Cavalier Homes Inc. said Monday the Federal Trade Commission has cleared the way for its merger with Addison rival Southern Energy Homes and that it plans to close its factory in Millen, Ga.

Southern Energy is paying $2.75-per-share in cash for Cavalier, making the deal worth about $51 million.

Cavalier said the FTC completed its review of the merger with Southern Energy, which is scheduled to be completed today. Cavalier shares will cease trading at the close of business today.

Cavalier said it is closing the Georgia plant because of "continuing market challenges" that have lowered sales volumes of certain manufactured homes. It said 100 workers will be affected.

Southern Energy is a unit of Clayton Homes Inc., which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

In the current economic recession, it seems like the average American is able to afford less and less.

These unfortunate circumstances have placed affordable housing in quite high demand. It’s no surprise now that manufactured homes and mobile homes are paving the way when it comes to reasonably priced housing. With this increased demand, there will be more and more Americans living in factory built homes. As ownership of manufactured and mobile homes has increased, so has the demand for Mobile Home Loans.

At the introduction of manufactured and mobiles to the housing market, most of the average mortgage banks were uninteresed in offering Mobile Home Mortgages. Most mortgage banks lumped Mobile home loans in the same category with car or vehicle loans. Much like vehicles, manufactured and mobile homes were thought to quickly depreciate in value, unlike a traditional stick-built home or condo that typically sees equity gaining over time.

Due to the lack of equity appreciation, for many years it was improbable that a manufactured or mobile home refinance or equity loan would be made available to owners of factory built homes at all.
As time went on, home values skyrocketed faster than general income could keep up with. The depreciation of manufactured and mobile home owner’s equity started to slow down.  Eventually the equity losses  stopped altogether. Manufactured and mobile homes soon were actually increasing in equity, in part due to the increasingly superior quality and safety of manufactured and mobile housing, coupled with federal and state laws governing the factory-built process.  While mobile home owners invested in their homes and continued to maintain and improve them, they gained precious equity.

Today, rate-and-term mobile home refinance loans and cash-out equity loans have become readily available to eligible owners of manufactured or mobile homes. It has become reasonably easy to locate what was considered “non-traditional” and even undesirable financing for manufactured or mobile homes.

As the current real estate market begins to recover, the manufactured and mobile home market endures the same loss of value as the “stick-built” and condominium homes. In the midst of the recovery, manufactured and mobile homes still remain viable for financing at terrifically competitive interest rates. These loans should be eligible for rate-and-term refinancing in the not-too-distant future and perhaps even “cash-out” equity loans in the somewhat-near-future.
There was a time when a manufactured or mobile home loan was frowned upon as a mere “car loan”.
Those days have long passed as manufactured and Mobile Homes have emerged as the last affordable housing in America with competitive financing available to qualified buyers.

The Mobile Home Renaissance – Challenge or Opportunity?

Owning a Manufactured Home or Mobile Home; What you Need to Know.

How Manufactured Homes are Built with Precision and Care?

Mobile home loans are tricky, which is why many traditional mortgage lenders and brokers don’t want to work on them. The owner of a mobile home can literally put wheels on the structure and drive away with it, which increases the risk of the loan compared to a home built on a foundation. Another issue with mobile home loans is that they are considered personal property rather than real estate. So, financing a mobile home loan without the land beneath it is similar to purchasing a car or RV. 

To read the entire article with the California Chronicle, click the link below:

California Manufactured Home Loans ]]> http://camhf.com/mobile-home-loan-blog/uncategorized/is-it-possible-to-finance-or-refinance-a-mobile-home-loan.html/feed 0 http://camhf.com/mobile-home-loan-blog/uncategorized/another-one-bites-the-dust.html http://camhf.com/mobile-home-loan-blog/uncategorized/another-one-bites-the-dust.html#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 20:13:45 +0000 admin http://camhf.com/mobile-home-loan-blog/?p=138 According to a recent LA Times article, Green prefab architecture firm Michelle Kaufmann Designs is closing it’s doors.

“Kaufmann, who worked for Frank Gehry and Michael Graves early in her career, was a pioneer in the so-called modern prefab movement of recent years. She was also one of the first architects to make a persuasive case that prefab design, which reduces construction waste and damage to building sites, among other benefits, was in a number of ways synonymous with sustainability.”

“Kaufmann’s own efforts, she said, were undermined by the economy’s rise and its fall. During the last few years of the housing boom, as she was starting out, many factories were so busy making money with conventional prefab construction that they saw no reason to experiment with more innovative designs. As the economy has soured, many of those same factories have gone out of business entirely. And lenders, who during the boom looked for excuses to approve even the most exotic mortgages, have taken on the kind of conservatism that formerly marked prefab builders.”

