NEWS

If you have children or friends between the ages of 23 and 26, chances are some of them are buying houses for the very first time. That sounds crazy, right?

Well, in reality, it’s not all that crazy when you look at it. Gen Z’ers – generally accepted to be those born in or after 1997 – are gradually entering the housing market.

And, at the end of the day, manufactured housing is a key entry point for these young home dwellers. Here are a few reasons why.

Affordability

Manufactured homes have routinely proven, time and time again, to be a far more cost-effective option than their site-built counterparts.

The cost of purchasing a site-built home in 2021 is up to $453,000, according to data from Statista. However, when you compare that to the average sale price of a new manufactured home in 2021, the difference is staggering.

New manufactured homes in 2021 sold for $92,911, according to Datacomp sales data. That number goes even lower when you look at pre-owned manufactured homes, which averaged at just $60,733 that same year.

These are numbers that, when you compare them to site-built homes that sell for much higher, underscore how great of a value manufactured housing is for young Americans.

Virality

We wrote recently about some manufactured homes that have gone viral on TikTok. It was impossible to include every mobile home that’s gone viral on social media over the past year, and that’s for good reason.

Content surrounding manufactured homes and their high quality and affordability has seen a massive uptick in viewership on platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This type of content helps to spread the word that manufactured homes are an insanely affordable entry point to homeownership for Gen Z. In fact, video content in general has helped spur new conversation about the importance of manufactured housing for younger Americans, as YouTube has grown to become the world’s second largest search engine behind Google.

Couple that with the boom in the vertical video format popularized by TikTok, and it’s become a prime medium for visual content on mobile homes to spread like wildfire.

Ease of Access to the American Dream

Recently, there has been a stigma surrounding home ownership – specifically that it’s no longer attainable for most Americans. This stigma can be for multiple reasons, whether it’s because of the high cost of site-built homes or because site-built homes are so difficult to buy.

However, manufactured housing is proving that stigma wrong. In America, over 22 million people live in manufactured homes, meaning that nearly one in ten homeowners have discovered the benefits to these types of homes.

Solution To Apartment Rent Churn

There’s one other reason that we should mention here.

Have you ever seen a social media post complaining about how someone can’t get approved for a $900 mortgage for their site-built home even though they pay $1,400 a month to live in an apartment? This is just one factor that traps apartment renters in a cycle of ever-increasing apartment rents. And that doesn’t even touch on noisy neighbors all around you.

Living in a manufactured home is an antidote to apartment rent churn. Financing requirements for mobile homes are different from site-built mortgages, meaning that you may have an easier time getting approved for your mobile home purchase. In fact, we’ve written before about how manufactured homes are perfect for breaking out of the apartment renting cycle.

All of these reasons contribute greatly to Gen Z’ers entering homeownership thanks to manufactured housing. But, if you’re a Gen Z-er, you might be wondering how you can get in on the action.