"It is really a debt investment in the form of a participating mortgage," Chateau executive vice president Rees Davis told GlobeSt.com. "We have about $11 million invested. And we have the potential of investing another $6 million or $7 million. At the end of the day, we would expect it to get us an equity-type of return in the neighborhood of a 20% internal rate of return."

Chateau, which is based in Greenwood Village, a suburb southeast of Denver, adds 6,000 residents to its Communityplus Buying Program. Its goal is to have a total of 200,000 residents in the program, which provides discounts from various vendors.

Manufactured housing sometimes is one of the least understood aspects of commercial real estate, he says. "It's really a misnomer to call them mobile homes," Davis says. "The truth is, over 95% of all manufactured housing is moved only one time - from the facility where it was made, either to a site owned by the homeowner or in a land-lease deal." In most cases, Chateau owns the land and the homeowner owns the house and leases the land from Chateau, he says.