This New NJ Law Could Change Life for Mobile Home Owners

A bill signed into law by outgoing Governor Phil Murphy last week is intended to make it more affordable for residents of mobile homes and manufactured homes to buy the communities in which they live.

Mobile and manufactured homes, which are very poular in South Jersey, are the most affordable type of homeownership, but aren't without their vulnerabilities.

Although the mobile home residents may own the home, they do not own the land on which it sits.

That means that owners of these communities can decide to sell the land or redevelop the land for other purposes.

Owning the Home, But Not the Land

The Philadelphia Inquirer had a good article this week about the issues that residents of manufactured home communities are facing.

There are close to 100,000 people in New Jersey living in a manufactured or mobile home, and most of them are in South Jersey.

They are facing rising rents and the insecurity of new owners buying their community and making changes.

NJ State Assembly member David Bailey, Jr, whose district includes Cumberland, Salem, and Gloucester counties, told the Inquirer he began hearing from residents of Salem County manufactured communities as soon as he was elected, complaining about rising land rental prices, poor conditions, and infrastructure issues.

"Imagine you've owned your home for 20 years and somebody comes and says, we're selling this land and you either follow these new rules or you gotta move....That's what could happen to these people. Because they have no choice. They're stuck".

Over the last decade, about 20% of the country's mobile home parks were bought by private equity companies or investors who were looking to profit by raising the rent on the land.

The Manufactured Home Park Protection Act

The law just signed by Murphy gives homeowners in mobile home parks the opportunity to keep their homes by purchasing the parks before they are sold or converted for other uses.

The bill would require landowners to inform the homeowners and other state and local leaders if they intend to sell or redevelop the community.

If 51 percent of the homeowners agree to purchase the community and they meet the conditions of the sale, they would be given 120 days to execute a contract.

The old law allowed affected homeowners to purchase the parks if two-thirds of them agreed to make the purchase, a threshold that proved to be too high.

While there are more than 1,000 resident-owned mobile and manufactured home communities throughout the US., most in states that have passed strong resident right-to-purchase statutes, there are none in New Jersey.

New Jersey has also established a 3.5% annual rent cap on land underneath mobile homes, manufactured, and modular homes to prevent sudden, sharp rent hikes.