Typically, when demand drops, prices follow. But even when the number of buyers dropped, prices kept climbing. The median price of a single-family home hit record highs in 2024, and has only continued going up. In May, the median price was $427,800 – up from $357,100 in 2021, when home prices started to climb.
At today’s prices, a family would need to earn $126,700 a year to afford monthly payments on an average home purchased in 2024, up from $79,300 annually in 2021, according to a report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Economists say a historically low inventory of existing homes, coupled with sluggish new construction, is keeping prices high.
All over my are there are shit tons of new 
starting at $350-400k
There isn’t a damned shortage. There is a shortage of affordable homes. Who is afording these is beyond me because the jobs in the area don’t pay nearly enough and there can’t be that many upper management / C-suite families that can afford them. I am seeing banks offering Zero down / no PMI like in 2008. Like they are baking another housing crash.
I live in one of the most “affordable” parts of my city, and there are mobile homes in my area selling for over $400,000. I am not in a coastal state or a top ten metro area. Shit is insane and unsustainable.
I live in a pricier area and mobile home are $75-$200k but you have to pay land rent worth $2400-$3200/month. There’s no winning.
What is “mobile home”?
Also called a “manufactured home.” They’re pre built structures that are meant to be trailered to a plot of land and then dropped there (either with or without a standard foundation) and then hooked up to water/sewer/power/gas. The build quality is generally quite a bit lower than a standard (“stick built”) house, because they need to be light enough to move around and totally self-contained. They only tend to last 20-30 years before they start to fall apart. If they’re well made and newer, though, you wouldn’t necessarily know from looking at the inside that they’re not regular houses.
Historically, they’ve been a way for lower income people to own a home (at least in the US), but that’s receding rapidly. When people talk about “trailer parks,” they mean mobile home complexes in which the residents (usually) own the structure but pay rent on the land, though in some areas (like where I live) lots of folks buy the plot of land and either drop a home on it or get the one that’s already there. You can buy the structures for $100,000 or less (though they can definitely go higher), but the insane price of land and real estate price gouging is pushing up the overall cost into the mid six-figures in some places, even for units that are a decade or more old.
Thanks
Wow that sounds pretty awful considering the normally awful standard of homebuilding in US.
Same as the intent for Krushchevka in socialist countries, but Khrushchevka stand strong till today (there’s even one in Germany that survived direct jet fighter crash and people still live there) and the prices often outstrips the modern private development houses which quite often starts to crack even before anyone actually moves in.
Overall conclusion for “mobile homes”: how fucking dare muricans joke about houses build from prefabs while they have this shit.
Yeah, modern home building quality in the US is also shit. I watched one go up few months ago near where I work, and you could see that it was basically 100% press board. I’m sure it sold for $550,000.
It’s super bleak. Prices in my city have basically tripled in the last 6 years. Shit that would have been $100,000 in 2019 is going for $350,000 now. It’s out of control.