Although lending on mobile homes, manufactured homes and pre fab homes has tightened up, financing is still easily available to qualified home buyers and home owners. Now more than ever, it’s important to have a trustworthy, licensed lender, with a great reputation, like CAMHF, on hand.

CertifiedGreen Modular Home Program™ Guide, by NMHC and SBRA*

The National Modular Housing Council (NMHC) has introduced a dynamic new program called the CertifiedGreen Modular Home Program™,created by the NMHC in cooperation with the Systems Building Research Alliance (SBRA). This program was created to draw attention to the inherently green nature of factory building: the efficient way that modular homes are constructed, the use and reuse of materials and the general conservation of resources that are hallmarks of modular construction.

CertifiedGreen™ is a national program for new homes that qualify in compliance with the National Green Building Standard recently accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).The standard was developed by a housing industry consensus committee representing architects, site and factory built home builders, environmental experts and building product manufacturers formed by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the International Code Council (ICC) to draft the actual standards documentation. The CertifiedGreen™ program was designed by and for the benefit of the modular industry, expressly to meet the needs of modular home builders constructing green homes.

According to the Manufactured Housing Institute, “With the National Green Building Standard as the program’s technical basis, CertifiedGreen™ homes meet a widely recognized benchmark for green building.”

The Program Guide contains additional information on what is required for participation in the program.

National Green Building Standard™, by ICC and NAHB (New Standard to be in stock beginning of March 2009)

A collaborative effort between the ICC and NAHB, the Standard provides the “green” practices that can be incorporated into new homes, including high-rise multifamily buildings, home remodeling and additions, hotels and motels, and the site upon which the green homes are located.

The green practices include lot design, preparation and development; resource, energy, and water efficiency; indoor environmental quality; and operation; maintenance; and building owner education. The four threshold levels, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Emerald provide builders with a means to achieve basic, entry-level green building, or achieve the highest level of sustainable “green” building that incorporates energy savings of 60 percent or higher. The Standard can be used by any builder for their individual projects, or be the basis for a local community or state green building program.

*Information on CertifiedGreen Modular Home Program™ was obtained from the Manufactured Housing Institute.

One of these organizations, called MARI or the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, Inc., has aligned itself with the manufactured housing industry. From an article entitled “Stamping Out Lending Fraud”, published by Modern Homes Magazine, the writer, Ann Parman, explains that “Recently, the Manufactured Housing Institute entered into an agreement with MARI with the goal of reducing the incidence of fraud in manufactured home loan transactions. Hopefully, the end result will be fewer loan defaults and, as a result, better loan terms for consumers. Higher defaults cost lenders more money, and that gets passed on in higher rates to consumers. In addition, the industry’s participation in MARI can help prevent consumers from obtaining loans that are too large for their budgets or for the homes they purchase, and therefore, increase their ability to build home equity.”

Essentially, MARI is an information service provider that collects reports of possible incidents of fradulent activities in the mortgage service industry MARI’s database collects & maintains two types of reports:

“1) non-public incidents of alleged fraud, material misrepresentations and other serious misconduct;
and

2) public sanctions against professionals and companies involved in the mortgage and financial services industries.”

The Manufactured Housing Institute has also created a Lender Best Practices (LBP) program, where participation in the MARI organization is mandatory. The article reports, “The members of the LBP Steering Committee felt it was important for industry lenders to become more diligent in both the detection and reporting of fraud,” said Don Scarmuzzi of DFS Consulting LLC who assisted in putting the LBP and MARI programs together.

If it wasn’t for organizations like MHI and MARI, the missteps of the past may have never been brought to attention , creating great strides towards corrections of these wrongdoings that only hurt consumers, in the end.

For more information on these organizations, please read the full article at:

http://www.manufacturedhousing.org/mhomes/images/lendingfraud.pdf

According to the Manufactured Housing Institute, the following are unique advantages to Manufactured Home or Mobile Home Ownership:

Cost-Effective:

Depending on the region of the country, construction cost per square foot for a new manufactured home averages 10 to 35 percent less than costs for a comparable site-built home.

Built for Quality:

All aspects of the construction process are controlled.

The weather does not interfere with construction and cause delays.

All technicians, craftsmen and assemblers work as a team and are professionally supervised.

Amenities:

Floor plans are available that range from basic to elaborate. These include vaulted or tray ceilings, fully-equipped kitchens, walk-in closets, and bathrooms with recessed tubs and whirlpools.

A variety of exterior siding is available, including metallic, vinyl, wood, or hardboard. In some cases, homebuyers can also opt for stucco exteriors.

Safety:

Manufactured homes are among the safest housing choices available today due to federal laws requiring smoke detectors, escape windows, and limited combustible materials around furnaces, water heaters and kitchen ranges.

More Information can be found at http://www.manufacturedhousing.org/media_center/quick_facts/advantages.htm