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
This has actually become a real problem in cities where suburbs have grown to surround mobile home lots that used to be on the “edge” of town, and are now *in* town. Many of the landowners can now make much much more by selling the land to developers, and trailer dwellers who have lived there for decades are being evicted. Their homes are now too fragile to be moved, or they have built extensions (or even second floors!) and they couldn’t afford rent at a new location anyway. [There are several charities and non-profits that have arisen with the goal of helping these people form co-ops to purchase the land](https://nonprofitquarterly.org/retirement-wave-creates-opening-cooperative-ownership-manufactured-housing-parks/).
You can still get evicted even if you own a SFH. You have to pay property taxes to the city. This can be an issue in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods where the value of the home skyrockets and there are not controls against how much your tax liability can be
We need “trailer lots” that can be purchased and owned, but that’s not profitable for the powers that be.
I never understood the premise when I was younger, especially watching Trailer Park Boys, because the mobile homes never seemed “mobile” as I was picturing them moving around like an RV.
John Oliver did a great piece on this.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCC8fPQOaxU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCC8fPQOaxU)
Adding one of his points: most modern mobile homes can’t be moved after an amount of time. They settle and would no longer be structurally sound (anything that doesn’t remain on a trailer with wheels) after moving.
I’m moving close to (live by one now too…FL lol) a 55+ mobile home park and the only people there who can leave are the big-ass bus style RVs that live there.
My brother purchased a double wide trailer. I forget what the principle of the loan was for, but he was paying around $500 a month and had it paid off in 7 or 8 years. It needed a bit of work, but nothing he couldn’t fix up himself. Lot rent used to be $120, it’s gone up a bit since then but I think he’s only paying around $200. As a point of comparison, at the time, I was paying $700 a month for a single bedroom apartment less than half the size of his trailer.
He’s now paid that off and ONLY has to worry about the lot rent. He can sell the trailer (which would likely net him a profit, considering it’s appreciated in value), or use it as equity to secure a loan on something else. I’m still in the same apartment, now paying over $1000 a month, with nothing to show for the thousands of dollars I’ve dumped into this place.
So YOU tell ME what you think the point of a mobile home is.
Mobile home parks used to be a very inexpensive way to live. Then a bunch of investment folks saw there was money to be made so they bought up the parks and raised the ground rent ridiculously high.
There’s a view of the investors talking about raising the costs high enough the folks living there can never afford to buy a home and move. They said they want to keep those people broke.
Mobile park residents are getting fucked in a major way.
Lot rent isn’t too expensive. Even a loan for a used mobile home that I’d only a handful of years old can be pretty cheap month by month over 5 to 7 years.
The biggest maint issue is moisture. Any leaking AC systems, broken pipes have to be fixed ASAP. Checking every couple of months is usually what you do. That moisture will soak into the hanging insulation under the home and then rot out the subfloor and framing. Keeping it leveled is another one.
Upgrade the insulation for very hot zones or the normal AC for it, which is an A-frame unit. Won’t be able to keep up when it’s 100F+ outside. Keep the roof I’m great condition as well.
Local and very small regionally owned lots are by far more affordable for lot rent than ones owned by multistate corporations.
Another benefit is that once you by land, you move it to that land you save so much money and can work on building a house.
I live in Oklahoma. So it’s vastly cheaper in this state.
There used to be advantages to mobile home parks – a cheap way to afford suburban living.
Then investors swooped in and jacked up lot rent to unaffordable levels.
Or even worse, the property owners sell out the land from under the lots to developers who then tell the tenants to GTFO so they can build SFHs or luxury apartments.
[https://www.ksl.com/article/51066915/layton-mobile-home-park-residents-mull-future-as-6-story-apartment-building-takes-shape](https://www.ksl.com/article/51066915/layton-mobile-home-park-residents-mull-future-as-6-story-apartment-building-takes-shape)
Mobile home parks are abusive, predatory traps that encapsulate all of the worst attributes of late stage capitalism. At least with an apartment you have the option to move – with a mobile home you’re often stuck.
Yes, it’s pretty much a scam. John Oliver actually did a pretty good episode on Mobile homes,
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