Originally Posted by A_Spruce
A manufactured home, i.e., trailer, mobile home, double wide, etc., is complete and utter garbage. Whether they sit on a permanent foundation or not, banks still classify them as "temporary" or "moveable" and don't want to lend on them. Insurers don't want to insure them. Yes, you will eventually find companies to provide these services, but you will pay significantly more for them over standard stick built housing.
Quality wise, they are garbage, built with the cheapest of the cheap materials, quality so low that these same components are not allowed (by code enforcement) in standard stick framing. If China could build a house for the market place, it would be a manufactured home.
Another poster mixed "manufactured" with "modular". While both are built in a factory, a manufactured home is built to completion, then permanently mounted onto a trailer frame and towed to the site in once piece, whereas a modular home is built in wall and floor sections, crated on a freight truck and hauled to site in a million pieces, where it is then assembled on site and finished as a normal stick frame home would be. Modular homes are a much higher quality version of a standard stick framed home and are no different in the eyes of lenders and insurers.
As for value/resale value, it really depends on your location. If you live in Trailerville, USA, then they will be cheap, plentiful, and quite possibly not have the financing or insurance issues of areas such as mine where trailers in the wild are uncommon, here they tend to be localized to "parks" and do not command the same values as stick built homes.
Repairs can be an issue as well. As previously stated, they are made with the cheapest of the cheap materials and you can only get replacement parts from a mobile home supplier. You would guess correctly that these repair materials are also much more expensive than what the local big box sells for conventional homes. And, finally, finding a qualified repair person to work on them will be commensurate with how prevalent trailers are in your area. Not everything is "proprietary", but you don't just start hacking into one either, especially the more, shall we say, "rustic" it is. You can, of course, convert the proprietary items to more conventional stuff from a big box, but it isn't a direct fit bolt-on type of deal.
Well said!