Posted by Tony Colella on August 22, 2011 at 03:56:33:
Its too early to tell. This is a good question and one that has been discussed to some (limited) extent here before. Many are remodelling older homes that have decent, marketable floor plans so that they won’t need to be replaced. This is often cheaper to do.
16 years is a looong time in many regards and there is too little known about how markets will move at this point. It would be easy to say that the need for affordable housing will be stronger than ever but we have seen that more is at work on the Macro level than simple demand vs. supply forces.
Keep in mind that Warren Buffett is heavily invested in the mobile home manufacturing game and with deep pockets anything is possible.
With fewer and fewer mobile homes being built each year, where will the used units come from in the future? I plan on retiring in about 16 years. Where am I am going to find used units to replace units that wear-out or to purchase for rentals? I am afraid that mobile home rentals will go the way of the Dodo bird. Your thoughts?
This is something I just wrote an article about. There is a project
underway right now to put all of the chattel sales numbers together
from all the major states and run a mathematical projection of number
of used homes for sale that were new since the last major HUD Code
revision that RCG is sponsoring. The numbers are very bleak so far.
That manufacturers need to build " Community Series Homes" that can
be profitably sold in communities without cutting quality is a given. It
is also a given that sales operations are also going to have to learn to
market, sell, and finance new homes or they will be out of things to
sell.