Mobile home park tax crusader takes on City Hall, and he might just win

ROCHESTER - The city of Rochester can claim all it wants that its recent revaluations of mobile homes were fair, just and equitable, but one man who probably knows more about the mobile home ecosystem than anyone else says he expects to prove them wrong, and he'll do so in the next 10 days.
In fact, that may be why his 24-page presentation that was supposed to be part of the finance committee's meeting packet for this Tuesday was scrubbed late last week.

Longtime Royal Crest mobile home park administrator Kevin Brigham was also expected to be listed on the agenda, but was left off because according to one city official, the finance committee didn't want to attract a large mob like what occurred at last month's City Council workshop when mobile home owners berated the city over its unjust revaluations.
Brigham, who's made it his passion to lead the resistance against the recent revaluations that tripled the assessments and doubled the tax burden for the majority of mobile home owners, says there are three factors that improperly played a major role in what many see as a complete betrayal of the mobile home community.
Flipping a big factor
Everyone knows about flipping homes from shows on HGTV and A&E networks.
Well, there's such a thing as mobile home flipping, too.
In fact, Brigham notes that while doing research into the reassessment period, he found 10 mobile homes that had been flipped in which the before appraisal was omitted while the after flipping appraisal was applied, skewing the true assessment upward.

Of those 10, two were from Royal Crest, for which he had the numbers. One of them was from lot 54, which went up 542 percent in taxes - from $363 dollars to $1,136 between 2023 and 2024.
The increase was because the mobile home on lot 54 had been gutted, totally refurbished and for all intents and purposes, brought up to 2024 standards.
Lot 25, meanwhile, was appraised for $38,600 and taxed at $1,076 in 2023, while appraised at $143,000 and taxed at $2,124 the next year.
Brigham is not sure why the prior sale during the assessment window of April 2023 to September 2024 was not averaged into the aggregate, but it wasn't. He said the other eight mobile homes that were flipped saw similar increases.
"This was a huge factor in inaccurate assessments," Brigham said.
Taj Mahal parks carried too much weight
About 56.2 percent of the 200 mobile homes sales that helped figure the reassessments were located in what Brigham called the "Taj Mahal" parks that have significant amenities like Tara Estates.
Brigham said they comprise just three parks in Rochester making them a tiny percentage of the overall mobile home community.

Royal Crest mobile home park administrator Kevin Brigham (Courtesy photo)

Meanwhile, mobile home coops that are run as nonprofits or are privately owned make up the majority of mobile home parks in the city, so their taxes were skewed upward, in part, because of the Taj Mahal parks values.
"The overwhelming number (used for the reassessments) came from these Taj Mahal parks," Brigham noted.
Enigmatic Trend Value didn't help
Everyone agrees it's cool to be "trending," but not when you live in a mobile home.
According to recent data from Google AI, "the trend value of mobile homes is significantly increasing, with the average price of a new mobile home rising by around 58 percent between 2018 and 2023."
Figures show the average sale price of a mobile home is now around $124,300 nationwide.
The trend value is often used in the mobile/home community to either increase or decrease the taxable value of a home. In today's hot mobile home market it mostly used to increase the value.
One mobile home in the city comprising 1,005 square feet of living space shows a trend factor of 42 percent, Brigham noted.
Trend factor is also commonly used to either justify an increase or decrease in the taxable value of a mobile home, but Brigham said it is rarely used on single family dwellings, and if it is, there's rarely more than a 5 percent increase.
Brigham told The Rochester Voice that while he won't be on the finance committee agenda, he will get to make his report to the board in full, which he said will likely take about 15 minutes. He said he'll be open to answer any questions anyone from the board might want to ask.
"I want to work with the finance board and the City Council," he said. "This is about working for solutions."
Brigham is also expected to be on the City Council workshop agenda slated for Feb. 18.