A quick google search told me that Carolina has the highest percentage of mobile homes in the USA so here I am.
Circumstances might cause me to have to scale down. I've seen some of the newer models and they are beautiful and reasonably priced compared to a house. Builders of them don't tell us the negatives though.
What, if any, are the negatives to living in a mobile home?
Mobile home question
I lived in one for a few years a long time ago .. I'm sure they are much better built than way back when .. There were only a few real negatives such as hurricanes, tornadoes and high winds can collapse them and turn them into a pile of rubble, that's why it's important to have them strapped down more than the bare minimum. During the summer, if your a/c breaks and you are not at home to open windows, it can get in the 100's inside very quickly unless you are in deep shade. They aren't very well insulated so electric bills can be very high. They aren't very sound proof either.
When I was a firefighter, I noticed mobile homes burned faster and hotter as well .. almost impossible to save a single wide unless you get there early. Once fully involved and the insulation catches, there is pretty much nothing you can do but but contain it because unlike a regular house, its extremely difficult to expose parts of the interior stop it.
I have also read about high concentrations of formaldehyde from the particle board they use in them nowadays, especially the new ones which is very unhealthy.
All in all, I had no problems living in one and it was kind of nice, I had a single wide .. the park I was in was situated on a lake.
X
DH owned a mobile home when we met and married. We moved it down to the beach as a vacation home. Mobile home parks have a great many little fees that can trip you up on cutting costs. Then there's the permits needed. It cost $1000 to move it from Chapel Hill to Hampstead (200 miles), but some estimates were as high as $2500. Getting all the permits was a nightmare. Everything to meet them, folks would say, "oh, that'll only be two to three hundred." $1500 later (200 to 300 at a time), we were done moving it, set up and legal. As a realtor, I will comment that I think a lot of municipalities try to discourage manufactured housing by making this permitting process much too difficult, and no where clearly stated out. About the only folks that can handle it are the ones selling the trailers! they have staff for this purpose.
We had trouble down at the coast with excessive mold and mildew setting in. These things are made with particle board, and his singlewide wasn't a low end model either.
Hurricane Fran dumped 7 trees down on it. So I can also tell you that if a tree hits it, it crumples dangerously. Hurricane winds stripped one wall like the top of a sardine can. Once the wall or ceiling is breached in a storm, water comes pouring in, the particle board gets saturated, and the floors give.
Another thing - you can't just leave it for a few weeks to go on vacation - the doors windows and walls just aren't as sturdy and won't keep a determined thief out - we had some thefts.
Anyone in a mobile home knows the old joke, "they attract tornados." well, they don't hold up in a tornado. Whereas you might lose your roof in a brick home in a tornado, you will lose the whole mobile home.
Lastly, and I hate to say this because we had some wonderful neighbors, but mobile home parks do attract a criminal element simply because it's cheap housing for folks that don't have steady jobs. If the managers care more about the rent than their renters safety, look OUT. DH's park sold to a Canadian firm that stopped doing a close check on prospects, and within two years, all the good folks left. Vandalism went sky high, so we were glad to be gone.
But I wish we'd just left the darn thing in Chapel Hill and rented it out as student housing - we'd have made $$ and would still be making $$. Instead, after Fran, the bill the park wanted to remove the trees was $7000. We turned over the pink slip instead and walked away, but not before looters took everything inside of value, including the toilets!
OH - one last thing - mobile home dealers have some of the WORST financing terms in the WORLD.
I was a Realtor, and I looked over his terms on his loan - OH MY GOD. it was legal robbery. He had great credit and a good job. After 9 years of payments and a hefty downpayment , he still owed $18k on a $20k purchase price! Almost 100% of his payments paid only the interest AND FEES- they were going to soak him for another 15 years. The terms they had explained to him were very very off - there were a dozen or so little fees tacked in that were not described - he was used to buying cars, he didn't know to watch these things.
He talked to his bank, and they refinanced it for him. He had 1/3 the balance paid off, by just making the new payments, one year later by the time we got married.
For what he was paid, he could have bought a sweet but tiny brick bugalow that appreciated in value nearly 50% in those 9 years. Instead, he still owed $13k on a home that had devalued so badly we were unable to find a buyer willing to pay more than $8k. That's why we moved it to the beach - we couldn't sell it without coming out of pocket with $5k, and we'd just gotten married, bought a house and gotten pregnant. We should have left it as a rental in Chapel Hill.
Thanks for the input!
I don't have to worry about tornadoes and hurricanes up here. There is a mobile home park down the road...full of retirees. I'd buy one already parked and established.
Crime in this area is pretty much nil.
My biggest concern is heating one during a Canadian winter. Bearing in mind that this house costs me almost 2K a winter in heating oil, and it is a SOLID house, would a mobile home be better?
no. they really don't have very good R-factors. Especially their windows, those are usually pretty cheaply made. Most folks that want to reduce their heat bills put the heaviest clear plastic they can find over windows all winter.
If you know where you want to live then why don't you go knock on a few doors in the park, introduce yourself and a potential neighbor and ask what they pay for electric?
X
There's a big difference between a "mobile home" and a "modular home". The latter is built indoors and (supposedly) to the same specs of traditional stick built homes. I looked at Palm Harbor homes a few years back, and was tempted to go that route, but decided to go the traditional, stick-built route instead b/c while modular homes seem better constructed and insulated, etc. than mobile homes, I still never felt the "stability" in them that I did in a traditional stick built home (e.g., the floors always feel "hollow" vs. solid/sturdy under my feet).
My mother has owned a manufatured home (essentially a double-wide mobile home), and now has a modular home. Both were really nice, the latter being much better construction-wise; however, for as much as she paid for it (around $180K), she could have had a stick-built home, and I think she might've been happier with the end result.