By Manuel Gutierrez, Consulting Economist to NKBA

At the end of the 20th century, manufactured housing was expected to be an inexpensive and more efficient alternative to the stick-built housing traditionally used in the U.S. They could be built assembly-line style in a factory, shipped to
the building site in sections and assembled on-site, saving many hours or labor. That promise failed miserably, however, and despite accounting for a sizable number of the homes added in the last five years of the 1990’s, their popularity has plummeted since 2000 — even more over the last decade.

Many of these units are counted in the “housing starts” data released monthly. Not all are, however, since a housing start technically is defined as the moment a builder breaks ground, while these manufactured units are placed on a concrete foundation, with no ground broken.

Figure 1 displays the number of manufactured homes shipped since 1994. The sharp decline in shipments since 2000 is readily apparent. In the five-year period from 1995 to 1999, manufacturers shipped on average 355,000 homes annually.

Manufactured housing, which shipped an average of 355,000 units during its heyday in the late 1990s, bottomed out at around 50,000 units by 2010, and now hovers around 94,000 units.

That number fell to just 50,000 units shipped by 2010. While they accounted for more than a quarter of the new single-family houses in the earlier period, they have represented about one in 10 over the last decade.

Geographically, manufactured homes are shipped to a handful of states. One in four of all manufactured homes are installed in just two states: Texas and Florida. These two states, together with North Carolina, account for 30% of all shipments. Interestingly, these states also have the highest number of traditional housing starts.

The top 10 states, shown in Figure 2, account for fully 60% of all manufactured homes. Five of them are also among the top states for most new housing starts activity overall.

Only two of the top 10 states shown in Figure 2 are outside the South: Michigan and Kentucky. The South, which includes eight more states in addition to those in Figure 2, accounts for just over two-thirds of the shipments of manufactured homes.

The typical manufactured home is smaller than a standard single-family house. For 2020, the average size of a single-family house built on site was 2,473 square feet. Very significantly, this is 1,000 square feet larger than the average manufactured house, which measured 1,472 square feet last year.

There are large differences in manufactured house size by region, ranging from 1,266 square feet in the Northeast to 1,531 square feet in the South (Figure 3.)

Note that the average size in three of the regions is below the national average.

Most manufactured homes are either one- or two-section structures, with the majority being two sections. Manufacturers shipped 52,000 two-section homes last year, 58% of the total. Just under 39,000 had only one section.

The vast majority of manufactured homes, whether they are one- or two-section homes, have more than two bedrooms. One-bedroom homes represent only 17% of all homes shipped, while 83% had at least three bedrooms.

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