Manufactured Housing - MH

Categories: Real Estate

Think: pre-fab. Homes built according to a Lego-like, pre-set grid. You can virtually, in 3-D on a cheap computer, fly over and through the home you'd be buying. Really cool visuals. You can virtually decorate and furnish it and paint it Tiffany blue if that rocks your world.

The housing is manufactured ahead of time...cheaply. It is then shipped to the build lot and simply assembled by low-end carpenters who are also...cheap, or at least relatively so. Wall A goes here. Pipe C goes there. Wire D goes here.

Manufactured housing was a big deal in Communist Romania and other Eastern Bloc buildings of the era. Huge rows of cinder block were simply fastened together with rebar steal and then filled with concrete. Easy. Cheap. Efficient. Maybe that's a Thing for the masses in the future; it might also just be a price cap that keeps skyrocketing construction labor costs down. At some point, when faced with spending $240,000 in materials for a custom home, the appeal of spending just $80,000 for a pre-fab, manufactured home might be worth it being, eh, 15% less "custom."

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