My friend (in Ohio) wants to purchase a trailer to live in. I know very little about them and there are a few things I wanted to know.
Do they depreciate in value generally?
Can you be easily evicted from trailer parks, ie what rights/security of residency do you have?
What advantages are there to trailer living as opposed to apartment/house etc.?
What else are they suppose to do? Become more valuable as they fall apart? 
Well, for example they might become more valuable if an area experienced a significant increase in the demand for places to live or is this an erroneous assumption?
Yes.
As far as I know, trailer park tenants (and landlords) have the same legal rights, responsibilities, etc. as they do in apartment rentals. But, IANAL, nor do I reside in Ohio.
A trailer allows you to own a “home” at a fraction of the cost of owning a site-built home (subject, of course, to the conditions of the local housing market). I have around 1100 square feet, for which I paid $28,500. An 1100-square-foot home in my city, excluding those in terrible neighborhoods, would set me back $70,000 or more. One downside is that you have to pay lot rent; you can avoid this by buying your own land to put it on.
Tell your friend not to do it. As a trailer owner myself, I can tell you confidently that trailers are terrible homes. They depriciate rapidly, they’re crap in a tornado, and finding land to put them on is a crapshoot. Your choice is to either pay lot rent (and between my mortgage payment and my lot rent payment, I’m putting out as much each month as I would on a mortgage on that $70,000 house I told you about in Point 3) or find some land out in the country that isn’t crap.
I suppose, in the sense that they would as much as any other commodity that can easily be trucked in from elsewhere, like cars, or boats. I would hesitate to call that an “investment”.
It is the land that increases in value as the demand for places to live goes up. Trailers are manufactured goods. Manufactured goods’ value rarely goes up.
Under those conditions, the land under the trailers becomes much more valuable as a housing or commercial development, and the owner can tell you to move out and find a new place to “park” your trailer. I’ve seen this many times as the land in my area has increased in value over the last 20 years. One time trailer parks now have a dozen $500,000 homes on them, and others are strip malls or big-box stores.
It is almost always a bad investment.
Have them look into amodular home, instead.
The only successful trailer-park arrangement I have ever encountered was when my husband’s aunt and uncle put up a couple of trailers in their Michigan campground for their mother and sister (my MIL) to live in. Also, my MIL was for a number of years very happy with her retirement mobile home in a trailer park in Florida. She was a snowbird and was only there from November to May every year.
But those are the only two instances, and you’ll notice that in neither case were there any expectations of some kind of “investment”. Everybody concerned knew that their trailers constituted temporary housing (Grandma was in her 90s, and my MIL is now in her 70s), and nobody was planning to raise a family or anything in their trailer.
And, setting aside the negatives already mentioned, trailers have, like, ZERO storage space. I spent enough time in Grandma and MIL’s trailers to observe how they had absolutely nowhere to put their lifetime of knickknacks, clothing, books, etc. Itty-bitty little toy kitchens, no cabinet space to speak of, cheapjack construction throughout, paper-thin walls, etc. Really, a trailer is only a last resort for folks who can’t afford a real house but who don’t want to live in an apartment. They’re certainly not some kind of an “investment”. Tell your friend to save her money towards a down payment on a house.
FWIW, there are insanely good deals to be had on homes in NE Ohio right now. If I absolutely needed a place to live in, say, California where homes start at $250k, I’d go for a trailer. But you can find fantastic homes in NE Ohio for under or near $100k.
A trailer would be just wasting good money you could use towards a great house, up here at least.
Careful there. While some modular homes are built well, a lot of them are junk.
My cousin plopped a modular home on 5 acres in rural Ohio. That was 10 years ago. It’s falling apart at the seams.
The only reason I can think of to buy a trailer, is to give yourself time to save enough money to put a good down payment on a real home. It is an awful place to just reside indefinitely.
Palm Harbor homes are quite nice. It is not uncommon in this area to pay $200k for a mobile/modular home on an acre or two.
Thanks to Katrina and Andrew, the building standards are far higher than they used to be. The difference in homes built post-Andrew and pre-Andrew is amazing. Also, even if you look at a particular manufacturer, they have price points all over the scale. You can walk through a cheapie model and just feel it,where as walking through a top of the line model feels like walking through a regular home.
Addressing the previous poster: Walls are typically made of 2x4s, floors 2x6s, etc. I highly recommend you read the specs on any home. With most aspects, the standard features are pretty impressive, on the better homes. It really isn’t like that anymore except for the cheapest homes. But really, what can you expect when you can buy a 5 bed/3 bath house for $14?
Maintenance on the homes are very important and I know of two specific examples where the homes not only did not depreciate, but appreciated pretty surprisingly. They were both homes on owned lots. Not in parks.
