Industry statistics suggest that the auto industry’s final count for 2015 could hit an all time high for U.S. car sales, with some 17.5 million autos, trucks, SUVs and other vehicles sold.
At the current pace, the MH industry looks like it could finish the year with some 70,000 total HUD Code manufactured homes (see download from the end of the article, linked here). Compare this to the RV industry’s 369,100 estimate, per the RVIA.
Conventional Housing
Per the NAHB’s attached download, the Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR) for new home sales in November 2015 stood at 490,000 nationally. Existing home sales for the same period was 4.150 million houses sold in the U.S..
Let’s do some math. Autos often rival or exceed new MHs in price. RVs cost more per square foot than MHs. Certainly new home sales cost significantly more than MH. So why are MH Shipments trailing almost any reasonable domestic sales metric you might want to compare MH against?
When you say the word ‘apartment,’ most people know what you mean. Say the word auto, RV, house or multi-family – and an image jumps to mind. One problem with MH is the term manufactured home means ‘mobile home’ to the majority who think they know what it is that we do.
Potential blessing in disguise
For those willing to work smarter and go after a larger piece of the market pie, the sky is practically the limit for MH – so long as someone is willing to invest in education/image in a given market. Marketing is not enough, though, because once you attract that prospect who has cash or good credit that was shopping for a conventional house, now you have to engage that home shopper professionally. The “old mobe dog” ways of selling an MH just don’t cut it with the upscale buyers, as a rule. They’d be turned off, and leave. There is no need to wait for the industry to organize on a national level, as wonderful as that might be. Based upon much of what I’ve seen and hear from past national efforts that never got passed first base, the efforts would have fallen flat.
MH isn’t like apartments, or RVs, our houses or cars where people hear the name or term and they get the proper image. Can marketing help? Absolutely, we do it with clients routinely.
But marketing must be coupled with the right sales engagement approaches. And I’m not talking about a (pardon the expression) used car approach. That 1-2 connection between marketing and sales is what can make our industry’s potential hit 500,000 new homes a year, vs. the improving, but still paltry, 70,000 (+/-) homes we are likely to see shipped by HUD Code producers by the time all the final numbers for 2015 are tallied.
The practical, profitable solution is E, learn more, linked here. ##
