Posted by Mike Leiter (KY) on November 05, 1998 at 24:20:54:
Here’s the deal. The good ol’ MH state itself, Kentucky has some funky MH dealer rules. Supposedly, after selling or offering for sale 3 MHs in 12 consecutive months, you become a dealer - if not registered, an illegal dealer.
I’ve got the info from the state on the regs and such for dealers, and it appears (I need to go through them in more detail), that I have to have a place of business, not my home (my place of business is my home office), and a hard-covered lot with xxx amount of sq. ft., etc., etc. Obviously, this is a totally, rediculous, 100% unneccessary requirement for someone doing Lonnie deals.
In addition, just recently they passed some crappy reg or ordinance that requires a MH dealer to have a state certified installer ON THEIR PAYROLL!!! How about just a simple requirement to USE a certified installer. How stupid. To become one myself, I need to take 2 days off work to take a 15 hour course for $190 and pass a test, not too big a deal. Plus the $200/year dealer fee. Then to keep up my certification, 5 hr class per year for about $40. Anyway, just a stupid, needless, pointless requirement for Lonnie deals.
Anyway, my main question is, can I get around this requirement? I’ve got several Lonnie deals in the works and their is 100% the market for these deals here. In 2 weeks I’ve found several homes in the $1500-$4000 range, and tons in the $5k-$10k range. One MH park owner had one for sale for $7500, will take $6000 cash, and said they had about 50 calls from people wanting to buy on contract, and suspected (they were getting out of doing land contracts - good! I’ll take over), and thought they would be able to get $8900 with financing for that MH.
So, when you buy/sell the MHs, do you not put your name on the title, only as lienholder. If you do this, doesn’t the sales price from the first sale tell the buyer how much you paid? Or don’t you have to have the seller put down the sales price? Without dealer status, would I ‘legally’ have to pay sales tax on the sale?
Finally, I realize that until I figure out what to do, I can ‘sell’ 2 homes, my wife can sell 2 homes, maybe my business can as well. I’m not sure about my 2 daughters (age 11 months and 3.5 years), maybe they can do 2 each. I was thinking about paying my friends $50 a deal to do everything in their name twice a year, etc., etc., so that could hold me over for a long time.
Any thoughts? If they absolutely require the place of business and a lot, I hate to pay rent for a place I never use, etc. If anyone is in this situation, or has overcome it, or just does deals in KY with MH (I’m in the Lexington area), please let me know how you’ve dealt with dealer status.
Thanks one and all!
Regards,
Mike