Saving Money with a Manufactured Home

Recent data from the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey shows that people living in mobile homes spend far less on keeping up their homes than do residents of stick-built homes.

America’s infatuation with home-ownership didn’t include much interest in getting people into manufactured homes. It was an exception to a larger gospel about home ownership. With the best of intentions, many housing experts encouraged low-income households to build assets by buying a home.

More than any other factor, “experts” didn’t get on the manufactured housing bandwagon because of one thing – a perception that mobile homes do not appreciate in value.  There’s probably more than enough evidence out there to support that idea, although it is less true for used manufactured homes or for ones where both the land and the home are owned and financed as one. Rather than ignoring manufactured housing as an option for asset-building, housers would have served their aims better by developing a more nuanced understanding of when and how manufactured homes can work for their residents.

The experts didn’t foresee that stick-built homes would nosedive. That is what happened, unfortunately. The problem is that now, millions of Americans now owe more than the value of their homes.

An evaluation of the benefit or cost to a household in owning a home is generally determined by looking at the gain or loss on a sale of a home. That’s a bit of a simplification. It costs a lot to keep up your home.  People that bought a manufactured home during the boom years enjoy lower maintenance costs on their homes.

Among households that spent money doing repairs, manufactured home owners put approximately $1,450 into their homes in 2008. That is slightly less than one-third of what a homeowner living in a stick-built unit paid. Even people living in homes that were less than 4 years old spent far more than did residents of “mobile” homes.

Part of the discrepancy may be natural. Mobile home owners are much more likely to do the repairs themselves, and they are probably likely to be living in a home with a lower value. Doing the work yourself is a lot cheaper.

There is also a lot of variety in the quality of newly built homes.  Some home builders just don’t make homes that last, according to this survey made in Charlotte in 2009.  Oddly enough, the same builders that were pilloried in Charlotte are also getting bad grades in places as different as Orlando and the Inland Empire of California.

If this was a survey by J.D. Power, the surveyors would not that mobile homes still encountered more repair jobs than did people living in new homes. It is just that those jobs cost a lot less.

A lot of observers point out that some jobs are better investments than others.  According to the experts, you should put money into bathrooms and kitchens.  Americans aren’t getting the message.  Slightly more than two in five fix-ups involved either the porch or the deck. For people owning either a new home or a mobile home, about two in three jobs went into the porch or deck. Maybe this explains part of the discrepancy in home price appreciation.