After 11 years living in an apartment with her teenage daughter, Karine Miousse says she needed an affordable home after the building’s new landlord forced residents to move.
Last year, she found it. Not another apartment, but a mobile home for sale close to the hospital she works in as an urgent care nurse.
“Other homes in Laval are $400-500,000, and I’m a single parent, so I didn’t know how I would afford that,” says Miousse.
She’s now a homeowner paying about $1,500 a month. At this amount, she says her family can continue to enjoy life.
“If we want to go to a restaurant, we can. If we want to go to the waterpark, we can still go. If we want to see a show at the Bell Centre, we can go,” says Miousse. “That was my goal, to be able to have a house and still go out as we pleased.”
Post-Covid trailer parks are an entirely different creature. Pre-Covid, it was mainly seniors and empty nesters who lived there, says Eric Lachapelle, owner of Multi-Domaines, a company that owns 25 mobile home parks in Ontario and Quebec.
“Before Covid we never saw a [young] family in the mobile home park,” says Lachapelle. “Now we see families with kids.”
‘There’s a need’
Mobile homes usually list for less than $250,000, and can have as many as three bedrooms. By comparison, the average home price in Canada was $655,000 in September 2023, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association, a trade association.
“The mobile house [community] is changing. Before it was older people, but now you have all kinds of people 30 to 40 [years old],” says Céline Guy, a Proprio Direct real estate agent in Quebec. Guy sold 13 mobile homes in the last year, often to young families, single parents or single people. Prior to 2018, she rarely sold them.
Most mobile home owners don’t own the land the home sits on, which is one reason their cost is so much lower than real estate. But in addition to buying the mobile home, mobile home owners must also pay a monthly land rental fee, and in Quebec, the municipal property tax.
In Quebec, this monthly land fee ranges between $250 and $300. In Ontario, it’s between $300 and $600, depending on the city. The fee includes snow removal, hydro, upkeep of water and electrical lines, road and septic tank management and community and park maintenance.
Guy says the combined financing and rental costs are less than most apartment rents in Montreal, where the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is now $1,600.
“I find that to have a house right now… [and] be paying less than $1,600, everything included, is rare in 2023,” says Guy, who recently sold a mobile home to a young family who could not afford rent on a conventional apartment.
In the last five years, mobile home manufacturer General Coach Canada sold 700 mobile homes, says Roger Faulkner, the company’s president. “That’s pretty astronomical for our industry. Without a doubt there’s a need today.”
‘We’ve advanced considerably’
Mobile home communities can be tight-knit, with little street traffic and neighbours who are nearby and able to watch out for one another.
“We kind of have the wrong idea of a mobile home,” says Guy. “It’s a really nice community. Everybody helps everybody.”
Faulkner says he prefers to call mobile homes “manufactured housing,” to reduce the stigma attached to trailer parks. In the 1970s, the US and Canada officially switched to the term “manufactured home” because the “increased sizes, weights and [different] code standards” of the homes no longer applied to the mobile home category, according to the industry association Modular Housing Association Prairie Provinces.
Different from the white, rectangular trailer homes of the 1950s, mobile homes of the past few decades have modern kitchens, porches, electric fireplaces and decks.
“We’ve advanced considerably,” says Faulkner.
But there are drawbacks.
A mobile home purchase generally does not qualify for a mortgage unless the owner owns the land it sits on, according to Richard’s Mortgage Group, a mortgage brokerage. Purchasers therefore tend to take out personal loans instead of mortgage loans, which typically results in higher interest costs.
If a landowner decides to develop the mobile home community into something else, those in the park have to relocate on short notice. While apartment renters can also be forced to relocate, it’s a lot more expensive for mobile home owners to move, since mobile homes are not actually that mobile.
A full-service move, which includes disconnecting and reconnecting utilities and other services, can cost between $3,000 and $14,000, according to various online estimates. The cost depends on the size and weight of the home, the distance of the move and the labour, material and setup costs.
Also, mobile homes depreciate due to wear and tear, whereas fixed house properties tend to appreciate because they are attached to land, says Faulkner.
This has significant implications for Canadian families, many of whom want to pass on assets to their children or use the equity in their homes to fund their retirement. A 2022 Leger survey found that 24 per cent of Canadian homeowners expect to tap their home equity to fund at least some of their retirement.
For Miousse, there are no regrets. “A lot of people say $200,000 for a mobile home is a lot. But the price of all homes have gone up,” she says.
No more shared foyer, or sounds of neighbours living all around them. The tranquil neighbourhood has also rubbed off on her daughter, with Miousse noticing the move has made her child happier.
“In the apartment, when my daughter used to listen to music, I always used to tell her to turn it down,” said Miousse. “But here, [I say] ‘Go ahead.’ You can turn up the TV and no one will be bothered. It’s another way of life.”
