New Home Sale with Increased Price

How are park owners doing with new home sales with the increase in prices? With constant price increases on homes, new singlewide homes in our communities are approaching 100k in our Wisconsin parks.

At that price, most our buyer are not able to qualify for financing. Loans for homes in communities have higher interest rate than SFRs. Thus even though mobile homes in communities still have price advantage, they have financing disadvantage. Because of this, we are seeing cooling down of demand for home sales.

We prefer not to rent these homes either. Our parks are communities of owners. We have also tried rent-to-own arrangements before and we didn’t like it.

If you have new homes for sale in your community, are you able to sell them / find qualified buyers?

We’re a new MH lender that only lends to people purchasing homes from community owners; we might be able to help getting your tenants financing to become homeowners.
Would love to see if we might be able to help.

chris@zippymh.com

We target retirees looking to down size. They are looking to liquidate some of the equity tied up in larger homes but are not ready or willing to move to apartments yet. We shifted from being a family community to adult only/retirees. Well maintained/renovated homes are now selling well above 100K and being pulled higher by the value of new homes we have brought in. To be successful it requires upgrading the quality of the community and the tenant base.
MHCs may shift away from being viewed as affordable housing and move toward young working class starter homes or retirees although some “trailer parks” will always continue to exist…

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Greg, thanks for the reply.

We had similar thoughts as well. We have also been looking at seniors or people who are selling their homes to downsize. It seems like a smaller segments than before, but they tend to be better qualified and be better tenants. We are also working to improve our community.

What do you do you do to attract seniors?

When we began the conversion from family to adult only we were selective in choosing qualified applicants that fit our desired demographic. It becomes much easier as your tenant base becomes predominantly seniors. It took about 15 years but we are now 100% 55+ .
If you can advertise as adult only this is particularly attractive to seniors otherwise you need to slant the wording of your adds to target seniors. Quiet, rural, nature, pride of ownership, high standards, strictly enforced community rules etc. These fit better in attracting retirees than young families but higher home prices may be all that is needed to attract seniors/retirees.

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A lot of what you say is true. We have been able to sell our new homes brought in. 21st has been the financer so we basically break even, but it’s worth it. Our homes are in the 65-70k range.

can you send me info

Absolutely - send me an email and I’ll get info right over to you.
chris@zippymh.com

We haven’t had to bring homes into our Wisconsin parks, but do so in other areas. We are pushing $75k sales prices for new homes, not quite breaking even and we are pushing the top of what our market can pay. Lenders charging our residents 9% and more while I am guaranteeing the loan doesn’t seem right. We are also bringing in newer used homes but often can’t get financing because the financed value (NADA+40%) won’t support the cost of the home. In those cases we use our own cost of real estate debt at ~4% to purchase and then rent/rent-to-own. Time will tell if we will regret that.

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