How much does it cost to live in a trailer park?

This is the whole page. When somebody tells you what it costs to live in a park, they tell you the lot rent, because it is the one number the park publishes and the one with a name attached. At our defaults that is $550 against a $1,435 month, which is 38%, so the quoted figure covers well under half of what living there costs. The other 62% is not hidden and it is not a trick. It is simply spread across billers who each send their own statement on their own schedule: the electricity company, whoever holds the note on the home, the insurer, your state, and the roof when it decides it is time. None of them coordinate, none of them appear in the park's advert, and each one on its own is small enough to feel like a detail. Put your own figures in above and the total stops being a rent figure and starts being a cost of living, which is the number the decision actually turns on.

This is what makes the arrangement different from renting an apartment and different from owning a house, and it is worth stating plainly because it is the source of nearly every difficulty people run into. The home is yours: it is a manufactured structure, it ages, and the upkeep and the insurance and the tax on it are yours because ownership works that way. The ground it stands on is not yours: it is land, it is somebody else's, and you pay them monthly for the use of it. So you have taken on the maintenance obligations of an owner over an asset that ages, while keeping the exposure of a tenant to somebody else's pricing on the asset that does not. That is not an argument against doing it, and for a great many households the monthly figure this page produces is genuinely lower than the alternatives available to them. It is an argument for knowing which parts of your housing you control, because those are the parts you can plan around, and the ground under you is not one of them.

In a flat, an increase you dislike is answered by moving, and the cost of that answer is a deposit and a van. That is what makes rent negotiable in practice: the tenant can walk. Here the same rise arrives and the same answer costs a completely different amount, because your home is a structure sitting on that lot and taking it with you means disconnecting it, permitting the move, hauling it, and setting and re-levelling it at the other end, which is a job measured in thousands and which can run into a real fraction of what the home is worth. The mobile home moving calculator on this site prices that properly and it is linked below, and it is worth running before you sign rather than after, because it tells you what your exit costs and therefore how much leverage you have. That is why this page compounds the rent forward instead of leaving it flat. At our defaults a 6% assumption turns $550 into $736 within five years, an extra $186 a month, and the reason to look at that early is that the ordinary response to it is priced out of reach.

Nearly everybody coming from renting carries a habit into this arrangement that no longer fits: when something broke, somebody else fixed it. Here the structure is yours, so the roof, the skirting, the plumbing, the water heater, the flooring and the heating and cooling are all on your ledger, and the reason the box asks for a monthly figure is that none of them fail monthly. They fail on their own schedule, at their own size, and the household that has been setting money aside experiences that as an annoyance while the household that has not experiences it as a crisis, which is the same event and two different outcomes decided months earlier. Our default is $125 a month and it is a placeholder rather than a recommendation. Set it against the age of the home and particularly against the age of the roof and the heating system, which are the two items whose failure is least convenient and least negotiable.

The lot rent is set park by park by whoever owns the park, so this page leaves that figure to your own lease rather than inventing one to stand in for it. What the page adds is everything the lot rent cannot show you, because rent for the ground is a minority of the month. Alongside it sit the utilities the park does not include, the payment on the home if you are still making one, insurance, whatever your state charges on a manufactured home, the park's own fees and pass-throughs, and the upkeep that lands on you because the structure is yours. Put your figures into the form above and you get a monthly total, a yearly figure, and the share of it that is actually lot rent. At our defaults that total is $1,435 a month and the rent is 38% of it, which is the gap between the number people quote and the number that leaves your account.

Because the usual defence against a rent rise is far more expensive here than it is in an ordinary tenancy, and that changes what the rise means. If a flat goes up and you object, you move, and moving costs a deposit and a van. If your lot goes up and you object, moving means taking the house with you: disconnecting it, getting the permits, hauling it and setting it back down, which is a job measured in thousands and which can come to a real fraction of what the home is worth. So the rise is not simply a cost, it is a cost you have limited practical ability to walk away from, and that is worth seeing over years rather than one renewal at a time. At our default assumption of 6% a year, $550 becomes $736 within five years, which is $186 a month more for the same ground. That assumption is yours to set and the box says so. Ask the park what the rent has actually been over the last several years and use their record instead of our placeholder, and run the mobile home moving calculator linked below so you know what your exit would cost before you need to know.

For a great many households the monthly figure comes out lower, and the honest answer is that it depends on which lines you are comparing and you cannot know until both totals exist. The comparison people usually make is lot rent against apartment rent, and that one is not a comparison at all, because the lot rent is a minority of the month here while the apartment rent covers considerably more of the tenant's total. Build the whole figure above and put it against the whole figure for the flat, including the flat's utilities and renters' cover. Then look at the parts that behave differently rather than only at which total is smaller. If your home is paid off, this arrangement can be dramatically lower and stay that way. If you are financing it, you have a payment that eventually ends, which the flat never gives you. Against both of those, you are carrying repairs that a tenant does not, and your exposure to a rise in the ground rent is harder to escape than a tenant's is. Those are different kinds of advantage and disadvantage, and the totals alone will not tell you how you weigh them.

That line is drawn differently in different parks and it is the first thing to establish, because it is the reason two rents that look far apart can produce an identical month. Some parks fold water, sewer and refuse into the rent. Others bill them through separately, sometimes apportioned from a master meter, which makes the advertised rent look better while your total stays where it was. Roads, grounds, lighting and any shared amenities are generally the park's to maintain and are usually reflected in the rent, whereas everything from your skirting inwards is yours. Get the lease and ask directly: what is covered, what is billed separately, what fees exist outside the rent, and what the park can change without renegotiating. Then fill in the boxes above accordingly, and if you are weighing two parks, fill the form in twice rather than assuming their arrangements match. The comparison that means anything is total against total.