Did you know manufactured homes can sell for over $300,000 in Irvine? Let’s look in on the Royle Family.
Asking Price: $332,000
Address: 5200 Irvine Blvd #157 Irvine, CA 92620
I would like to leave this city
This old town don’t smell too pretty and
I can feel the warning signs running around my mind
And when I leave this island I’ll book myself into a soul asylum
Cause I can feel the warning signs running around my mind
Half the World Away — Oasis
Before anyone claims I am being an elitist, let me point out that I spent most of my childhood in a rural farm community in Central Wisconsin, and I have lived for many years in manufactured housing. It can be quite nice, as today’s featured property demonstrates.
Manufactured housing has been given a bad rap for years. It is relatively inexpensive — which means it has cheap fixtures and finishes — and it is generally associated with the lowest rung on the property ladder.
Many people falsely consider them unsafe. It is standard practice in the media to drive straight to a mobile home park after a big storm because they believe they are likely to find damage there. With modern standards for tie-downs, manufactures homes are as capable of withstanding storms as site-built.
No matter how nice a property is, people still have a stigma for manufactured housing — which is a shame because even site-built housing is manufactured these days; it is just manufactured on site.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this property really is worth $332,000 in today’s market. Everyone wants to retire here, right?
The Manufactured Home Business of Yesteryear
My mentor was a seasoned real estate developer in Florida who made a fortune developing manufactured housing communities in the center of the state. Back when these communities were popular, the way developer’s made money was through site rent — it was a cash-cow business.
The developer would put in a small amenity package and sell tightly-packed mobile homes for cost. The development itself was a breakeven proposition, but once you got hundreds of people to park their manufactured homes on your site, you could slowly bring up the rents and drain all the equity out of the properties. The park could be kept for cashflow or sold for enormous valuations.
There are many mobile homes in Central Florida that have little or no resale value because rental rates barely cover site rent on the home. You see the same problem with some of the small condos in Laguna Woods, and of course, with the North Korea Towers.
Asking Price: $332,000
Income Requirement: $83,000
Downpayment Needed: $66,400
Purchase Price: unknown
Purchase Date: unknown
Address: 5200 Irvine Blvd #157 Irvine, CA 92620
Beds: 2
Baths: 2
Sq. Ft.: 1,670
$/Sq. Ft.: $199
Lot Size: 4,000 Sq. Ft.
Property Type: Single Family Residence
Style: Carriage House
Stories: 1
View: Greenbelt
Year Built: 1979
Community: Northwood
County: Orange
MLS#: P699300
Source: SoCalMLS
Status: Active
On Redfin: 21 day
Beautifully Updated Manufactured Home With Great Interior Tract Greenbelt Location In The Highly Sought After 55+ Resident Owned Community ‘The Groves’. Large 2BR/2BA Flowing Floor plan w/Aprox. 1670 Sq/Ft. Updated Fully Appointed Kitchen w/ Custom Cabinets, Solid Surface Counters & Stainless Appliances. Lrg Family Room Opens to Private Side & Front Patio Areas Perfect For Entertaining Family & Friends. Lrg Formal Lvng Rm / Dining Rm w/ Custom Built-Ins. New Windows, Doors, Flooring, Remodeled Baths – No Detail Missed – Shows Like New. Attached 2 Car Garage. Great Association Amenities. Close To Everything Location. Put This One At The Top Of your Show List You Will Not Be Disappointed!!!
I don’t have any mortgage or sales data for you. You don’t think grandma spent the home, do you?
Oh, I thought the weekend extended to today.
IR, do you get extra pay for working Labor Day?
If it is a typical weekend traffic day, I will make about $3 in Adsense revenue.
It is a Wild Rivers day for the IR family…
I am surprised at the places mobile home parks are located in CA. Some of them are quite desirable. I’m guessing the parks became established before they had a lot of neighbors.
I think it was there in the early 70’s when I moved to Irvine. It definitely was there by the mid 70’s surrounded by orange groves and wholesale nurseries.
There used to be a really nice on on PCH between Newport Coast and Laguna Beach. The view from some of the units was spectacular.
El Morro…I had a friend who lived there for a few years. Nicest trailer park I’d ever seen! The kids walked to the elementary school next door and the community had a real neighborhood feel to it.
These homes on Irvine Blvd. are a bit more desireable than your average mobile home park. “This is a resident owned mobile home park where each owner owns a share (with a few exceptions) of the corporation that owns the land, therefore no space rent.” A share is approx $97,000. Some of the listings will contain the share as part of the home price, others will list it separately.
Some of the conventional manufactured home parks, like “Lake Park” near Fairhaven Cemetary, are in crisis because the land owner has decided not to renew the lease long-term. This makes it virtually impossible to sell the homes as there is no guarantee of long-term residency.
This is the key comment/explaination.
Rental lots in the Irvine area are around $900 to $1300 per month. If you can buy your lot for $97,000 at a 6% interest rate then you are only paying ~$500-600 per month on the lot mortgage. Like any (fixed rate) mortgage this is protected against inflation and will eventually pay off, thus leaving you with a $97,000 asset.
Also, as other commenters have mentioned, the certainty of owning the land your house is on is vital in order to think of it as a long term resisdence or investment.
I will never forgive the residents of this Groves community for blocking the construction of a walk-bridge over Jeffrey. The Middle School attending children of Woodbury have to cross Jeffrey to attend Sierra Vista Middle School, and will have to for the forseeable future since TIC and IUSD pulled a fast one and postponed indefinitely the Woodbury Middle School in favor of building more new homes. (as if a community 50% underwater needs more new homes). The paranoid selfishness of those who opposed the walkbridge will eventually result in a child being killed on Jeffrey by an inattentive driver. I hope that is worth their desire for privacy.
