Some other statistics

Today I want to write about the median sale price of mobile homes, about the number of distress sales, and about the number of homes that are still sold that were built prior to the onset of the HUD code.

To do that, I am going to rely upon some Census data.  The Census Bureau’s Residential Finance Survey is a great find.

Some time ago, there was a debate about the average cost of a manufactured home.  I thought it was about $40,000.  Then again, I realize that such a price is really misleading, because homes are sold as both singlewides and doublewides.  The average price for doublewides is a distinct question that should not be influenced by the sale of a singlewide.

Now I can see from the RFS that the sale price is actually much different.  In the five years from 1997 to 2001, there were 1.2 million mobile homes sold.  That includes both  new and used homes, and homes that are paid for in cash as well as ones that are financed.  The average price was $24,960.  But that number is obscured by the doublewide problem, too.  The suggestion of such a bias can be seen in the median price — $15,692.  It is a lot lower.

The other thing that is interesting to me is the age of properties.  Sometimes people say that mobile homes are temporary housing.  (Actually, the same thing has been said about a lot of stick built homes in Chicago, but that owes to some peculiarites of the construction business in that area.)  Almost two-thirds (877,000) of the homes sold were built prior to 1979.  For the most part, those are pre-HUD Code homes.  The fact that they are being sold and not abandoned testifies to their continued utility as dwellings.

Sadly, there are also some sad things to see in the data.  The RFC cross tabulates the sale price as a percentage of the estimated value of the home.  I do not know how they generated “value,” because an appraisal process would have been far too costly, I am sure.  It may have been self-reported by the survey respondent.  What the numbers suggest is that a high percentage of homes are sold at distress prices.  Among homes made after 1997, 23,000 (5.8 percent) were sold at less than 60 percent of their value.  Among homes built prior to 1980, 49,000 (12.2 percent) were sold at less than 60 percent of their value.