My husband and I recently bought a 34 acre Christmas tree farm with a 10 year old double wide on it. While I wasn't thrilled with living in a double wide, it is what it is. Here's the thing with mine. It's made with cheap material, I think they most are. You can tell by the cabinets and faucets, and interior doors, it's just not top quality stuff. Like anything else though, if you take care of it, it will last. Unfortunately the prior owners didn't do that for mine. It's 10 years old and we had to replace the carpet when we moved in (the owners neglect for that though), replaced the water heater, replaced the light fixtures and ceiling fans, the ac unit needed repair, the leaky toilets needed repair, the roof needed repair, we replaced all the cheap appliances, and the windows need to be replaced next. The exterior doors and trim are also needing to be replaced soon. Some of the things on this list are because the prior owners did not take care of basic things. Some things (like the windows and water heater) are because it's cheap material, and some things (like the appliances and lights) worked fine but I wanted better quality. No, it's not a good return on investment, but you can get a nice place to call home for quite a few years if you take care of it. I hope this helps.

We live in a hybrid. The original 1400sq. ft home is a double wide manufactured home on a foundation. We added 1480sq ft stick built to it (this includes an upstairs bonus room). The manufactured home part of our house was built in 1996. I have been in newer ones (2005ish) and they were built so differently from ours! My kitchen cabinets are cheap as all get out and will some day be ripped out and replaced. The walls have wallpaper put directly onto the sheetrock so I can't remove it, I can only paint over it (so there is no texturing). But painting over it hasn't been hard or bad either. What I learned from looking at newer ones (we considered putting a new one on our place so we could take care of my mother-in-law) is this:

Most manufactured homes do not come with floor trim (baseboard trim)- pay for it. It's worth it! Or plan on putting it in yourself.

They only use flat paint entirely over textured walls now. When they set it up and are ready to paint it, pay someone to come in and do a GOOD paint job with either semi-gloss or eggshell on the walls (flat white ceilings they can do).

Upgrade to have real wood cabinets put in the kitchen and baths.

Upgrade the flooring (especially if you'll have linoleum).

ALWAYS have it put on a permanent foundation. If you do that, a bank will treat it as "real property" and so will a lot of insurance companies. This makes a loan and insurance cheaper.

Clayton Homes was one of the companies we considered because they seemed to have a decent reputation.

Manufactured homes will never appreciate the way a stick built house will, but it can make getting into a house a lot easier if you know what to spend your money on and what not to. Putting it on a permanent foundation will also help it to appreciate vs. depreciate if you don't put it on a permanent foundation. And honestly, the manufactured part of our house has excellent insulation, etc. In some respects, it seems better that way then the stick built part does and we did not cheap out on our addition. So.........

The only other thing I can think of is that nothing is "standard" in a manufactured home. So if you need to repair/replace something you often have to modify what's there to make something from like Lowes or Home Depot work. But it can be done. It just takes some ingenuity and work. I am in the process of upgrading/updating the manufactured part of our house to match the newer section (wall trim, paint, doors, cabinets, counters, etc) and while it's been a long process, it's not been hard and in the end looks really good. So a lot has to do with what type of product you start out with.

One thing we did find is when we looked into all of the upgrades we'd want to do on a manufactured home for my MIL that it was almost the cost of a building a house. One thing you might want to look into is a stick built by someone like Adair Homes. Because you do some of the work (paint, etc), and they build so many of them they can build a stick built pretty close to the cost of an upgraded manufactured home. I know several people who have gone that route and have been really happy with them as well. Doing that type of build can save about $40K in total cost to build.

Feel free to ask whatever questions you have. We did pretty extensive research before we settled on what we were going to do.

Hope this helps!

You need to do some research on gift taxes and being given land. If it's willed to you then you won't necessarily have to pay taxes on it when he passes. If he deeds it to you now you may have to pay serious gift taxes. Do check into that before you do any paperwork with the deed.

Your plan sounds reasonable. Always best to live somewhere awhile before buying.

You could have him do what my mom did - sold it to me for $1 - no taxes. In PA, you can do that between immediate family.

Theo166 wrote: »

kimbermak wrote: »

You could have him do what my mom did - sold it to me for $1 - no taxes. In PA, you can do that between immediate family.

You can also have it gifted over several years which can avoid taxes. I think ~10k / yr is possible.

Yes. Cash can be gifted up to $14,000 per person (this year the limit went up from 10K) but that wouldn't work with land because you can't partially gift land. But the selling for $1 might work! But definitely check!