Rising prices won’t necessarily hurt us. We’ve continued to buy new homes constantly over the last two years. What we’ve found is that as we’ve raised our rents to match price increases, our quality of tenant has improved, money down has gone up, and turnover is down. I’ve had several park owners who have been in the business 40+ years confirm that this always happens.
As for lead times, if you know a local dealer talk to them and see what they’re seeing. Rates and prices are rising and demand is softening here in NC. Our setup company works for several sales lots and offline dates are getting moved up by 1-3 months. The only way that happens is if orders are falling out. This has happened with fleetwood and champion customers. When things got crazy a lot of dealers were putting in ghost orders - ordering a home that hasn’t sold yet. If offline was 6 months away then they had 6 months to sell the home. Now they’re finding they aren’t selling all the ghost orders so houses are falling out of the queue. I doubt this is something unique to us here in NC.
Look at car dealerships: last summer they had no cars on the lot. Now they are back to normal inventory levels. We’re starting to see “0% financing” advertised again. Why finance at 0% if demand is so high?