By Jaime Adame for The Daily Yonder

On a warm September day last year, I learned I was far from alone in finding a three-day eviction notice taped to the door of my home.

“He’s just been very demanding lately,” a leasing manager told me, referring to the out-of-state owner of my apartment and about 25 other rental properties in town. “So we had to print out probably, I don’t know, like, 100 [notices] the day that you got yours.”

I live in Brownwood, Texas, a small city of about 19,000, two-and-a-half hours northwest of Austin. But my rent payment doesn’t stay in town. Like so many renters, even in small cities and rural areas, my monthly payments go to a limited liability corporation.

For me, the wave of worry was short-lived. Clutching the notice, I barged into a couple of attorney offices. One graciously heard me out and made a phone call on my behalf – despite it being clear I had no money – leading to a quick agreement with my leasing manager on what I could pay to avoid an eviction court over a past due amount of $230.

Others aren’t so fortunate. The rise of out-of-state corporate landlords leads to especially burdensome eviction practices in small cities and towns like mine, with rural renters more likely than urban tenants to struggle and lose in court, researchers and tenant advocates say.

Eviction Filings Devastate Renters

Brownwood renter Ashley Orosco also knows the pain of an eviction filing firsthand.

“The defamation of character in itself is just devastating,” said Orosco, 38, a single mom to two teen daughters. “I pride myself on my reputation in a small community,” she said.

Orosco told me she had never faced anything like the eviction notice she found on her door in May.

She said she moved into the corporate-owned Yellow Rose Estates mobile home park in Brownwood last year at the end of July. The park, which has about 115 home-sites, seemed affordable, offering three bedrooms for under $900, she said. The family could also bring along the dogs she had adopted at her older daughter’s request to help cope with grief following the death of Orosco’s mother three years ago.

“She got her a little dog, and my youngest got her a dog. And they’re a big part of our family,” Orosco said.

Orosco said she began making late rent payments after spending on her family for the Christmas season. “You know, we kind of give our kids what we think they want,” she said.

She said she agreed to speak to me to get out her side of the story. “Yes, I was late,” she said. But she said that she always paid the $50 monthly late fee and that her payments to her landlord came “in an adequate time that they had allotted.”

Tenants like Orosco living in Yellow Rose Estates accounted for 22% of the 107 new Landlord/tenant court filings through the first six months of 2024 in Brown County, according to state data and case summaries provided upon request.

When Orosco received her eviction notice, she got help from Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas.

“We have definitely seen an increase in people needing help with eviction cases lately,” said Melissa Arano, a Legal Aid attorney.

Data from the courts and U.S. Census Bureau also shows rising pressure on renters in Brownwood, where the slogan “Feels Like Home” is emblazoned on city hall. A 2017 survey of Brownwood residents found that the top reason people liked living here was its “small town environment.” Tied for third: “low cost of living.”

But a 2019 housing study warned that “housing in Brownwood is in jeopardy of becoming unaffordable to the majority of City residents.”

High inflation exacerbated housing insecurity in Brown County (where Brownwood is located), contributing to the highest number of eviction filings in the county in more than two decades. Eviction filings increased to 252 last year, up from 236 in 2022 and 187 in 2021, according to Texas Office of Court Administration records. (The numbers reflect landlord/tenant cases, of which about 95% are estimated to be eviction filings, according to the advocacy group Texas Housers.)

A rising share of Brownwood’s renting households also fit the definition of “rent burdened,” a term for those spending more than 30% of income on housing, according to Census Bureau estimates. The latest data shows that roughly 53% of Brownwood renters meet this definition, up from about 43% five years earlier.

Contributing to that, since 2019, rental costs in Brown County have increased by 25%,  more than the 18.8% rise for urban Travis County, home of the booming Texas capital of Austin, according to data published by The Washington Post.

Landlords have experienced hikes in insurance costs as well as property tax increases, so “they’re not the bad guys,” said Hanna Adams, executive director of the non-profit Cornerstone Community Action Agency, which serves Brown County and nearby counties.

The way Adams sees it, the supply of affordable housing has not kept up with the demand, leading to increased rents and a rise in applicants for the federal aid for tenants distributed by Cornerstone.

“Our waitlist at one time was over a year long, of people waiting for rental assistance,” Adams said.

Research shows that renters in small-town communities like Brownwood have a harder time with evictions and court actions than do their urban counterparts.

A 2024 study published in the journal Rural Sociology looked at the 220,000 eviction notices filed in rural counties in a single year..

