I have been looking at the MLS tonight. I notice there is a manufactured home in my search and the price is much lower than the other comparable homes. It has been on the market for over 70 days where most of the homes are only on the market for less than 30.
Is there a taboo for manufactured homes? I know they are well built in a factory.
Issues related to financing would be my guess.
Well, I mean I was looking at a modular home, it is on its own lot and looks and feels like a real home and it is two story high instead of one. However, the list price is ONLY 450K vs 700~800K in comparable size and location.
If you like the home, and your lender likes the home, and it passes inspection, well then you just might end up with the least expensive home in the neighborhood.
Yes.
The structural limitations of a house you can tow behind semis, combined with the impact of the move, combined with the limitations in placing it permanently… all these things result in a house that is less structurally sound than one that is built on the spot on a solid foundation. Or at least that is what I have heard - I don’t know any architects or structural engineers with any personal experience with manufactured homes. So while they are “well built in a factory”, they are not as well built as if they were built on the spot, and are neither designed nor expected to last nearly as long.
They have to look good to have a chance of selling, and so the places they are saving money are exactly the places you don’t want to scrimp when you’re going to be living there for a few decades.
I sold cars for a miserable year, including a month selling Suzukis - a make so poorly regarded that (at least at the time) a lot of banks refused to finance them. People were always pleasantly surprised at how nice the interiors looked, at how good they seemed, and I wasn’t there long enough to realize the truth. When I moved to a better dealership and started test driving a wider variety of vehicles and seeing them all at various points in their life cycle, I started realizing that there was a reason they were so cheap.
My point, I guess, is that a Rolexx may look just as nice as a Rolex and be a fraction of the price, but even so cheap it can still be overpriced.
There is nothing wrong with manufactured or modular homes. A mobile home is different, especially if can still be moved. A mobile home is a car, usually the title is issued and controlled by the DMV. In some states if the mobile home is put in a permanent foundation, you can cancel the vehicle title and get a real estate title, but in others you cannot (once a car,always a car). Modular homes cannot be moved. They are placed on foundations and once that is done, you get a real estate title. You might have to originally get construction financing if you are buying it from the factory, but once it is titled, a purchase loan from a bank is no different than any other home loan. The inspection and appraisal will value the home.
I have seen some manufactured homes that anyone would love to live in, especially the log homes. They are gorgeous.
Perhaps the image of manufactured homes as cheaply made things you find in low end “trailer parks” may be what puts people off of them, even if a manufactured home is in a regular neighborhood and is barely distinguishable from any other home in that neighborhood.
There are three of them in my neighborhood. I doubt you would be able to spot two of them. The other looks like the " monopoly " house. One of them is very nice . I suspect it was a higher end manufacturer that made it. The monopoly house looks like it was poorly made. Visible damage from some of the larger storms we have had in the last few years with pieces of the soffet and gutters missing and some shifted siding. I don’t know why they have never had them fixed.
There is a manufactured home near my sil’s place on a lake. It is gorgeous and no one would know it was manufactured except for the fact that the owner tells everyone.
We have a vacation home that is a manufactured home. I don’t know if we’d like living in it year round, but it has been wonderful to date and we’ve had it for many years now.
I thought they decreased in value, rather than increased in value like a home built on a foundation, but I could be wrong. In my area, there is a real stigma with living in a manufactured home.
We live in southern NJ and there are seldom basements in the homes. The manufactured homes are on the same kind of foundations as regular stick frame homes, so that is a non-issue here
Architect here. A lot of misinformation here. A manufactured/modular home is not the same thing as a mobile home! If anything a good modular home is actually better made than a stick built home because there can be much more quality control in the factory. They are often better insulated with foam instead of fiberglass batts. The main drawback is that you may be limited in floor plans because they do have to fit on trucks. They should always be put on real foundations (which may or may not incude a basement.)
Ok, I went to see the house and here is whats wrong:
As @cosmicfish said, the manufactured homes are of lessor quality. The differences are:
We did look at “Hicks” brand manufactured homes. We saw some that looked just fine and dandy and were at one point thinking of buying a lot of tearing down an existing place and putting up a manufactured home be ended up buying an existing home. Prices were lower for the manufactured homes + lot, but we never got around to figuring out the details.
The home I looked at was from the late 1970’s apparently manufactured home building standards have changed a lot since.
Relatives of mine have a beautiful and pretty expensive manufactured home. Unless you saw it being put on the foundation with the crane, I don’t think you could tell. We are talking a high end waterfront home, and they did LOTS of research before deciding on their home.
Artloversplus…a stick built hpuse from the 70’s could have the same issues as this manufactured home. It’s not that it is a manufactured home that is the issue. It is that it is a home that was built to the lowest building standards possible for the time.
When I was in grad school in 1976, there were three manufactured homes across the street from my teeny tiny stick built house. They were gorgeous, well insulated for the time, nice finish work…really lovely.
It’s been on the market for a long while, and has a lower price because it is a lower quality home, not necessarily because it is manufactured. If someone had a stick built house with these “features” it would be the same!
