Mobile home park owner now county’s biggest taxpayer

The owner of Westmoreland Mall drops to second place.

By RICH CHOLODOFSKY
TribLive

A New Jersey-based company that owns mobile home parks and prefabricated residential communities in a dozen states will be Westmoreland County’s largest taxpayer in 2026.

New totals from the county’s tax assessment office reveal United Mobile Homes Properties Inc. has taken the top spot among local taxpayers, replacing the owners of Westmoreland Mall in Hempfield who for decades topped the list of property owners with the most valued assets.

According to the most recent figures, the company’s holdings in the county are assessed at more than $12.4 million, which translates to a market value of more than $140 million.

The company owns more than 900 mobile homes as part of a local portfolio that includes 14 mobile home parks and housing communities in locations such as Mt. Pleasant, Rostraver, Hempfield and Unity. In the Mon Valley, the company owns Port Royal Village and Rostraver Estates in Rostraver Township and Voyager Estates in West Newton, as well as 51 Estates in Forward Township, and New Colony in West Mifflin, both in Allegheny County.

The company added 55 parcels to its holdings in 2025, according to Camdon Porterfield, Westmoreland County’s chief assessor.

“These are extremely difficult to track,” Porterfield said. “I recently went through our lists and reviewed our mobile home parks and saw a lot of United Mobile Home transactions. On a whim, I searched records for United Mobile Homes and was very surprised to see they’ve accumulated over 900 properties through the years.

“I was very shocked by that; however, with corporations increasingly entering the housing market, I should not have been that surprised.”

The company has been buying property in Westmoreland County since 2010, public records show. Attempts to reach United Mobile Homes Properties Inc. over the past week were unsuccessful.

Westmoreland taxes more than 190,000 parcels, which are expected to generate about $109 million in revenue this year for the county. County, school and municipal taxes are calculated based on assessed values, which represent only a small fraction of a property’s true market value. Assessments in Westmoreland County are based on construction costs from 1972 and are among the oldest systems in Pennsylvania.

Property assessments reflect just 8.8% of market value, meaning a home worth $100,000 is assessed in Westmoreland County at just $8,800 for taxing purposes.

It’s an outdated system that for decades has skewed home values, Porterfield said.

Mobile home owners might be among the biggest losers in the current system. Each mobile home is taxed based on a value of $8.50 per square foot.

“That translates to a market value of about $112,600 for an average single- wide mobile home with no land,” Porterfield said.

Records indicate there are more than 6,300 mobile homes throughout the county.

Corporate ownership of single-family homes has risen in recent years. Christopher Briem, a co-author of a study by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Social and Urban Research, found corporate homeownership in Allegheny County accelerated in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The scale is something new; these are large national investors, and there has been a very rapid building up of inventory. It’s really quite remarkable,” Briem said.

The study focused on single-family homes and did not specifically look at mobile home purchases or corporate homeownership in Westmoreland County.

United Mobile Homes Properties Inc. accounted for 0.3% of Westmoreland County’s more than $4 billion in assessed property values, according to the assessment office.

CBL Westmoreland, owner of Westmoreland Mall in Hempfield, drops to second place for 2026. Porterfield said the mall’s owners likely would have retained the top spot had they not appealed their assessments in 2023. CBL Westmoreland owns 11 properties including the mall and adjacent sites and saw its assessments reduced by more than $3 million.

That reduction resulted in the company’s annual tax bill being slashed by about $90,000.

Its holdings are assessed at more than $9.6 million. The company late last year filed a new round of court challenges to its valuations after the county’s tax assessment board rejected appeals on seven properties last fall.

Also among the list of top taxpayers are THF Greengate Development, which owns commercial retail property in Hempfield; Independence Health, with 57 taxable properties; and Mellon Bank, owner of 68 properties including bank branches and residential real estate.

Westmoreland County Planning Director Jason Rigone said additional properties could be added to the tax rolls in the coming years upon the expiration of state-sponsored exemption programs such as Keystone Opportunity Zones or the Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance program.

Those programs, which include largescale industrial and commercial properties throughout the county, allow for property tax exemptions over a series of years — some for five years, others for 10 — for new construction.

“We’re continuing to see investments, and it’s stable growth from a lot of different sectors,” Rigone said. “We won’t see a major uptick coming on to the tax rolls, but we’ll see gradual growth based on the sunsetting of those benefits.”