“When [rural] renters do receive a filing, they will have more trouble than their counterparts in urban areas, because rural areas have a less developed ecosystem of legal service and tenants’ rights organizations,” two researchers with Princeton University’s Eviction Lab who have worked on a first-of-its-kind national database of eviction filings.

Another study in Kentucky found rural renters in eviction court were much more likely to have a judgment against them compared to those in urban areas. Urban renters lost in court 46.2% of the time, while rural renters had a judgment against them in 71.5% of cases. The findings surprised Cassie Chambers Armstrong, a co-author of the study and a law professor at the University of Louisville.

“I went into this project with the idea that there were unique challenges facing folks in rural communities, and that we would see that there were disparities in terms of how the systems were working for folks,” Armstrong said in an interview. “The data was actually even more staggering and more shocking than I think I would have predicted.”

Corporate Landlord

In Brownwood, the Yellow Rose mobile home park, owned by an out-of-state corporation, is one of the most frequent filers of eviction cases in the county. This fits a national trend observed by Gershenson with Princeton’s Eviction Lab, who said in an email interview that corporate landlords are more likely to file evictions, although the correlation to out-of-state ownership is less clear.

“I can say with more confidence that large corporate landlords file more often than mom-and-pop landlords,” he said. “This doesn’t map perfectly onto the out-of-towner/local distinction, but it is pretty close.”

As in many rural communities, the Brownwood mobile home park’s lower rents attracted both tenants and deep-pocketed investors looking for a good business opportunity.

That’s the story of a Virginia-based entity known as ClearTrail Group Holdings, which purchased Yellow Rose Estates in 2017, along with several other parks, according to property records. A lawsuit filed that same year described how the business of acquiring mobile home communities attracted investors like a magnet.

The organization that became ClearTrail Group Holdings began as a mobile home management company seeking money to buy more parks. The company’s executives had talks with potential investors, which included an insurance company and New York investment fund Reservoir Capital Group, according to court documents filed as part of a lawsuit by consultants Paradigm Partners International, which sued over a disputed fee for making the Reservoir Capital introduction. Before ClearTrail executives reached an agreement with Reservoir Capital, an “introduction” was also made to “a Chinese investment group” and “an office that managed a family’s wealth.” The ClearTrail executives also had negotiations with a Texas-based investment group, according to court documents.

While the lawsuit settled out of court, case records include a 2016 offer letter from Reservoir pledging $100 million in capital for the new ClearTrail venture, an amount that, according to court records, was double the investment originally sought.

“We are hopeful that this partnership will ultimately result in the company being one of the largest acquirers and operators of manufactured housing communities in the U.S.,” stated the Reservoir letter.

Ultimately, however, the company became a “good-sized firm,” but not an industry giant, said ClearTrail executive Andrew Reisinger in interviews with the Daily Yonder. The partnership with Reservoir Capital “was a very nice relationship and it worked out well, but it’s now over,” having ended about three years ago, said Reisinger, a mobile home industry veteran of more than 15 years.

“Churn Kills”

Reisinger said he owns and manages a separate entity, ClearTrail Real Estate, also based in Virginia, that manages mobile home parks for various ownership groups in which he typically owns a minority stake.

Clear Trail Real Estate has an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau, based on the number and resolution of consumer complaints.  The bureau states that its ratings are “not a guarantee of a business’s reliability or performance.”

Those complaints – four in the last 12 months – include a tenant from an unnamed park alleging lost rent payments: “[We] have the receipt from payment and the money order receipt still, and we received TWO eviction letters in the mail saying we never paid, everyone in the trailer court has this same issue and the company is not answering the phone,” states one complaint, in part.

Frequent complaints are common in the mobile home industry, Reisinger noted.

“Many are warranted. Many are not legitimate,” he said in an email, though he acknowledged that ClearTrail Real Estate makes mistakes – “more than I am comfortable making.” When errors happen, “we do our best to correct the error.”

“Believe it or not, we view evicting a tenant as a failure,” Reisinger said. “We have a saying – churn kills.”

Yet eviction filings are sometimes a landlord’s only option, he said.

“We should be expected to treat our people right, but we’re not their banker or their fallback. They need to pay their bills to us just like they need to pay their bills to everyone else,” Reisinger said in a phone interview.

It’s a fact that affordable housing in mobile home parks draws in families, and that “our tenant base is typically in the 20th percentile to 50th percentile of income,” he said, going on to describe how many living in the parks can’t afford to deal with problems like losing a job, getting hurt, or having to pay for a major car repair.

