According to a study by the Foremost Insurance Company, 88 percent of manufactured homeowners report satisfaction with their housing choice. Likewise, a most recent Owens Corning study, conducted by National Family Opinion, found that 93 percent of manufactured home owners are satisfied with their housing choice.³

According to the U.S. Census in 2005, over 66 percent of manufactured homes were placed on private property, while the remaining 34 percent were sited in residential land-lease communities. The percentage of manufactured homes placed on private property has been growing over the last decade, and this trend is expected to continue as more and more residential land is zoned appropriately to allow for manufactured housing.⁴

Rural and suburban markets have traditionally been the stronghold of the industry. While this remains true even today, manufactured homes are increasingly being used in urban areas. Two converging factors virtually ensure manufactured housing will play an evergrowing role in providing housing in urban neighborhoods—the escalating cost of new housing, and the rising use of technological and design innovations in homes.

Are manufactured homes more vulnerable to fire than site-built homes?
Manufactured homes are no more prone to fire than homes built on-site. As a matter of fact, a 1986 national fire safety study by the Foremost Insurance Company showed that site-built homes are more than twice as likely to experience a fire than manufactured homes. The study showed that the number of home fires is 17 per 1,000 for site-built homes, while only eight per 1,000 for manufactured homes.⁵

A February 2005 report on “Manufactured Homes Fires in the U.S.,” by Dr. John R. Hall Jr., National Fire Protection Association, compared manufactured homes and other dwelling fire experiences in the mid-1990’s. It found that manufactured homes had a fire experience rate per 100,000 housing units that was 38 to 44 percent lower than the rate for other dwellings.⁶


Some fire resistance features of the HUD Code include strict standards for flame spread and smoke generation in materials, egress windows in bedrooms, smoke detectors, and at least two exterior doors, which must be remote from each other and reachable without passage through other doors that are lockable. Single-story site-built homes are required to have only one exterior door, and there is no “reachability” requirement.

Historically, a key factor in the severity of fires in manufactured homes is that there are a significantly higher percentage of manufactured homes in rural areas than in urban areas, while the percentage of site-built homes is much higher in urban/suburban areas. A fire in a home located in a rural area has a greater chance of becoming a “total fire” because of the increased amount of time needed for fire equipment to reach the home, since it may be outside a fire-protected zone.

Studies indicate that the majority of fires in manufactured homes are related to human carelessness, disproving the assumption that the construction standards are at fault. Further complicating the situation are reports from fire safety and government experts that more than a third of fires in post-HUD Code manufactured homes occurred in homes having no functioning smoke alarm present. Yet, every HUD-code manufactured home is built with a smoke detector to protect each bedroom area.