The sale
Marcus & Millichap announced the sale of Desert Classic Mobile Home Park, a 275-space manufactured-housing community in Tucson, Arizona, on July 17. The property sold all-cash for $26.13 million, or $95,018 per space, and closed June 30, 2026. Built in 1972 on more than 35 acres between Interstate 10 and Interstate 19 on the city's south side, the park includes a swimming pool, a spa and one park-owned home.
'This currently and historically well-occupied property sold for the first time after a long period of multi-generational ownership,' said Dustin B. Wilmer of The Wilmer & Danny Group at Marcus & Millichap, in the firm's announcement. Wilmer said the sellers received multiple competitive offers before accepting the winning bid from the buyer, California-based Pacifica Companies, which the brokerage described as 'a well-respected owner and operator of manufactured housing communities and RV resorts.' Wilmer and Jared Wallach of Marcus & Millichap represented the buyer, alongside John Sheedy of Park Brokerage and Ryan Sarbinoff, the firm's Arizona broker of record.
The brokerage characterized the price as one of the highest on record per site for an all-age mobile home park in Tucson. Tucson.com, in a follow-up report, said no changes to the park's rents had been announced as of July 30.
Why land-lease parks are different
Desert Classic is a land-lease community: residents typically own their manufactured homes but rent the ground beneath them, a structure that is well documented across the manufactured-housing industry and distinguishes these transactions from ordinary apartment sales. Because relocating a manufactured home is expensive and often impractical — many older units cannot legally or physically be moved without significant cost — a resident facing a lot-rent increase after a change in park ownership has far fewer realistic alternatives than an apartment tenant facing a rent increase who can simply move.
Tucson.com's coverage noted that development of new manufactured-housing communities has been constrained by zoning restrictions and neighbor opposition, a scarcity of supply that, combined with the difficulty of relocating existing homes, gives owners of established parks like Desert Classic significant pricing power over their captive resident base regardless of who owns the land.
The buyer's footprint
Pacifica Companies has investment properties across the United States as well as in Mexico and India, according to Tucson.com. Marcus & Millichap's own materials describe the firm as having closed 8,818 transactions worth $50.8 billion in 2025 across more than 80 offices — context for the brokerage's scale, not for this specific deal's financing or Pacifica's plans for the property, which were not disclosed in the sources reviewed.
Why financing, not just zoning, shapes who owns parks like this
Federal research on manufactured-housing finance underscores why land-lease economics matter so much to a deal like Desert Classic's. A 2021 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data found that manufactured-home buyers who take out chattel loans — financing that treats the home as personal property rather than real estate, which is common for homes on leased land such as park lots — face higher denial rates than manufactured-housing mortgage borrowers or site-built home borrowers, and pay higher interest rates when they are approved. The CFPB also found Black, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native borrowers were more likely than white borrowers to end up with chattel loans even after controlling for whether they owned the underlying land, and that the chattel lending market is concentrated among relatively few lenders compared with the site-built mortgage market.
Because chattel loans are titled to the home rather than the land, they generally do not carry the accumulating equity or refinancing options of a conventional mortgage, and manufactured homes financed this way are also more likely to depreciate rather than appreciate in value, the CFPB found — a dynamic Pew-funded research from the University of North Carolina's Center for Community Capital has also documented, alongside evidence that homeowners on leased land face reduced security of tenure since a change in park ownership or a lot-rent increase can force a costly, often impractical relocation. Manufactured housing overall accounts for about 6% of the nation's occupied housing stock, according to the CFPB, and a still-larger share of unsubsidized affordable housing specifically, which is why researchers and consumer advocates have paid particular attention to financing terms in land-lease communities like Desert Classic even where, as here, no rent increase has yet been announced.