Why a lease, and not a statute

Because Montana has no statute to use. There is no rent-cap law for manufactured-home communities, and the 2025 attempt to build a framework failed comprehensively:

• House Bill 277, minimum lease term for mobile home lot rentals — Died in Process, May 20, 2025
• House Bill 305, mobile home park dispute resolution program — Died in Process, May 20, 2025
• House Bill 873, mobile home park emergency relocation account — Died in Process, May 20, 2025
• House Joint Resolution 41, a study of the Landlord Tenant Act and the Mobile Home Lot Rental Act — tabled April 17, 2025, Died in Committee, May 20, 2025

The consequence of HJ 41's failure is the one with the longest reach: there is no interim study feeding the 2027 session on the lot-rental framework. Manufactured-home communities house a large share of Montana's common-interest housing, and they are the one category with nothing in the pipeline.

So caps and rights of first refusal exist in Montana only where negotiated — or where residents buy the park.

The durable route: resident ownership

Missoula County alone contains five of Montana's 22 resident-owned cooperatives, including Old Hellgate Village, a resident-owned, democratically run co-op. A cooperative conversion changes the question entirely: the residents become the owner, and the rent decision becomes a budget decision made by a board the members elect.

It is worth noting how the pending Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act committee draft would treat such communities. Its section 15 would make a cooperative with no more than 12 units and no development rights subject only to two sections of the act — so Montana's smaller resident-owned co-ops would sit largely outside it, while a converted park of any real size would not.

The counter-example, and it is the more common outcome

Resident purchase is the good ending. Closure is the other one, and Montana produced a well-documented case of it.

Spring Creek Mobile Home Park in Evergreen, Flathead County, was cleared for redevelopment after its new owner issued 180-day eviction notices, citing the cost of replacing decades-old infrastructure — specifically the water system — and the land's location in a floodplain. 26 households were affected and all were relocated. Whitefish organisations and residents raised $164,000; an emergency relocation fund was set up through NeighborWorks Montana and the Whitefish Community Foundation, including a $45,000 Emergency Response Grant and $5,000 per household.³

The outcomes, from the published case study: 20 households stayed in the area, one moved to Havre, five left the state; four now own single-family homes or townhouses, seven rent apartments, and the rest own or rent manufactured homes or recreational vehicles or live with family. Most moved from ownership to renting. The case study documents family separations, stress, declining mental health, social isolation, educational disruption for children and weakened financial security. Moving a mobile home runs $10,000 to $25,000.

The relocation capital came from philanthropy, not statute — which is precisely what House Bill 873's emergency relocation account would have changed, and it died.⁵

What is unconfirmed

Whether the Travois Village and Harvey's lease was actually finalised by June 1, 2026, and whether the 3 percent cap cleared the “shareholder approval” condition, we could not confirm — no later coverage was found. The NeighborWorks meeting about a Harvey's resident purchase was agreed to, not completed. A third park, Katoonah Lodges west of Missoula — 103 units, sold to a Texas buyer for $11 million in January 2025, with rent raised $100 after purchase and another $95 effective May 1, 2026 — launched its own tenants union in May 2026 with 76 percent of homes; its outcome is not yet reported. Sources also differ on whether the Spring Creek relocations completed in June 2024 or June 2025.⁴