How are mobile homes taxed?

Factual Questions
1

I have just heard about this today, and I need someone to explain this subject to me. And two people that I know are experiencing this.

In Pennsylvania, you pay “property tax” on mobile homes. One guy I work with rents a lot in a mobile home park and pays about $1200 per year, and he says it is based on the square footage of the lot covered. My brother has a double wide on the same piece of property where his in-laws have their home. He is paying $1800 per year; his in-laws are paying around $1000 for a real house, garage, and his mother-in-law’s hair shop. I have no idea how the taxing authority asseses the values. In both cases, the “real property” is not in the trailer owner’s name.

Is this a real property tax? Why isn’t the owner of the property paying the taxes? I rent a house, I don’t get a tax bill. Why are trailers different?

I always thought that one of the reasons mobile homes were so popular was the “low cost” aspect. If there are these amounts of taxes on them, why are there so many of them? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to build a permanent building?

Anyway, thanks for any information.

I myself am not a fan of mobile homes and always advocated taxing them to reduce the quantity of them in our area. But aparently that doesn’t work. I have no idea what the appeal of trailers is.

2

Affordability.
I have no idea about your Pa. tax situation.

3

Presumebly the lease would stipulate that the renter pays them, not the landlord.

In my experience, you would be correct though. Generally the landlord pays the taxes and just hides it in the rent price.

4

In Missouri, mobile homes are considered “personal property”, just like automobiles, boats, and airplanes. they are taxed each year on a percentage of their appraised value.

5

I had one as a summer place on a lake. The land was taxed thru property taxes, and the trailer was taxed thru personal property taxes.

6

I live in a trailer. I’m paying for the trailer, but renting the land it’s on. I pay $200/mo for the land, and $266/mo on the trailer note. It’s a 14X80 trailer, which is 1120 sq. ft., and a friend of mine, who lives 3 blocks away in a one room apartment, which is probably 12X20 ft, pays roughly $100/mo less than I do. So I get nearly ten times the space for only $100 more a month. Were I to try and find an apartment with the same amount of space as this place, I’d be paying close to $1000/mo, and still not have as much space as I do now.

As part of my lease agreement, I pay the property taxes on my trailer. I pay $189/yr to the county in taxes and $156 to the city in taxes.

Even with those taxes, it’s cheaper than living in an apartment in my area. And vastly cheaper than living in a safe apartment in my area (And my trailer park’s very safe. The land lord has no problem evicting folks who get the cops called on them.)

7

Commercial real estate appraiser checking in:

As has been mentioned already, typically the dirt is appraised as real property and the mobile home is appraised as personal property. The owner of the mobile home gets a tax bill based on the value of the trailer, and the owner of the land (if different) gets a tax bill for just the land, as well as any site improvements owned by that person (asphalt paving, for instance).

Exactly how the property (either the land or the mobile home) is appraised varies from state to state, and frequently from assessor to assessor. The primary variable for the mobile home is its size (typically measured from the outside walls), while naturally the land value is based on the size of the land. Either one of these is of course also based on local market values, or at least they ought to be (the quality of county assessors varies widely across the nation).

Pennsylvania may be what we call an “equalization” state. This means that if someone can show that the local assessor has valued a comparable property to yours less than he valued your property, you can protest the tax solely on the grounds that it is “unfair.” If reassessments are capped at a certain percentage over the last year, this can lead to a situation where the assessed value of the property has absolutely no bearing on the actual market value. This can give you instances where some homeowners have significantly lower property taxes than other property owners that are less “pro-active” in keeping their tax assessments low.

Another possibility is that personal property is taxed at a significantly higher rate than real property in your neck of the woods. In Oklahoma, it’s usually the opposite. Incidentally, a property tax of $1,800 in the Tulsa area would correspond with a market value of about $135,000 for real property (I don’t remember personal property rates or ratios off-hand, I rarely deal with that sort of thing).

What I can tell you is that, in a mobile home park, the owner of the park is paying a hefty amount in property taxes for just the park, without any consideration for the mobile homes unless the park owner owns them as well. It’s conceivable that the owner could charge a pro-rata share of the real property taxes back to the tenants, but I’ve never seen that before.

If you’d like, I can go into excrutiating detail as to the appraisal process for real property, and less so into the process for personal property.

Oh yeah, I should also point out that I have no experience appraising property in Pennsylvania. If you’re still really curious, rattle off an e-mail to your friendly neighborhood county assessor. Most of them are more than happy to answer any questions you’ve got regarding how they determine tax assessments. You also might do a Google search for your local assessor’s office; many of them have extensive websites with very informative FAQ’s.

8

desdinova, et al:

Thanks for the replys, I think I have a grip on the subject now.