Glenwood Village is sold to Hometown America

Glenwood Village, a sprawling 563-unit manufactured home community in Riverhead has been sold to Hometown America Communities.

Brian Stark of Aquebogue, whose father and uncle began developing Glenwood Village in 1964, told RiverheadLOCAL yesterday the sale was consummated at a closing Wednesday. He declined to disclose the sale price. 

Hometown America Communities, a privately held company founded in 1997 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, owns and operates roughly 80 land-lease communities in 12 states. It has operated in New York for almost 14 years, a company spokesperson said in an email today.

“It’s bittersweet,” Stark said in an interview yesterday, “and the end of an era.” Stark has been a managing partner of the family-owned company for 31 years. After his father Bruce Stark died in 1991, he left his investment banking job in New York City to come back to Riverhead and go into business with his uncle Doug Stark. His uncle died in 2013.

“When I left Wall Street, I said to someone, I really don’t want to manage a trailer park. I said, what I want to do is manage a high-end manufactured home community,” Stark said. “So that was kind of my mission, to rebuild the old sites, the old units, and expand, like we did, into the higher-end, bigger manufactured homes.”

Under his leadership, a Glenwood-owned construction company built “probably 300 of the old sites,” he said. “We rebuilt about three-quarters of the old park” and in the early 2000s, added 80 sites in a new section called Glenwood Oaks, developed on an adjacent parcel of land.

The quality of the homes, the atmosphere of the community and the people who live there have always been the top priority, Stark said.

The park office was a hive of activity this morning, with Hometown America employees getting settled in and setting up operations, and with residents coming in for various reasons. 

Lorraine and Frank Slanina, Glenwood residents for 15 years, stopped to greet Stark and wish him well. 

“This park is probably the best park in all of Riverhead,” Lorraine Slanina said. “The amenities that we have, the real estate that we have, everything is nice and neat. People take care of their homes here. People are very friendly,” she said. “It is a beautiful place to live.”

Stark said he is confident the community is in good hands. 

“Hometown is the largest operator of senior manufactured home communities in the country,” Stark said. Hometown is a quality operator, he said. Other large manufactured home community operators expressed interest in Glenwood, Stark said, but he declined because they don’t share Glenwood’s management philosophy.

Glenwood Village is Hometown America’s third acquisition in this state; all three are within the Town of Riverhead.

The 291-unit Calverton Meadows senior community, formerly Thurm’s Estates on Fresh Pond Avenue, which Hometown America acquired in December 2011 for more than $10.8 million, was the Chicago-based company’s first community in New York.  It purchased its second New York property, Foxwood Village, a 244-unit senior community on Middle Road in Calverton, for $16.8 million in December 2021.

“We are excited about our recent acquisition of Glenwood Village in Riverhead,” the company said in an emailed statement.

“We look forward to building and maintaining strong, productive relationships with our residents,” the company said.

Hometown reinvests in their communities, Stark said, and that aligns with his family’s business philosophy. 

“My father and my uncle always had the mantra, ‘pay yourself enough to be comfortable and then put everything else you make back into the business. And that’s exactly what I did. We did it for 60-some years. Every year we would try to do a one-off for a capital improvement, an addition or an infrastructure improvement,” Stark said.

At age 63, Stark said he’s ready to work a bit less, but not retire altogether. He plans to continue following the same philosophy of reinvestment, with continued investments in the local community. He’s going to set up a charitable trust. “I can direct money to Peconic Bay Medical Center, and more money to Riverhead Rotary scholarships,” he said, increasing the annual scholarship amount from its current level of $100,000. 

“Stuff like that, to me, is fun,” Stark said. “I mean, that’s going to be the fun part, because my lifestyle is not really changing, but I can change other people’s lives with real money, with life-changing money,” he said.

In addition, he said, he’ll continue working on the Sandy Pond par three golf course and mini-golf project on Roanoke Avenue. A clubhouse is currently in the review process at Town Hall. Plans include the construction of three 7,000-square-foot storage buildings on the south side of the property, to be leased for contractor storage, Stark said.

“I’ll probably be a third busy, compared to 100% busy running Glenwood. I’ll do 30% of the work. I guess that’s semi-retired, right?”