The Manufactured-Home Mortgage Penalty (2025)
The cheapest path to owning a home comes with the hardest financing: manufactured-home buyers are denied far more often and pay higher rates.
Key findings
- A home-purchase application for a manufactured home was denied 6.2 times as often as one for a site-built home in 2025: 61.3% turned down versus 9.8%.
- Among loans that were approved, 51.6% of manufactured-home mortgages were higher-priced (a rate spread of at least 1.5 points over the market benchmark), versus 2.8% of site-built loans.
- Manufactured homes are one of the few remaining paths to affordable ownership, yet their buyers face both the highest denial rates and the most expensive credit.
- This covers 379,225 manufactured-home purchase decisions and 3,820,626 site-built ones.
Manufactured homes (what people often call mobile or modular homes) are the cheapest route into homeownership for millions of households. Financing one is a different story. This compares every 2025 home-purchase application for a manufactured home with those for site-built homes. Two gaps stand out: manufactured-home buyers are turned down far more often, and when they do get a loan it is far more likely to be higher-priced. Part of the reason is that many manufactured homes are bought with personal-property (chattel) loans rather than traditional real-estate mortgages, and those are approved less readily and priced higher. A loan is counted as higher-priced when its rate spread is 1.5 percentage points or more above the average prime offer rate (the standard regulatory threshold for a first-lien loan). HMDA is a near-census, so these are exact counts.
Site-built versus manufactured
The double penalty
| Category | Denial rate | Higher-priced share (of originations) |
|---|---|---|
| Site-built | 9.8% | 2.8% |
| Manufactured | 61.3% | 51.6% |
By construction type
| Construction type | Purchase decisions | Denial rate | Higher-priced (of originations) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site-built | 3,820,626 | 9.8% | 2.8% |
| Manufactured | 379,225 | 61.3% | 51.6% |
Denial rate is denials divided by decisions (originations plus denials) on home-purchase applications. Higher-priced share is computed on first-lien originations with a reported rate spread. Exact counts; no sampling margins of error.
Data Sources & Methodology
The figures on this page are computed directly from the source data below. Narrative text accompanies the figures but never generates them.
Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Loan/Application Register (LAR)
- Vintage:
- 2025
- Access:
- BigQuery
- Cadence:
- annual
Loan-level records of U.S. mortgage applications and originations reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Each row is one application or loan, with loan terms, action taken, property and census-tract geography, and privacy-protected applicant demographics. It is a near-census of covered mortgage activity, enabling analysis of lending, denials, and access to credit.
HMDA requires most U.S. mortgage lenders to report every mortgage application and loan they act on. The annual snapshot file is a frozen national extract of these loan/application records (the Loan/Application Register, or LAR) for the reporting year.
The LAR is administrative data covering the large majority of U.S. mortgage activity, not a probability sample. Statistics are exact counts and shares over the reported records; there are no sampling weights and no sampling margins of error.
To protect applicant privacy, the public file bins or rounds several fields (for example age, income, loan amount, and debt-to-income and loan-to-value ratios) and withholds some values. Analyses use these modified fields as published.
Each record carries state and county FIPS codes and a census tract, supporting state, county, and tract-level analysis; metropolitan areas can be derived from county.
- HMDA covers lenders above reporting thresholds, so it captures the large majority, but not literally all, of U.S. mortgage activity.
- Several applicant fields are binned, rounded, or withheld for privacy, which limits precise computation on income, age, loan amount, and ratio fields.
- The data reflects applications and lender actions, not loan performance; it says nothing about whether loans were later repaid.
- Reported race, ethnicity, and sex follow HMDA collection rules and include "not provided" and institution-reported categories that require careful handling.
How these figures were produced
- Estimate type:
- Administrative near-census (exact counts)
- Weighting:
- None (not a weighted sample)
Suggested citation
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2025 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Loan/Application Register, via FFIEC. Analysis by Matt George, itsmattgeorge.com. Retrieved 2026-10-22.