The Grissim Buyer's Guide to Manufactured Homes & Land: How to Find a Reputable Dealer and Negotiate a Fair Price on the Best Kept Secret in American Housing

Completely revised and updated, including a new, annotated Construction Rating Table with 56 criteria you can use to evaluate any home—before you buy.

The Buyer’s Guide has been widely hailed as the definitive resource for navigating the tricky waters of the manufactured home marketplace. With this new 2006 edition, journalist, author and consumer advocate John Grissim (himself a manufactured home owner) has made many revisions and up-dates and added new material that make this invaluable resource even more useful to home shoppers.

Among the many additions are a greatly expanded discussion on selecting the right home, including a new glossary of common terms used in manufactured home construction, plus a new three-page Construction Features and Specifications Comparison Table with 56 criteria. This table enables you not only to identify what features are associated with different levels of quality but also to determine the construction quality (on a 1-to-10 scale) of any home you are evaluating. This is by far the most comprehensive detailed listing of construction features and quality ever provided consumers.

Among many topics receiving an expanded discussion is the installation (or set-up) process and the role of the set-up contractor, including a detailed installation check-list for home buyers. Warranty issues, and how to deal with them, receive added emphasis. Also included are tips to better calculate the fair asking price for a home, together with a simple formula for determining your offering price during negotiations.