The St. Louis Federal Reserve’s FRED site is a virtual treasure trove of data – especially housing data. Recently, FRED announced that there were adding a new real estate data component, manufactured homes. FRED says this market is separate & smaller than the widely watched single-family homes market, but price data for manufactured homes have several interesting characteristics they feel need to be part of the discussion. Indeed…
“First, manufactured homes are more uniform than other homes. For example, single-family homes come in a variety of sizes, they have tended to become larger over time, and the size composition of single-family home sales may vary from one period to another. Manufactured homes come in two standard sizes, single and double, and separate statistics are collected for each. Second, the price of manufactured homes includes only the house—that is, the land is not part of it. This should make the price more informative. However, the market for manufactured homes is thinner, which makes measurements less precise and thus more volatile.”
Click here to read the full report at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
