Modular Homes

What is a modular home?

A modular home is built in sections in a factory, delivered to your site, and assembled on a permanent foundation. The important part is the code it is built to: modular homes meet the same state and local building codes as a house built on site, which is why, once it is placed, it is legally and financially treated much like one.

That has knock-on effects worth knowing about. It usually makes financing more straightforward, because lenders treat it as real property rather than as a vehicle-like asset. It also tends to hold value in a way that surprises people who assume anything factory-built depreciates.

What tends to draw people to modular:

• Built in weeks in a controlled factory rather than over months in the weather.
• Genuinely wide choice on layout, finishes and energy specification.
• Consistent build quality — the same crew, the same jigs, every time.
• Treated as real estate once sited, which helps with both lending and resale.

Mobile home or manufactured home?

These two are the pair most often muddled, and the dividing line is a date. "Mobile home" properly refers to factory-built homes from before June 1976. "Manufactured home" refers to everything built since, when a single federal construction and safety standard — the HUD code — came into force.

That is not a pedantic distinction. The pre-1976 stock was built to no consistent national standard at all, and it is the source of most of the reputation the whole category still carries. A manufactured home built this decade has very little in common with it beyond the fact that both arrived on wheels.

Both are built on a steel chassis, which is what makes them transportable. In practice the great majority are delivered once, sited, and never moved again.

Why people choose a double-wide

A double-wide — more accurately a multi-section home — arrives as two or more sections that are joined on site. Losing the width restriction of a single transportable section is what makes the difference: you get room proportions that feel like a house rather than a corridor with rooms off it.

It is the point at which open-plan kitchens, proper primary suites and usable utility rooms become possible. For most families comparing a single-section against a multi-section at similar quality, the multi-section is what they end up in.

What the extra width buys you:

• Room for a family to be in different rooms at the same time.
• Kitchens with an island, and bathrooms with both a tub and a separate shower.
• Better resale, particularly on land you own with a permanent foundation.
• Still a fraction of the cost per square foot of building on site.

Buying pre-owned

A pre-owned home is often the fastest and cheapest route into ownership, and sometimes the smartest — plenty come with decking, landscaping or improvements the first owner paid for and will not get back.

It does need more care at the inspection stage than a new home does, and we would rather tell you what to check than have you find out afterwards.

Worth checking carefully before you commit:

• The foundation and how the home has been sited and tied down.
• Roof condition, and any sign of past or present water ingress.
• Plumbing and electrical, particularly on anything pre-1976.
• How it is titled — real property or personal property changes your financing.
• What bringing it up to current insulation standards would cost.

So which one do you need?

In practice it usually comes down to the land. If you own it and intend to keep the home there permanently, modular or a permanently-affixed manufactured home opens up the best financing and the best long-term value. If you are going into a community and leasing the lot, a manufactured home is almost certainly the right answer, and the decision becomes about floor plan and budget instead.

If you are not sure which of those you are yet, that is completely normal, and it is a better conversation to have with us in person than to guess at online.