OLD ORCHARD BEACH — Old Orchard Village has been Jessica Wright’s home for 16 years. She lives there with her two children, who she supports on a single income.

The fee she currently pays to have her mobile home on the lot – roughly $500 a month – is doable, but if that fee went up significantly, they would have to find somewhere else to live.

That’s a possible scenario.

In early February, the mobile home park residents at Atlantic Village and Old Orchard Village learned that the longtime owner – Seagate Limited Partnership – was selling the properties. Residents in the parks, like Wright, own their home but not the land below it.

Seagate Limited Partnership, which has owned the parcels since 1996, must wait 60 days after notifying residents before transferring ownership, per a recently enacted state law.

In October 2023, legislation went into effect that requires mobile home park owners to give residents 60 days notice, during which time residents have the opportunity to try to buy the land themselves by forming a resident-owned community.

The looming sale motivated Barbara Huntress-Rather, who has lived in Old Orchard Village for roughly three years, and a few other residents to do exactly that. Huntress-Rather said an initial meeting about the sale drew 75 people.

Following the sale notice, she and a handful of residents contacted Cooperative Development Institute (CDI), a nonprofit that helps people form co-ops and has a program specifically dedicated to helping mobile home park residents do so.

At a meeting in February, CDI walked attendees through the basics of establishing resident ownership.

“The residents are very organized, collaborative, and committed to their community,” wrote Nora Gosselin, market development and acquisitions specialist at CDI’s New England Resident Owned Communities program, in an emailed statement. “Many of the residents have been clear that they seek to continue the park owner’s legacy by stepping into ownership themselves. The Opportunity to Purchase statute is about giving residents, with professional support, the ability to preserve local ownership, and come to the table as a buyer, same as any other buyer, if they so choose.”

Seagate has declined to identify the buyer, according to Huntress-Rather, but residents know that the prospective buyer has put forward a bid of $40.4 million dollars, she said.

Seagate Limited Partnership did not respond to a request for comment by the deadline.

The $40.4 million bid is “expensive,” said Gosselin, but “it’s important to consider the ocean location, institutional size (~400 homes), and the fact that the properties are beautifully maintained.”

“The residents will have to do due diligence and vet the property like any other buyer,” she added.

Residents are now getting the information they need to decide whether they want to make an offer. “There could be an environmental issue that requires a whole lot of money to clean it up, or other infrastructure issues, like the water and sewer lines, we just plain don’t know,” said Huntress-Rather.

The sale raises concerns that the new owners could increase the lot fees that residents currently pay, or flip the two parks into something else entirely.

Residents were already given a notice that their lot fees would increase $75 this June (which is more than the yearly increase they’ve seen in past years), but they worry that future increases could be much steeper.

“It’s scary because we don’t know what the purchaser has lined up,” said Wright.

Judy Twombly said she thinks the fees could increase, or “they could take all of this out and make it into condos or seasonal mobile homes, so they could jack up the prices.” Twombly and her dog, Leo, have lived in Old Orchard Village since September 2017.

Although the sale is worrisome, there are also risks associated with going the cooperative route. If formed, the cooperative would need to finance a loan in order to put forward a counter bid. Residents could still expect their lot fees to go up in order to pay for the financing.

According to an estimate put together by CDI, residents could expect lot fees to increase to $900 a month based on preliminary estimates of operating and financing costs.

“A lot of people feel like me, that it doesn’t hurt to look into the possibility of a co-op,” but they’re clear eyed about the fact that it could not make sense in the end, said Twombly. “It’s been hard on everybody,” she said, speaking of the mood in the neighborhood.

CDI is also looking into whether there is any federal or state help that could make the rent more affordable if they did go ahead and purchase, said Huntress-Rather. “There are no promises. But it’s being explored,” she said.

Those involved in organizing the cooperative have been hitting the pavement for the past few weeks looking to collect signatures.

Under the new state law, the group needs 51% of mobile home owners to sign a petition saying they are on board with forming the cooperative before they can move forward with an offer – a goal they recently reached, according to Huntress-Rather.

If they put forward an offer that Seagate accepts, they would have 90 days to come up with the funding for it.

With 51% percent of residents in the parks on board, those organizing the effort are hosting a meeting on March 23 with CDI to discuss next steps.

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