For anybody that’s interested, I posted a manufactured home anecdote in the forums. https://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewthread/6109/
IR, You hit it on the nose. The mobile home park rent and condo HOA have alot in common. The mobile home is in worse shape. Expensive to move the mobile house and limited park space once an area is developed.
If you don’t own the land, your at the mercy of the landlord. If you own the land, but have to pay to stay, your at the mercy of the govt or HOA. But as SoOCOwner wrote, share ownership of the land has many advantages over renting or leasing a mobile house space.
There are some manufactured modular buildings that were as strong or stronger than the typical on site made building. 2×4 construction that built at a factory to cuts down on waste and have more precision in the construction.
Any density maps on Debt to Equity and/or Debt to Income for house loans in Irvine and vicinity?
Malibu has a couple of those leased space parks.
It definitely does appear to be a cash cow…
http://www.redfin.com/CA/Malibu/29500-Heathercliff-Rd-90265/unit-78/home/17368660
$1348/mo rent, and there looks to be about 200+/- spaces. That landowner is making a FORTUNE!!
Prefab housing can be pretty cool these days…but only if you own the land IMHO.
I always found http://www.Fabprefab.com to be pretty interesting.
STAGING 101 FOR DUMMIE REALTORS AND SELLERS:
Step One: Get rid of all the crap. That means clear the place of fridge magnets, little area rugs, kid’s drawings, posters, magazines, clothes, laundry baskets, doilies(!), junk figurines, post-it notes, small appliances, and extraneous decorative articles.
Step Two: Paint the place a pleasing neutral color. Avoid glare white. Try a medium beige if your stuff is in warm colors, or an eggshell white if your colors are cool or sweet.
Get as many of the small articles packed up and out of sight as possible. Get the runners off the dining room table and take all the small plants out of the room and for Godsakes don’t leave a pair of shoes lying on the floor or stacks of cereal boxes on top the fridge or God Forbid, a dirty shirt hanging on the back of a dining room chair.
Remember, the photos your realtor posts are the buyer’s first impression of your house, and if it is a cluttered wreck of tasteless furniture and dumb gewgaws, it will be the LAST impression.
Would you sit for a portrait wearing the duds you wear to wash your car, with your hair disheveled and your face unwashed? Then don’t show your house that way and expect buyers to take an interest.
Oh YEAH, I forgot:
Pleeeease close the toilet seat lid!
This came in from an interested reader:
Couple of things…..The Groves used to be a space rent park, land owned by TIC. But as the park aged, coaches began to deteriorate and the park owners had a hard time raising rents. It also used to be that such a park owner could require the owners of the coaches to replace them when they reached the ripe old age of 17. Then the State of CA said they couldn’t do that, mobile home parks provided much needed “affordable” housing, particularly for seniors. And the State also provided legislation to help park residents be able to take ownership of the land, to preserve it’s “affordable” status.
And that’s what happened to The Groves. It was converted to condo ownership and each owner of a coach space owns all the land in common, along with monthly fees. That means all “coaches” had to be permanently mounted on stem walls, and therefore would be treated as real property for tax purposes, instead of vehicle taxes as well. I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, but the actualy form of ownership on that project is “stock-co op”.
As far as construction standards, manufactured homes must be built to Federal Building Code, often exceeding local building codes for insulation, wiring, etc. so that they can be sold anywhere or moved anywhere in the country. In a rental park, they must have an axle (so they can be moved). No longer are they built with fake wood panelling. Corion counter-tops, dry wall, high grade wood cabinets, are the norm. So, it’s very important to look at the age of the structure.
Let’s go back to “Stock-co op”. While popular in Florida and many parts of the Eastern seaboard, New York, New Jersey, etc., stock-co op’s in California are very difficult to sell because of lack of financing (almost no CA lenders will touch them), confusion over ownership rights (a local attitude reality), and possibly even more limiting rules and regulations that found in condo’s generally. Simplistically, the financing is put on the whole building that goes on for the life of the loan. Each owner pays a share of that loan payment. If an owner doesn’t pay, the rest have to pitch in. If an owner sells, the new buyer must assume the underlying share of the unpaid loan.
That is the case with many of the properties in Laguna Woods. At the beginning of that development all the properties were owned by the Golden Rain Foundation, a company set up by the original developer, Ross Cortese, now owned by his daughter Heidi Cortese. The effect that has had over the years has been to depress appreciation in these properties. Some of the last units built there are truly condos, though they might be detached homes on separate lots, but are financiable as condos. One of the rules is that they must be owner occupied. A unit can only be rented for a single 6 month period, then must revert to being owner occupied. So in a seniors community with folks passing on, their heirs are left with a problem.
If you try to comp them against similar square footage 1 bedroom, 1 bath, 700 sq.ft. condos without a garage, just a carport, anywhere close by….it makes no sense. Such a property in Laguna Woods would sell for $100,000, in Laguna Hills for $240,000. Association fees in LW are $500-600 a month, in Laguna Hills probably under $200. And you have to prove to the Golden Rain Foundation that you not only have income necessary to qualify to pay the monthly payment, but assets 2.5 times the value of the property you are purchasing.
Now to the question of “Did Grandma play the lender game”….my own recent research in Casta del Sol, Palmia, Laguna Woods, Huntington Landmark, and Leisure World Seal Beach have revealed that contrary to what the purchase pattern in senior communities has been historically (80% pay cash), there is an astounding number of short sales and foreclosures in every one of these ‘over 55’ communities. So, maybe it wasn’t grandma herself, but son of grandma, who was making the decisions…..yes the game is active there too.
Never learned so many new facts about manufactured housing as in this Observation — thanks for all the info, IR.
It is pretty tough getting past most buyers resistance to manufactured homes.
Is this spam trying to add to the conversation?
Actually, it is well done…