I might point out that the standards here for mobile homes are pretty darn high. If you see the crap builders are throwing up, I’d gladly take a Palm Harbor home that is assembly line manufactured any day. As a matter of fact, as soon as my brick & morter house sells, that is exactly what I plan to do. I promise I won’t be in my underwear on the news any time in the next 3 decades. After that, it is a crap shoot. I might be on the news FOR my underwear by then.
I have a fair number of in-laws living in trailers and modular homes.
The ones who have attempt to sell their normal sized trailers, on both rented lots and owned land, have uniformly failed even when they were in good condition.
I have seen doublewides sell, though really the nice ones are almost indistinguishable from a modular home.
My mother-in-law’s modular home (on a good sized chunk of land, with a full basement) is in excellent condition and has skyrocketed in worth over the last decade. It definitely has a few spots that could use better construction though, such as the printed faux-wallpaper walls in the bathroom.
Your friend should look for a used trailer. That’ll serve two purposes: (1) he’ll have a good idea of what a new or semi-new trailer will be worth in a short amount of time, and (2) maybe he’ll consider purchasing a used trailer. They’re dirt cheap. )That’s my backup plan if I ever become destitute, but only as a last resort. First resort is impose on the in-laws in Mexico).
I lived in a trailer as a kid for about 5 years. Even then, it was an old, piece of crap trailer that welfare bought for us. In general nothing ever went wrong, but nothing was really of any quality, either. We were just outside of the nominal tornado belt, so that wasn’t much of a concern. The tight quarters and close proximity to neighbors didn’t bug me as a kid, but I’d drive me nuts now.
Modulars (true modulars, terminology varies across the country) are built to and meet local building codes. If you see that they’re only HUD certified, then they’re just fancy trailers and you want to avoid them. You need the land for that, though. I’m assuming your friend wants to live in a trailer park (again, lingo varies by region – maybe “mobile home community”).
If he’s got land, hell, buy an old travel trailer until he can build! My aunt and uncle parked an old travel trailer at what used to be their old vacation land. Granted, vacations are different than living there, but it worked for them for weeks at a time. They now live there in a huge monstrosity of a modular home.
Turkish: Well, do you want to do it?
Mickey: That depends.
Turkish: On what?
Mickey: On you buying this caravan. Not the rouge one, the rose.
Turkish: It’s not the same caravan.
Mickey: It’s not the same fight.
Turkish: It’s twice the fucking size of the last one.
Mickey: Turkish, the fight is twice the size. And me ma still needs a caravan. I like to look after me ma. It’s a fair deal. Take it.
Turkish: Mickey, you’re lucky we aren’t worm food after your last performance. Buying a tart’s mobile palace is a little fucking rich.
[Realizes his mistake]
Turkish: I wasn’t calling your mum a tart. I just meant…
Mickey: Ah, save your breath for cooling your porridge. Now, look…
[starts talking incoherently]
Mickey: Right. And she’s terribly partial to the periwinkle blue, boss. Have I made myself clear, lads?
Turkish: Yeah, that’s perfectly clear, Mickey. Just give me one minute to confer with my colleague.
[to Tommy]
Turkish: Did you understand a single word of what he just said?
Sorry Thief. You asking about a trailer pinged this dialogue.
Good call. That’s what I get for hastily composing the post. When I said “look into”, I meant to research. You’re right, some are well built, and a lot are junk. My parents own and live in one, and I would never have guessed if they hadn’t told me. It was very well built, and the only problems we ever had were when a rock quarry opened about half a mile from our house. I wish I had done some research on it myself, that I could share. Unfortunately, I haven’t, but it is a viable avenue to spend a bit of time researching.
Thanks for bringing that point up.
Addressing the early points about trailer parks being turned into strip malls …
No clue about Ohio, but in several states that’s pretty much illegal. The law effectively requires the trailer park owner to continue using the land for that purpose. In some cases they must honor all leases to the end of their term, which means a 10 year lease gives you 10 years of confidence the place will still be there.
An unintended consequence is once the landowner decides to close the park, they stop writing new leases and as the park slowly depopulates an dteh revenue drops, the maintenance goes to hell & there becomes an incentive for folks to move out ahead of their lease expiration.
In other places where month to month is common, there are still lengthy notice requirements, etc.
I don’t know beans about the Ohio law specifically, but it’s wrong to assume without checking that your friend could be evicted on 30 days notice so they can put a Home Depot on the land.
Yep. I know several people who bought trailers to live in while they built their “real” houses. Five years later, the house is completed, they move in, and sell/give away the trailer.