Behind the technical debates about codes and quality is a simpler, emotional question: If I buy one of these homes, will it actually appreciate–or am I buying an asset that loses value like a car?
New data from the Federal Housing Finance agency, analyzed by the Urban Institute, suggest that for many buyers, the old fears are flat-out wrong.
Looking at 2000 through mid-2024, Urban’s researchers compared price appreciation for site-built homes and manufactured homes financed with GSE-backed mortgages —meaning the owner holds title to both the home and the land. Over that 24-year period, site-built homes increased 212.6%, while manufactured homes rose 211.8% both working out to roughly 5% a year.
Since 2014, manufactured homes in that dataset have often outpaced their site-built homes counterparts. Except for just two quarters, manufactured homes had higher year-over-year price gains than site-built homes in every quarter from Q2 2014 through Q2 2024.
But there are important caveats. The data cover only homes where the buyer owns the land, not units on rented pads, and manufactured housing is heavily concentrated in a handful of high-appreciation states like Texas and Florida. In recent years, land values have done a lot of the heavy lifting. One Urban analysis found that land’s share of home values climbed from about 36% in 2012 to more than 57% in 2023, with land prices rising far faster than the costs of structures.
Still, the takeaway is that ‘powerful’ factory-built homes can absolutely be a wealth-building asset when they’re titled as real property and permanently attached to land.
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