Better Loan Policies Would Improve Mobile Home Markets – Report

Last Updated on February 18, 2021 by Palm Gardens

People make decisions about their homes based on their income. For lower-income families, manufactured home is the best option. According to some recent estimates, a brand new manufactured home would cost about $64,000 in rural areas whereas it costs more than $374,100 for a site-built home.

For the last one decade, the housing policies affecting manufactured homes have been opening doors. Many families who couldn’t afford to buy a site-built home or rental markets, the supportive mortgage system and facilitating policies paved way for obtaining new homes. The demand for manufactured homes is still rising. However, many have expressed their concerns over the consumer rights of people who tend to buy or build a manufactured home instead of a site-built home.

Loans For Manufactured Homes

A major challenge for people who want to buy or build a manufactured home is the availability of loan. Buying a manufactured home in one of the mobile home parks in Mesa AZ is quite affordable. Nonetheless, the volume of loan one can get for this is low. According to the reports, the maximum loan one can get for a mobile home is less than $75,000, which has decreased by 5% from that in 2014.

Meanwhile, the reports further indicate that people still continue to look for manufactured homes even though the volume of loan is less. The resale market for mobile homes is growing. Hence, people are not really worried about investing money in mobile homes. Last year, about 12.8% of the 440,000 new single-family home sales were for manufactured homes. During the same period, the shipments of manufactured homes accounted for about 9.1% of the lot.

About 7 years ago, manufactured housing was considered as an underserved market by the congress. It was served by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a government sponsored enterprise. In the following year, a new DTS rule was proposed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. This rule insisted that the suggestions made in the Fannie and Freddie policy should be followed to safeguard manufactured homes. Nevertheless, the GSEs need to adopt plans that would improvement the mortgage financing system for manufactured homes.

To put in simple words, the best way to improve the safety on transactions of mobile homes is to enable chattel loans for mobile homes enjoy the same level of Federal support that site-built homes currently enjoy.