Housing
This section of the BDN aims to help readers understand Maine’s housing crisis, the volatile real estate market and the public policy behind them. Read more Housing coverage here.
When Diane Payzant moved into the Tempesta Way Mobile Home Park in Norridgewock more than a decade ago, she paid $200 each month for rent, which went up by only $45 over nine years.
That changed in May 2024 when Auburn-based Brown Stone MHP LLC bought the 15-home park. Payzant, 64, soon received repeated rent hikes and additional charges that brought her monthly payments from $245 to more than $550, she said.
The state filed a civil lawsuit in Kennebec County Superior Court last week against Brown Stone MHP LLC for allegedly not giving residents enough notice before the rent hikes took effect and implementing additional unfair fees.
This lawsuit is the first brought by the Maine attorney general’s office to enforce recent amendments to the state’s rent increase notice rule for mobile home parks, according to Danna Hayes, a spokesperson with the office. The changes to state law came after corporate mobile home park owners across the state were repeatedly raising rents for residents.
The high costs are especially harmful for the Norridgewock park residents, as most are retired, disabled and on fixed incomes, Payzant said.
“Everybody spent all their money buying their home here and they were planning on this being their retirement,” Payzant said. “They were going to stay here, live and enjoy it and now they can’t.”
The trend has led residents of some Maine mobile home parks to join forces to buy their parks in the hope of keeping them out of the hands of large corporations who would’ve enacted similar fee spikes. Other communities have passed local rules that cap how much mobile home park owners can raise rents in a certain period of time.
In most of Maine’s mobile home parks, residents own the home they live in, but pay rent on the land it sits on. Residents are also responsible for paying their own utilities and maintaining their lot.
“It costs so much to move a mobile home and they know you can’t,” Payzant said. “You’re just captive and they can just keep raising those lot fees and you have nothing you can do.”
The rent hikes began in June 2024 — a month after Brown Stone MHP LLC bought the park — when residents received a notice stating monthly lot rents would rise from $245 to $450 and residents would be charged an additional $25 for every pet they own beginning Sept. 1, 2024, the lawsuit alleges.
The following May, the park owner allegedly announced that lot rents would rise to $550 on July 1, 2025, and stated “we have done everything we can not to increase our rents and have successfully accomplished that since 2023,” according to the lawsuit.
The state also alleges that the park owner didn’t give residents 75 days’ notice of a rent increase, as required by state law at the time, the lawsuit states.
Residents then received a notice dated June 1 announcing rents would rise again to $565 and include a new $39 water and sewer fee beginning Aug. 1 to offset “increasing water and sewer service costs.”
The state alleges the notice did not give residents the legally required 90 days’ notice of a rent hike or contain information about residents’ rights, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit asks a judge to issue a civil fine of up to $10,000 for each of the five violations the park owner allegedly committed under the Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act and pay the state “all amounts paid by park residents based on illegal and noncompliant rent increases and fee notices,” among other damages.
Brown Stone MHP LLC did not return requests for comment on Wednesday.