I’ve been in a few modular home factories. Many are very impressive in manufacturing techniques, materials and workmanship. Others are cheap trash.
I was in one recently that featured some building materials generally used only in high end houses. Seeing that alone would encourage me to buy one of their homes were I in the market.
I believe in the market for low, medium and high end homes. Everyone should equally be able to buy what their income allows for.
When I was a kid, my aunt lived in a mobile home park on the waterfront in Detroit. It was a very neat little community of interesting people.
I have no problem with modulars or mobile homes. Just that you need to pay attention to what you purchase. Like you said some are trash. And they are sold as meeting code around here when they dont meet local code. They meet code in a different state where they were built.
That said I think people should have a choice as to what they buy be it site built or not. If it is a piece of crap be aware that you will need repairs sooner. And some of these are just crap. But I have also seen site built homes that were crap as well. I mentioned it above in reference to Mississippi.
I mean if you dont need a large house why should you have to buy it? That just doubles the interest insurance and property taxes.
If you add the extra up I am sure that it would cut your payment quite a bit. Around here a average priced rental of 3 bedrooms and a garage goes for $1,200-$1,300 per month. Take just a third of that and save it and you have about $5,000 per year. After a couple years you could get a addition put on. Sooner if you can do it yourself. But that is illegal if you start with a one bedroom home.
And like I said earlier with a R21 wall. That adds about $400 in materials to the cost of a small 1200 square foot house with little benefit over the old R19 walls.
They are just pricing the younger people out of home ownership. There are so many ways to drop the price of the home if government got out of the way. Here is another example. It cost around $5,000 to have all the inspections done to a new house. But they are not held liable if they miss something. How much does it cost for a mortgage inspection? Not much and for a little more I bet they could do a new home inspection as it is being built. And they could carry liability insurance in case they miss something.
This one is built tight as a tick. No movement in the floors and the walls were surprisingly thick. In his park they are slowly replacing the metal boxes with the manufactured homes. I believe for many boomers, myself possibly included, this will be retirement housing.