Why We Only Buy Two Kinds of Real Estate

Most funds will buy whatever the market is selling. We are deliberate. We own exactly two kinds of real estate: manufactured housing communities and self-storage. Here is the case for both.

Start with what they have in common. Both are essential-use assets. People need affordable places to live and places to store their belongings in good times and bad. That makes the demand durable rather than cyclical, which is the foundation of everything we do.

Manufactured housing has a supply dynamic you find almost nowhere else in real estate. New communities are rarely built, largely because of local zoning and community opposition, and existing ones are sometimes redeveloped away. The numbers bear this out. Of the roughly 44,000 manufactured housing communities in the country, only about 5 percent have been built since 1991, and industry data points to roughly 60 new communities added nationwide over a recent seven-year period. Supply is flat to shrinking.

Meanwhile demand keeps climbing, driven by the widening gap between what a family earns and what a traditional home costs. Today close to three in four U.S. households, roughly 100 million, cannot afford a median-priced new home. As that gap widens, the most affordable form of homeownership in the country only becomes more essential. Flat-to-shrinking supply against rising demand is about as favorable a setup as exists in real estate.

That demand shows up in the operating numbers. National occupancy in manufactured housing communities sits around 95 percent, and turnover is unusually low. Because residents own their homes and rent only the land, they tend to stay for years. Sun Communities reports average resident tenure of about 21 years. Rents grew roughly 6 percent in 2025, to about $772 a month, even as many other property types softened.

Self-storage rhymes, with a twist. Once someone fills a unit, they rarely go through the hassle and cost of moving it to save a few dollars a month, so occupancy and pricing hold up well. Demand has also broadened over time, as the share of U.S. households renting storage has risen in recent years. The catch is that storage is easy to build, which means major metros can get overbuilt. So the discipline in storage is being careful about supply. We focus on smaller, secondary markets with less new development and less competition, where existing facilities keep their pricing power.

There is one more reason we like these two: they hold up when the economy does not. Manufactured housing is the most affordable segment of housing in the country. When times get harder and people cannot afford something more expensive, demand for the most affordable option tends to hold, and can even grow. Self-storage has shown a similar resilience. In 2008, when nearly every real estate sector posted steep losses, self-storage was the only major property type to finish the year with a positive total return.

None of this has gone unnoticed. Some of the largest investors in the country are now rotating capital into both asset classes. Apollo recently launched a fund of more than $850 million dedicated to manufactured housing, and other major institutions have moved into the space as well.

Put simply, we buy the real estate where the demand does not disappear when the market gets choppy. Everything else we do is built on that.

References

1. Manufactured home community count and age of stock, MHInsider

2. Why so few new communities are built, Urban Institute

3. Households priced out of a median-priced new home, NAHB, 2025

4. Occupancy and rent growth, NorthMarq, 2025

5. Average resident tenure, Sun Communities, via Cabot Wealth

6. Growth in household storage usage, StorageCafe, 2025

7. Self-storage performance in 2008, Modern Storage Media

8. Apollo's manufactured housing fund, IPE Real Assets