In NC, most mobile home parks do not sell the land.
I thought the point of buying a property is to eventually own it outright.
If you pay off the mobile home but find yourself unable to pay the lot rent… you can still get evicted. This situation persists forever, unless you move the home.
Buying land with utilities and moving the home is so expensive that most people would have to take out a personal loan or multiple loans to do it.
Personal loans are usually restricted to people with high incomes and/or credit scores. (People who can simply skip the park and buy a house on land in the first place).
Paying the lot rent and mobile home combined also makes it not a particularly cheap alternative to renting a house.
But so many people do it that I feel like I must be missing something that connects the dots and makes this make sense (logically and financially).
What am I missing?
ETA – sorry if this is a very stupid question. My parents were city people so I genuinely do not know how people benefit from using parks
In: Economics
There are 3 maybe 4 parts of a home. There’s the land underneath the place, the building, the contents and the right to occupy the building. When you rent an apartment in the city, often the landowner and the building owner are the same. In some areas the landowner might give a building developer a 99-year lease, so then the building and land owner are different, the building owner can then sell the individual condos to people with a 99-year lease.
Likewise in a mobile home park, the landowner and the building owners are often separate. In theory the building owner can move the building elsewhere, even though it often isn’t practical or physically possible.
It used to be fairly inexpensive to own or rent a mobile home and live in a mobile home park. Outside of town or the crummy part of town made it a low demand area. Urban sprawl or gentrification has surrounded many mobile home parks to where the land is becoming too valuable and the alternative use might be profitable, to equalize it the rent being charged to stay in the park has to increased.
There are also different laws that classify a mobile home as a vehicle and not a home so things like property taxes, types of loans you can get, etc. are not the same as owning a traditional home. But it was historically cheaper and that made it the only option for a lot of people.
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