Is manufactured home insurance more expensive? The short answer is, unfortunately yes.

Why is it more expensive?

The long answer has to do with basic insurance concepts. Your insurance rate whether for your home, a manufactured home, car or business is calculated by a simple statistics problem. That problem determines what is the chance you have a loss, and how bad will the loss be. Unfortunately for manufactured homes in comparison to a traditional stick built home the answer is the likelihood is higher, and it is likely to be a bigger loss.

Why Are the losses worse?

1976 is a dividing line for mobile and manufactured homes. As in 1976 manufactured homes were required to meet HUD standards. With those standards the quality of homes got significantly better. However, history has shown that when a loss occurs on a manufactured home the companies pay out more. Fires are particularly devastating to everything, but especially manufactured homes. If you have ever seen how quickly they can go up in flames it is startling. Add in the idea that manufactured homes in general depreciate in value rather than appreciate or hold value and you get a whole lot of total losses. Which makes for bad losses, which makes rates go up.

What can you do?

The best thing you can do to fight this is to shop around. There are companies that specialize in manufactured home insurance. While on average the rates are higher, these specialty companies such as Foremost, American Modern, American Reliable, Aegis, and others understand the risk, and often have cheaper rates than the standard home and auto insurance companies. What’s more is that they often have better coverage an account for things like depreciation on total and partial losses. Some of the standard homeowner’s insurance companies will only pay out the actual cash value which is crummy all around.

Gila Insurance Group works with many of the above-mentioned companies and understand the ins and outs of Manufactured home insurance coverage. Contact us today to start a quote and start saving today!