New mobile home: Manufactured houses deliver the American dream amid tough housing market

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Chesney Cross, and her husband, Ken, began hunting for a new home in the Knoxville, Tennessee-area just as the pandemic began upending the housing market.

After a year of searching, the couple were unable to find anything that fit their $250,000 budget.

“Everything was selling super quickly and above what we wanted to spend,” says Chesney, 33. “We couldn't find anything that wasn't a giant fixer-upper.”

The couple had been living in a 1,100-square-foot home for a decade. But when their first child, Cash, arrived in November 2019, it began to feel cramped.

As frustrating as the house-hunting process had become, Cross would still spend hours scouring Instagram for her dream home: #Farmhousestyle.

That’s when she came across a picture of a house with the rustic, farmhouse-chic aesthetic she pined for.

The price was right, but it turned out to be a manufactured home, an offspring of the mobile home.

"I mentioned it to my husband, and of course, he had that mindset of like, 'It's a trailer, you know,'” she says, alluding to a common perception of the old, cheaply built mobile homes. “I was like, 'No, you have to see these photos. It looks beautiful.'”

No matter, the family moved in last year, three months after signing a contract.

Chesney Cross moved into this new manufactured home in Sevierville, Tennessee, last year:

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Priced out of the housing market:

As an overheated housing market – marked by double-digit price increases, bidding wars and inventory shortages – puts the dream of homeownership out of reach of many ordinary Americans, manufactured homes are growing in popularity because their cost is roughly half that of homes built on a permanent site.

Unlike a traditional site-built house, which is constructed at its final location using multiple teams of subcontractors, a manufactured home is built in an indoor facility and delivered to its location. That lowers costs by improving the efficiency in the home-building process: All the teams needed to build the manufactured home are in the facility, dramatically reducing labor costs.

More than 43,000 land-lease/mobile park communities exist in the U.S., with an estimated 4.3 million home sites, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, a national trade organization. And nearly 22 million people live in manufactured homes.

Or Michaelo, founder of Orbit Homes, which makes manufactured homes in California, says the simplicity of completing a house in the factory is what drew him to the business.


A manufactured home by Orbit Homes:




A neighborhood in Knoxville, TN where site-built, manufactured homes were placed and built by a developer:

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