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Today's mobile home is mobile in name only. Often, it makes just one trip, going from the factory to the lot, where it is permanently attached to a foundation. For about half of the homes sold, the site is a conventional trailer park. But increasingly, manufacturers are promoting mobile-home subdivisions complete with curving streets and cul-de-sacs.
The standard, single-width mobile home accounts for 70% of the industry's sales, yet double-wide and triple-wide mobile homes, supplied with shingled roofs, wood paneling and even wet bars, are growing in popularity. Prices start at about $8,000, but at the very top of the line they reach $100,000. Champion Home Builders of Dryden, Mich., is developing a luxury mobile-home complex in Novi, Mich. In the Southern California town of Yorba Linda, manufacturer Fleetwood Enterprises has joined with a local developer, John D. Lusk & Son, to create a posh 400-acre development known as Green Hills. The community will include both custom-built Fleetwood mobile homes, selling for $87,000 and up, including land, and site-built homes, starting at $200,000. Yorba Linda officials dropped the normal lot size requirement from 7,500 to 5,000 sq. ft. so that builders could lower costs and the city could fulfill state requirements for lower-and middle-income housing. Says Planner Robert Kirkpatrick: "The conventional building industry has come to a virtual halt in this area. If interest rates remain where they are, we will be looking at more and more of these types of arrangements."
Both home builders and potential buyers last week saw some encouraging signs that the cost of borrowing money may be dropping a little. First, the Federal Reserve eliminated the 2% surcharge it had been charging member banks for loans. Then the Open Market Committee met in Washington, and some Federal Reserve watchers concluded that the group voted to ease up slightly on its tight money policy. Many banks last week lowered the bench-mark prime rate to 16.5%, and a few went as low as 16%.
These declines, however, will be slow in reaching mortgage rates, which traditionally trail the prime as money-lending levels both rise and fall. Still, New York's Citibank and Chase Manhattan last week dropped the rate on several types of mortgages. Although Citibank will still charge regular customers 16.5%, the 1% cutback was Citibank's first decline since August 1980. In Columbus, Ohio, BancOhio announced a mortgage rate cut to 16⅝% from 17⅜%. Nonetheless, housing experts doubt that mortgage levels will drop to less than 13% during 1982. Such rates are nearly double those of a decade ago and would force many home buyers to continue searching for new housing alternatives.
—By Kenneth M. Pierce. Reported by Christopher Redman/Detroit and Jeanne Saddler/Washington, with other U.S. bureaus