three of the forty-one voted to take it. Eight wanted to hold out for $400, and said so plainly, and then said they would pay $450 like everybody else if that was the deal. The letter went into Randolph’s office the next Monday, and Dale Weymouth signed it there in front of a county notary. He drove back to the airport in Kansas City that afternoon.