The Grissim Buyer's Guide to Manufactured Homes & Land: How to Find a Reputable Dealer and Negotiate a Fair Price on the Best Kept Secret in American Housing

The second edition of the best-selling consumer guide to manufactured homes and purchasing land or leasing a home site, providing up-to-date, essential information home buyers need to make an informed purchase decision. Completely revised and updated, including a new, annotated Construction Rating Table with 56 criteria you can use to evaluate any home—before you buy. The Buyers Guide has been widely hailed as the definitive resource for navigating the tricky waters of the manufactured home marketplace. With this new edition, journalist, author and consumer advocate John Grissim (himself a manufactured home owner) has made many revisions and up-dates and added new material that make this invaluable resource even more useful to home shoppers. Among the many additions are a greatly expanded discussion on selecting the right home, including a new glossary of common terms used in manufactured home construction, plus a new three-page Construction Features and Specifications Comparison Table with 56 criteria. This table enables you not only to identify what features are associated with different levels of quality but also to determine the construction quality (on a 1-to-10 scale) of any home you are evaluating. This is by far the most comprehensive detailed listing of construction features and quality ever provided consumers. Among many topics receiving an expanded discussion is the installation (or set-up) process and the role of the set-up contractor, including a detailed installation check-list for home buyers. Warranty issues, and how to deal with them, receive added emphasis. Also included are tips to better calculate the fair asking price for a home, together with a simple formula for determining your offering price during negotiations. Last, given that so much has happened economically in the years following the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent crash of American housing, one may reasonably ask if this edition of the Guide—the second printing of which was in 2008—is as relevant and up to date in 2018 as it was a decade ago. The unequivocal answer is Yes. The author had completed the updates and revisions to the Guide just as the economy was slipping into recession (see Chapter 1). More important, the manufactured housing industry had already emerged from its own meltdown during the previous decade and had corrected many of its shortcomings. The industry was, and still is, poised to offer home buyers exceptional value.