The State of Manufactured Homes back in 1999
In 1999 things started to unravel in the manufactured housing arena; most retail sales centers’ lots were stuffed with inventory and home sales were starting to slow down. Some predicted that the industry had produced over 150,000 extra homes, which made Wall Street very nervous. Many in the industry believed that things started to unravel two years earlier when Oakwood Homes reported a much higher than expected number of loan defaults, which resulted in Oakwood’s market value dropping by over $1 billion dollars. This is what alerted Wall Street to potential problems within the Manufactured Homes industry. High inventories and slow home sales pushed Wall Street over the edge, in my opinion, thus starting the unraveling of the factory-built housing industry in 1999 till present.