PART 2: Stop Saying Mobile Homes Don't Appreciate In Value!!!

[Logan M.]

A few weeks back I posted that people need to stop saying that mobile/manufactured homes don't appreciate.

I received many great responses. I wanted to do a second post though talking about this a little more focused.

From my experience, there are some major factors to consider when talking about their valuations but none of them come close to the importance of location. Some homes in more rural markets are basically free, and homes in the city can go for prices as high as $160,000 in my market for newer manufactured homes.

Some of the comments made the argument that the prices went up because of COVID stimulus which I would say is true but a few considerations are this: 

1. All housing went up during COVID and all goods in general went up. Don't say that one is appreciation while the other is not. The truth is our money became worth less because of the massive printing of money and the cost of everything increased because of that, including mobile homes.

2. In the Utah market, we will never have enough good data to create a reliable answer. I believe in statistics somewhere around 1200 for a sample size starts becoming extremely accurate and we are far off from that.

3. There is a minimum cost for housing and based on that each market will have a floor for the cost of mobile homes.

4. Part of the way we look at appreciation is by picking and choosing how we want to see it and the biggest evidence of this is inflation and how we perceive some of our increase in value as a gain when in reality the money we use is worth less than before. I know that is over-generalized.

I have come to understand that a lot of my housing options for tenants are more of a commodity than a fixed asset, like a SFH but I do believe that affordability will continue pushing values for mobile and manufactured homes higher.

This graph below really shows two things: One, we don't have enough data, and two, the data we have only give a partial view of what is happening.