Modular vs Manufactured - Safest? (how much, modular home, buying)

[Global Friend]

We have been searching for a home in SC on the internet and with a realtor. I'm finding a lot of modular & manufactured homes that look really nice and are at a good price but I'm not familiar with either of them. I read a few threads on here about them and did some research on the internet but I would like to hear first hand experience. Which are made better to stand up in bad weather? I will be livivng 1/2 hour to an hour inland from the beach, so I'm not sure how much a hurricane will effect me but I don't want to buy a house and then it fall apart because of strong winds.

Also, where I live not many people live in trailers so there is a stigma about them but I'm finding a lot of really nice ones in SC. Double wides, triple wides....I have never been in a trailer so I don't know what their like or how well their built. Are they safe in a storm? How do they compare to modular and manufactured? Does anyone on here live in a trailer and can give tell me, is it a lot different then a house?

We are thinking of buying one of the three mentioned above on a large lot and then building our own house on the same lot. Sounds like a good plan but as I said before I don't want to buy something that will fall apart when it gets windy. Thanks in advance for information.

[flgargoyle]

There seems to be a lot of confusion over the terms 'modular' and manufactured'. A manufactured home is what we used to call a mobile home or trailer- it comes on an integral trailer, which remains part of the house. Although building standards have improved tremendously, I still would not live in one in an area of potential bad weather. Here in FL, they get demolished in any kind of wind storm. And people 2 hours inland in FL experienced winds of 110 mph during Charlie. A modular home, on the other hand, is built to the same building codes as a site-built home- even a little better, b/c they have to hold up to the stresses of transportation. They are built of lumber and plywood, and shipped in modules, to be assembled at the site. I think that a modular built by a reputable company is equal to or better than a site-built wood home. The modules are built indoors, in precision fixtures, by trained people who do the same thing every day. This being said, I'm sure there are shoddy companies, and I know there are some companies trying to blur the line between manufactured and modular. If you are going to build your own house, by all means, buy a cheap trailer and live in it for the short term. That's what I may do. But if a hurricane heads your way, don't stick around to see what happens. BTW, I've been in some beautiful trailers, virtually indistinguishable from a regular home. You can usually tell from the outside, though. We are torn between modular, log, and owner-built conventional home at this point, but we have a few years to decide. I may be too old to build my own house by that time.

[Global Friend]

Thank you for the info., we also would like to possibly build a log cabin but on another thread someone said they read about a lot of bad experiences with log cabin kits on the internet. We need to do a lot more research.

[flgargoyle]

There is a website out there that really blasts the log home industry, with all sorts of horror stories about settling problems, etc. We're going to visit a model log home center in G'ville next week (Southland) and get some customer referrals. I find it hard to believe that all log homes are disasters waiting to happen, but like anything else, I'm sure there are good and bad.

[David in Anderson]

The main difference in madular and manufactured is the that a manufactured house or mobile home has HUD plates and is titles through the DMV. A modular house is not titled and does not have a HUD number. So far as quality, I've literally been in hundreds of both and quality varies from house to house and also depending on who "set the house up". If you do buy a manufactured or modular make sure the foundation is cemented - the piers I mean - most dealers will dry stack the concrete block piers underneath these houses which is very dangerous and does not meet the minimum property standard as set by FHA/HUD.

Log houses can be either great or horrible. Again depending on who built it for you. The main concern with log homes is the wood being properly dried so that when further dryingn occurs the logs do not twist. Also, Yoder Construction on Oconee County has built the best quality log houses I have seen in the last fifteen years.