Today’s buyer of both new and existing manufactured homes may choose from a wide array of financing options. Some financial institutions offer an entire menu of lending programs. The house can be financed as personal property, on leased land, in a manufactured home community or on a privately owned site. Buyers who desire to acquire land in conjunction with the home can finance the land and home together. Properly financed, the purchase of a manufactured home should lead to equity building for the homeowner.

Most buyers arrange financing for manufactured homes through the retailer from whom they buy their home. These retailers maintain business relationships with a number of lending institutions—large national lenders as well as local institutions—and can assist in the preparation and submission of a credit application. Customers also may shop independently for financing which a lender of their choice.

Manufactured homes can be financed as personal property. Even when the home and land are financed together, the home is often secured as personal property and the land as real property. A growing number of buyers are opting to put their homes on land they are purchasing or already own. Traditional manufactured home personal property lenders have created land-and-home financing programs designed to accommodate this trend.

Another growing trend for homebuyers is to finance their home and land together as real property using conventional mortgage financing obtained through a traditional mortgage lender. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the primary secondary market sources for mortgage loans in the U.S., encourage this trend through their guidelines for accepting real estate mortgage loans for 20 and 30 year terms secured by manufactured homes.