We sold 50K new mobile homes in the good ole USA last year and are track to sell 39K this year…WOW! Florida sold 80K new homes in 2000. And 2000 was when the repo craze began. I started making money on mobiles in 2002. I don’t why but this really caught my eye.
I had a choice of doing the copy in Acrobat or Excel… i prefer excel.
The first column is US totals, secong is singlewides, third D/W homes…check it out or am I reading this table wrong.
A Dealer here told me that 50K were sold nationally lasy year and I checked it out…she was right.
So, if I read this correctly - and project it correctly, it’s pretty safe to say that the decline in selling of (new?) homes has dropped (i.e. it’s kinda hit a lull - or at least, it’s fairly easy to project the direction of further selling down the road). In 2002, it appears that the decline has been (give or take) roughly 15.5(assumed the numbers are in thousands of units) homes sold. With those figures, it’s possible that the sale of these new manufactured homes could essentially drop to a negligeable level. Obviously, it’ll never hit zero, but what does the market do when we’ve got say >85% of the homes more than 30 years old? Is there any data to document another influx of new home sales, to start this same pattern over? Or is the market in general looking at getting away from these manufactured homes?
I hate to be pessimistic on the industry that has given me so much, but these are the very reasons I am no longer looking to purchase a park, or continue doing Lonnie deals any more than is necessary to keep my business running.
What those stats don’t show is that many of the currently produced manufactured homes are placed on land and not in land-lease communuties.
I have serious doubts about the viability of the manufactured home community model in the next 10-20 years. Of course buying on the cheap makes anything possible. I’d buy a park if the deal was right!
One needs to look no further than “The Journal” magazine to see how out-of-touch with reality this industry can be. The guys writing these articles about how to sell trailers on lots are living in the past. Yet every month we get more of the same advice on how to close “prospects”. Sad, indeed.
This has been my major concern for a few years now. Mobile home parks only have value as mobilehome parks when the lots are occupied. These homes must be eventually be replaced to continue to produce lot rent. A park full of 25+ yr old homes producing great returns Is really probably a park on it’s last legs.
How many years will it be before we are faced with the stark reality that we will have to purchase new homes to replace these obsolete units? This has bothered me for quite some time but I have not seen it addressed before much.