MH Digest

Manufactured housing quietly provides deeply affordable starter homes at an average construction cost under $90,000, but is easily excluded by some communities. Manufactured housing remains a grievously underutilized, deeply affordable housing resource in Rust Belt cities with low land prices, and in rural areas in northeastern states.

Manufactured housing has long mattered most in low-income and rural areas with low land prices. In states with the most liberal regulatory treatment of manufactured housing, concentrated in the South and West, manufactured homes supply between 20 percent and 60 percent of all new single-family homes.

If your credit score is 580 or higher, you can finance as much as 96.5% of the home’s purchase price, so you’ll only need to put down 3.5%. How much you can borrow will depend on where you live — for instance, homebuyers in places like New York and San Francisco can borrow more because the cost of living is higher than in other areas.
One way to find approved FHA loan lenders is to go directly to the HUD lender list search tool. You can search for lenders by city, county, state, ZIP code and mortgage type. [Link]

FreddieMac – If you are buying a manufactured home to install on land that you already own, or are planning to purchase, it can be titled as real property once the home is affixed to the land. If you are renting a site in a manufactured home community or leasing on private land, you will likely need to title the home as personal property.

This isn’t a trailer in a trailer park. Instead, it’s a quality built home that is almost identical to traditional “site-built” housing, except it is built in a factory and transported to the lot where it will be placed on a foundation.
The average cost in July of last year of a new manufactured home in Georgia was $82,000 for a single-wide and only $158,700 for a brand new double-wide three-bedroom two-bath home. That is from a recent report of the Census Bureau’s Manufactured Housing Survey (MHS).

For all its complexities, America’s nationwide housing crisis boils down to a problem of supply and demand: The country needs a lot more homes than it has, yet even ambitious reforms won’t provide developers with enough incentive to bridge the gap. Addressing this dilemma could well be the defining public-policy challenge of the next few decades. One promising option is manufactured housing, which can be produced much more quickly and at much lower cost than traditional homes constructed stick by stick onsite.

Housing affordability nationwide is the worst it has ever been on record due to spiking home prices and interest rates, Bloomberg reports.

The bustling Middleburg factory shows just how efficient construction can be. Walk from one end of the cavernous factory to the other and you’ll see how a 64-foot by 13-foot floor—roughly the size of an oversized truck load—becomes a piece of a house, as workers add walls, windows, electrical wires, insulation, and siding as the module moves from one station to another on a rail track. At peak times, this happens quickly

The common-sense zoning reform found sponsors across the political spectrum, championed by progressive Daniel Volland and co-sponsored by conservative real estate broker Kevin Cross and by Forrest Dunbar, who just won election to the Alaska state Senate as a Democrat. The two other members of the conservative voting bloc on the Assembly followed suit, voting “aye” alongside the liberal majority.

As part of its Housing Supply Action Plan, the Biden administration earlier this year announced programs aimed at making the financing and development of manufactured homes easier. A recent Morning Consult survey finds that about half of Americans see alternative housing such as mobile homes as a good investment, with younger generations more likely to be interested in these types of homes.

Manufactured homes come in many forms. Entry-level models are broadly affordable for low and moderate-income Americans. Larger and higher-end models can meet the aesthetic and functional expectations in many communities across the country.