A manufactured home is built mostly in a factory rather than on the property itself, then transported to its final site. That’s the core difference from a conventional home, where materials are delivered to the lot and a crew of framers, electricians, plumbers and other trades build everything on location. Site-built construction allows more customization but takes longer and costs more in labour. Factory construction trades some of that flexibility for speed and efficiency — which is why manufactured homes can often offer more space or better finishes for the same price, and why they’re especially practical in remote areas where shipping materials and trades out to a site gets expensive fast.
Manufactured homes fall into two main types:
- Mobile homes come in single-wide, double-wide, and occasionally triple-wide. A single-wide is typically 12–18 feet wide and up to 66 feet long, and travels to the site as one piece. Double- and triple-wides are built in matching sections and assembled on-site into a single home. Mobile homes tend to be the more affordable end of manufactured housing.
- Modular homes — also called factory-built or prefab homes — are built in multiple sections and shipped separately, then assembled on a permanent foundation. Built to the same municipal standards as conventional homes, modular construction can produce multi-storey layouts in almost any configuration. High-end modular homes can be genuinely hard to tell apart from a site-built house once installed.
