Why Aren’t We Building More Mobile Homes?

People in West Virginia accepted delivery of a little more than 1,000 mobile homes last year, according to census data. Over the same period, homebuilders obtained permits to build about 2,000 single-family homes. In other words, roughly1474568589186 one in three homes added to the state’s housing stock last year was a mobile home.

Surprised? That probably depends on how much money you make, what part of the country you live in, and how old you are. The average sales price of a new mobile home was $67,800 in April, compared with an average sales price of $380,000 for a site-built home. Three-quarters of mobile home residents have household incomes of less than $40,000. Mobile homes, which actually aren’t very mobile, are most highly concentrated in the South. More than 500,000 of them are in California, the most in the country, but in recent years new mobile home sales have made up a larger share of the housing market in Southern states, as the chart above shows.