Manufactured homes are having a moment

Where can you buy a California home just steps from the ocean for less than the price of a used car? At Huntington By The Sea, a mobile home park where Casey TeVault recently purchased a 1,400-square-foot mobile home for $12,000, invested $46,000 in renovations, then sold it for $120,000.

“Some parks are rough, but this one is beautiful,” he says, adding that many of the dwellings boast sunrooms and roof decks. “It doesn’t hurt to see the water from your roof!”

Forget the “trailer park” stereotype. They’re now called “manufactured homes,” and the new housing law could turn them into real estate’s next big thing. What’s changed: Removal of the steel chassis requirement—the permanent steel frame that manufactured homes are built on and transported with—means far fewer size constraints, opening the door to massive, multi-story mansions indistinguishable from the “stick-built” house next door. Plus, higher FHA loan limits for these dwellings could “expand the buyer pool and make these projects financially feasible for both developers and investors,” says Rod Khleif at Lifetime Cashflow Academy.

The main draw for buyers? An affordable average $141,450 price point that’s appreciated 70.1% since 2019—even faster than site-built homes.

Why some buyers are wary

“The purchase price may look attractive, but manufactured homes are a nightmare to sell,” says Max Cohen at FL HomeBuyers. “The buyer pool is much smaller; financing and insurance can shrink it further. If they’re on leased land, they’re even harder to exit. If I can’t sell it cleanly, I don’t want it.”

Alex Wright at DealForge experienced this messy sales process firsthand on a factory-built modular home near Three Forks, MT.

“It had a permanent foundation, looked and functioned like a single-family home, but because it was built in the 1970s, verifying records to determine whether it met the requirements to be treated as a single-family residence was difficult,” Wright recalls. “Some documentation no longer existed, and even the identification plaque looked different enough to create uncertainty. Buyers were asking, ‘Are we buying a house, or are we buying something that may be treated like a manufactured or mobile home?’ That mattered for financing, insurance, buyer confidence, and marketability.” Listed for $320,000, the property ended up selling for just $250,000.

TeVault agrees there are risks. “The two things to pay attention to are the year built and whether there is a certificate of permanent foundation,” he says. “If built before 1976, it carries higher risk.”

Wright hopes the new laws will help. “Anything that creates clearer and more consistent treatment of manufactured housing could help reduce buyer uncertainty,” he says. “Buyers can get comfortable with known risks. Unknown risks are another story.”