Economies of scale do work.Be persistent and hustle! 

Big players are throwing money this way, manufacturing is on the up and up...billionsWhat does this mean?

I'd give it a 4/10 on a difficultly scale.

Single wide, manufactured home built in 1996 on an engineer certified permanent foundation.

It really depends on your goals and how fast you want to scale and how much of your own capital you really need to be doing deals. 

There are others that do enough volume to create some excellent economies of scale, take smaller markups, and make up for that in volume.Like the song says, "you better shop around."

How does this scale up for larger properties (vs. duplexes)? 

The LLC is what most partners will utilize when they are seeking peace of mind, unless they are scaling their company up and have separate investing groups or partnerships - to which the Series LLC is well suited.

@Kellen Driscoll Check with your local manufactured home association.

The slight concern i do have is that largest employment industry is manufacturing, and it's about 20%+ for Ft Wayne as a whole, and the Crime index is slightly over national average.