Manufactured home sales up
Posted:27 February, 2009 by adminFinancially strapped families find bargains in pre-manufactured, upscale housing.
Nathan Hurst / The Detroit News
BROWNSTOWN TOWNSHIP — Todd Beesley never thought he’d be living in a manufactured home.
But after suffering through a spate of mortgage troubles with his old homestead in Taylor, the father of four and his wife took a look at what seemed like the deal of the century: a four-bedroom ranch-style house with “twice the space at half the cost,” Beesley said.
“It was a no-brainer. We moved.”
Their home was manufactured offsite and delivered to their new Brownstown neighborhood, dubbed Tanglewood Village, via big-rig truck.
At half the price of the family’s old $125,000 traditionally-built Taylor house — and about 60 percent of the $91,000 median sale price last month for non-foreclosed homes in Metro Detroit — the factory-built house proved to be just the bargain the family was seeking.
As Metro Detroit’s troubled housing market sees falling prices and increasing foreclosures, the market for manufactured housing is, at its upper end, absorbing recession-wracked families like the Beesleys, who need a place to call home and are willing to embrace the concept of mobile-home living.
While manufactured housing sales have declined over the past few decades, sales of multi-section, so-called “premium” manufactured homes like those at Tanglewood Village have increased in recent years. In 2007, the number of premium homes sold was 3,967 in the Great Lakes region, compared with 2,247 in 2006, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, a national industry group.
At its lowest end, the market’s hitting rock bottom. Take Maria Suttner of Holly: She and her husband spent $25,000 on a three-bedroom mobile home in 1998. They paid off the loan for the home in less than five years and have since been paying about $350 a month in lot rent.
But now that it’s time for them to move on to new lives in retirement out-of-state, nobody’s willing to take the trailer off their hands, even for nothing.
“It’s not a matter of not being able to sell it,” said Suttner, a retired secretary. “We can’t even give it away.”
Suttner said she was hoping to make Michigan’s biting winters a distant memory last year, but after offering her mobile home for free via online listings, she’s now wondering if it might be a better deal to have it dragged off to the dump.
She might have company.
On Craigslist and other Web sites, ads touting mobile homes for free or nearly free have become mainstays. Even the communities that harbor these once-in-transit homes are having trouble replacing residents departing for greener pastures, many of them out-of-state.
The manager of one mobile home community in Plymouth is advertising months of free lot rent and other associated expenses, while a number of Downriver trailer parks offer pre-owned homes for a token $1 payment if the new residents are willing to pay lot rent, which in some cases includes water and sewerage expenses.
Sales of manufactured housing plummeted in recent years, falling from a peak of 11,792 units in 1999 to just 1,695 in 2006, the last year on record with the Michigan Manufactured Housing Association.
The remaining companies in the manufactured housing game, although small, are pitching themselves as alternatives for distressed homeowners.
Tammy Stahl is a sales representative for Lewis Klein Homes, which developed the Tanglewood Village development where the Beesley family moved. Stahl said the pitch has been working well, considering the economy.
While traditionally built neighborhoods nearby have gone without a sale for nearly two years in some instances, she’s getting business from families who need cheaper alternatives to homes in foreclosure, or from would-be homeowners worried about getting in over their heads on a mortgage during a recession.
“There’s always that initial reluctance,” Stahl said. “But the prices really are unbeatable.”
