In 2012, a small audience of real estate investors gathered in a conference room in Colorado to learn about a lucrative opportunity.

We'll meet together the next three days, just one goal, and estimate everybody here a

competent mobile loan parked investor.

So we're going to show you how to find properties, negotiate,

renegotiate them, finance them. That's Frank Rolf, co-owner of Mobile Home

University. Do due diligence on them.

I'd properly buy them, close on them.

Turn them around and operate them and even sell them.

This kind of college styled about 30 hours in length where we teach them everything

from finding mobile home parks to evaluating them and running them.

11 years ago capitalists weren't clamoring to own mobile home parks.

That has changed.

Today, investors are cashing in on one of America's biggest and most vulnerable affordable housing markets.

When I bought Leadhaven, my very eviction, was a veteran who had severe mental problems.

Very nice individual, but didn't have their act together in a big way and hadn't paid rent in months and I then

had to evict her for non-payment. I had to do something.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things.

I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, mobile home parks.

At the dawn of the automobile industry in the 1920s, trailers were toys for the

rich, a way to travel the country in luxury. That changed during World War II

when the federal government bought tens of thousands of trailers

and used them to create permanent housing communities

...