Residents of mobile homes are seeing rental prices rise under new owners
Manufactured housing communities – where residents often own their homes but lease the land beneath them – have traditionally been viewed as an affordable housing option.
However, private equity firms and large investment firms are increasingly acquiring mobile home communities and raising rental prices.
That’s what happened recently at Smoky Palms North in Clinton, TN, where rents more than doubled under new business ownership.
“They’re raising my rent from $275 to $650,” Lillian Goins told WHAT. “Yes. I’m retired. I work part-time for two days to make ends meet. I think this is absolutely ridiculous. I can understand if someone bought it, you might go up $50 or $100, but $375 – it’s just not in my budget.”
In his letter to residents, the new owner wrote, “We understand that the $650 represents a significant change. … Please know that this adjustment was not made lightly. … It brings rates closer to market levels, allowing us to preserve the community.”
Such rent increases leave many mobile home owners in a difficult situation since they move into a mobile home costs usually between $4,000 and $10,000 – an expense that is out of reach for many residents.
According to the Manufactured Housing InstituteAbout 22 million Americans live in manufactured homes, a category that includes both mobile homes and modular construction.
Similar complaints across the country
Karla Beach from Texas recently found themselves in a similar situation and shared her story on Facebook.
“Our mobile home park has been sold to a Dallas company,” she wrote in February. “We are all seniors [in a] senior parking with a limited income. They raised our rent from $365 to $525, which none of us will be able to afford.”
She wrote: ‘I just don’t know what to do. We’re barely getting by at the moment, just [with] the bills we have to pay [and] the insurance and all that, I’m just crazy with worry.”
The following month, Beach put her mobile home up for sale on Facebook.
‘Believe me, I don’t want to have to sell it. I have to. They increase[d] the rent and we can’t pay it,” she wrote.
In April, she wrote that she had moved to an apartment in another city after having to sell her caravan due to the rent increase.
Business investors on the rise
In recent years, private equity firms and corporate investors have increasingly acquired mobile home parks across the country, with purchases expected to total about $9.4 billion in 2021 alone, the report said. U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Institutional investors (including private equity funds and other large corporate buyers) accounted for only about 13% of community purchases of manufactured housing in 2017-2019, according to a March 2025 analysis by Genesis community loan fund. By 2021, their share had increased to approximately 23% of buyers nationwide.
In December, Sen Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, launched an investigation into major investment firms with significant stakes in mobile home parks in New England. As part of the research, she sent letters to six leading companies operating in the region.
She requested that the companies provide data detailing how their business practices have affected residents of those parks, as well as information on the profits generated from those investments.
“The thousands of Granite Staters and millions of Americans who live in mobile home parks deserve fair rent, safe living conditions and the ability to protect themselves from abuse,” Hassan said in a statement to Realtor.com®. “As corporate investment firms buy more and more of these communities, they still have a responsibility to meet these basic standards for all their residents.”
In March, Hassan launched one confidential community research for people living in manufactured housing communities, looking for first-hand accounts of rent increases, living conditions, and treatment by park owners.
That same month, Sen Elizabeth Warren also sent letters to the largest corporate landlords in the single-family, multifamily and industrial housing sectors, requesting data on their business practices, landlord-tenant concerns and rental property portfolios.
“Rents in manufactured housing communities have increased 45% in the last decade,” said Warren, a Democrat. stated in a press release. “In MassachusettsFor example, the attorney general is suing an investor-owner of a manufactured housing community for “unfair and retaliatory rent increases” of more than 77% since 2022, with a cumulative 133% increase in rents for new rental lots.
Advantages and disadvantages of mobile homes
According to a recent report from Realtor.com, the average price of a mobile home was just $141,450, compared to $410,000 for a single-family home.
The report shows that manufactured homes can still help owners build equity, even if the home is on a rented lot in a park.
Landless mobile homes increased 51.6% from 2019 to early 2026, compared to the average single-family home appreciation of 58.6%. Mobile homes with land, meanwhile, appreciated by 70.1%, the report shows.
“It’s a great time to be a buyer in the mobile home market, but selling a mobile home can be difficult, especially if it’s not on freehold land, meaning buyers can’t take advantage of a mortgage.” Joel Bernersaid senior economist at Realtor.com and author of the report.
And owning a mobile home without owning the land beneath it poses additional risks.
Traditional homeowners who fall behind on their mortgages typically go through a lengthy foreclosure process, which includes several options to catch up on payments, apply for relief, or sell the property. Owners of manufactured homes in land-lease communities, on the other hand, are generally governed by the landlord-tenant law. As a result, even though they often own their home, missing a lot rent can quickly lead to eviction through a much quicker legal process.
Florida clearly illustrates this disparity. Residents of mobile home parks there faced an annual eviction rate of about 1.5% — about triple the foreclosure rate for conventional homeowners. In some regions, eviction rates in these communities rose above 6% per year, based on an analysis of more than 60,000 eviction filings in Florida mobile home parks between 2012 and 2022 conducted by Princeton University’s research firm. Expansion laboratory and the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies.
The data also shows a sharp increase in displacement following ownership changes: Eviction filings increased by about 40% in the months after a park was sold, suggesting that ownership transfers – such as takeovers by institutional investors – are a major driver of resident displacement.