ClearTrail properties offer payment plans to tenants who reach out for help. ClearTrail requires them to provide a 20% upfront payment to qualify for the plan , Reisinger said, estimating that those arrangements work out about three-quarters of the time.

But “some people make the decision that the value that they receive by not paying rent and other charges is worth more than the long-term costs to their credit rating, psychological well-being of the family, etc.”

Reisinger said landlords have fewer options compared to other businesses in dealing with those unable to pay.

“The only way that landlords can protect themselves and end unprofitable business relationships is to access the courts that have been created to protect property rights,” he said.

A ClearTrail Real Estate website, which Reisinger said is not up to date, lists 30-plus mobile home parks in more than a half-dozen states, including rural areas of Indiana, North Carolina,  and Texas. Reisinger said many of the listed parks were once owned as part of the venture with Reservoir Capital before being sold off. He declined to say how many parks were owned at the partnership’s peak, citing the privacy of his business associates.

“Serial Evictions”

Vaquero Investments, where Reisinger said he has a 10% stake, now owns the Yellow Rose Estates in Brownwood. Among Vaquero Investments’ other holdings are 225 mobile-home sites in Roxboro, North Carolina, a town of 8,100 about 30 miles north of Durham. Eviction notice records in North Carolina are online. Between July and September, eviction proceedings were started against 24 tenants in Vaquero-owned properties there.

Several tenants in Roxboro cases had multiple filings against them over those three months, an example of what’s known as serial eviction. Critics of the practice say it amounts to using the courts to help with routine rent collection, resulting in additional court fees for tenants and a cycle that’s tough to break.

Reisinger sighed deeply when asked if landlords should work with tenants to avoid serial eviction filings.

“I know that we do work with our residents. I believe that a lot of landlords do,” he said.

But it’s up to the tenants to break the cycle of serial eviction, he said.

“No one is forcing consumers to go through serial evictions. They’re doing it because they want to stay,” he said, adding that “serial evictions don’t happen because the landlords want them to happen. I promise you that.”

He disputed the idea that landlords misuse the court system to keep tenants rather than risk an unrented property.

“There is a growing demand for affordable housing. We don’t lack demand for our product,” Reisinger said. “If someone gets evicted who hasn’t been paying us, we’ll get another customer in there.”

A Frustrating Victory

Evictions can have far-lasting effects.

If a tenant is evicted, “that’s on their rental history,” said Arano, the Legal Aid attorney in Texas.

“If they try to rent at a different complex and that prospective landlord pulls their rental history and there are evictions on there, they’re less likely to be able to rent at that place,” Arano said.

For those forced to leave their homes, “a lot of times we find that our clients and applicants don’t have access to a trailer or someone to help them move, so that is another stress involved in the eviction process, is they don’t have a way to get their property and belongings to a new property or a new storage unit,” Arano said.

Coupled with other disruptions, eviction “has this downhill effect of affecting all different kinds of aspects of their life,” Arano said.

Orosco, who successfully disputed her eviction notice from Yellow Rose Estates mobile home park, told me that even though she won in court, she didn’t find the result satisfying.

Her first victory came after a judge dismissed the case because proper notice had not been given to her, she said. The park refiled the case, but this time Orosco won a judgment, according to court documents.

Part of her frustration at the eviction filings against her includes how the amount sought by the mobile home park increased despite her continuing to pay rent throughout the process, she said, adding that she’d like to know where her rent money was going.

There was also frustration at having to take off from work to go to court.

“That was my vacation time. That’s not a vacation,” Orosco told me, managing a chuckle.

I ran into Orosco a few days later at her job working at Walmart, where she greeted me with a warm smile. But another aspect of the conflict had put a cloud on her future.

Orosco said the park declined to renew her lease, a serious blow because the non-renewal affected her approval–after months of waiting–for rental assistance from Cornerstone, the local non-profit distributing federal aid. A change of address would require a new application for help.

She later told me she’d decided to move out after facing a third eviction case. The assistance program ran out of money for the year.

“I just feel harassed at this point,” Orosco said,

Before this last update, Orosco seemed ambivalent about staying or leaving, saying that she’d like some sort of deal to be worked out.

“I’m still maintaining the property. I keep my house clean, I cut my yard,” Orosco told me. “Everywhere you go, you leave a lasting impression.”

Jaime Adame lives in Brownwood, Texas. Most recently, he’s written for Inside Higher Ed and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.