In the 1990s, some of the trailers at Paradise Cove went for as little as $25,000, while trailers with an ocean view sold for up to $400,000. But in the housing boom of 2006, prices went up tenfold, much more than in the rest of Malibu, even though buying a trailer is a pretty sketchy real-estate deal. The owner of the park still controls the land, and you’re just buying the improvements—in other words, all you own is the trailer itself. But prices still rise with each resale: a 75-year-old woman who seldom changed out of her bathrobe sold her trailer for $750,000 to the ex-wife of a former Eagles guitarist in 2003, but she never moved in—she decided she wanted to live on a boat. She sold it for $975,000 to another flipper, who sold it to Mac Humphries, a retired Countrywide executive, and his wife, Jill, for $1.2 million. The Humphrieses put another $1 million into renovations.

By Vanessa Grigoriadis, Vanity Fair