Why can't I sell my mobile home?

I know there are a lot of frustrated mobile home sellers out there asking themselves this question. There are several reasons why it can be hard to sell your mobile home. The biggest one I’ve seen is that it’s very difficult for any buyer to get financing on a used mobile home and most buyers do not have enough cash to buy a mobile home outright. I’m sure anyone who has tried to sell a mobile home has had people ask if they’ll “take payments” instead of all cash.

This usually leads people to ask the question, “Why can’t I sell my mobile home?” It seems like the mobile home seller is at an impasse. They want cash for the home, the seller wants to make payments, and no one wants to finance the deal.

One answer is to create a note on the mobile home and then sell that note to an investor. Here’s how that works.

Creating the note

As much as you might not want to do it, you’ll need to bite the bullet and offer your mobile home for sale with owner financing. Once you’ve found a buyer, have a lawyer draft up a promissory note (or chattel mortgage) for your mobile home. This is commonly just called “the note”. A quick example would be on a $20,000 sale with $2,000 down you would create a note for $18,000 with monthly payments and interest rate described in the note. Once you’ve done this you have $2,000 in your pocket, a note for $18,000, and are ready for the next step.

Sell the note

There are sites out there specifically set up to sell notes. However, you may not even need to use them as craigslist seems to work for many people. One thing you’ll need to realize is note buyers will usually “buy on a discount” which means they’ll pay somewhere around 90% of your note’s value. In our example of an $18,000 note, that would be $16,200. You usually will be able to increase your selling price by about 10% when you offer owner finance so that should cancel out the loss you’ll get selling at the discount.

Once this happens your buyer will make payments to the investor and you’ll have the chunk of cash you need. It works out as a nice win-win situation for everyone involved.

Oh and if you live in Central Texas and would like help selling your mobile home, say to yourself Carter Sells Mobile Homes three times, then click on the site and call me!!