Search for how to fill vacant lots in a manufactured housing community and page one of Google is a BiggerPockets thread and two Mobile Home University forum threads. Operators asking other operators, because nobody has written it down properly.

That tells you two things. It is one of the most common problems in the asset class, and the published guidance is thin enough that people are still crowdsourcing it.

The reason it stays unsolved is that infill looks like a marketing problem and is actually a capital problem wearing a marketing costume. A vacant homesite produces nothing. Filling it requires putting an asset worth somewhere between sixty and two hundred thousand dollars onto ground you already own, financing it, finding somebody who can qualify to buy or rent it, and getting a permit — and the last of those alone can take four to six months per home.

Most operators underwrite infill at twelve months to stabilisation and get there in eighteen to thirty. This is what the gap is made of.

Figures below are labelled by source type. Census data is official; the Pew study is peer-reviewed research; trade and investor figures are labelled as such and should be treated as directional.

Key takeaways

• New home cost, official data: Census reports an average sales price of $90,700 for a new single-section and $164,200 for a new double-section as of March 2026.
• The home is not the cost. Delivery, set, skirting, steps, HVAC and utility connections add materially — investor guidance puts a delivered-and-set new home at $150,000–$250,000+ all-in.
• Used homes are roughly a third of the price. A public filer sold 161 new homes averaging ~$150,000 and 208 used homes averaging ~$59,000 in the same year.
• National MHC vacancy was 5.2% entering 2025, ranging from ~1% in the Pacific to ~10% in the Great Lakes and Plains.
• Filling lots with rental homes consumes agency headroom. Fannie caps park-owned homes at 25% (35% with a reduction plan); Freddie at 25%.
• Realistic absorption is two to three years, not one — and permitting alone runs four to six months per home placement.

The scale of the problem

The industry body reports more than 43,000 manufactured home communities representing almost 4.3 million homesites, with 31% of new manufactured homes placed in communities.

Against that, national MHC vacancy entering 2025 was 5.2%, with age-restricted communities tighter at 3.2%. The regional spread is the interesting part: roughly 1.0% in the Pacific against roughly 10% across the Great Lakes and Great Plains. Infill is not a national problem evenly distributed — it is concentrated in specific markets, and if you are in one of them your competition for buyers is other operators with the same empty pads.

No published national count of vacant homesites exists, so treat any figure you are quoted with suspicion. State-level data does exist and is sobering: Maine reported 475 communities with 19,348 total lots and 2,383 unoccupied in August 2026 — about 12.3% — against an average lot rent of $479.

Supply is not the constraint. Census reports manufactured home shipments running at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 100,000 as of June 2026. Homes are being built. They are not reaching your empty pads.

What it actually costs to fill a lot

Three sources, three different pictures, and the differences are instructive.

Official price data. Census's Manufactured Housing Survey puts the average sales price of a new single-section home at $90,700 and a new double-section at $164,200, both as of March 2026. That is the home at the factory gate, not on your pad.

Research data. Pew's 2024 cost study, using 2020–2021 inputs, modelled a 1,216 sq ft single-section at $56,956 and a 1,568 sq ft double-section at $109,852, with a CrossMod at $147,022. It put transport, setting and skirting for a double-section at $8,000 total — $3,000 delivery, $3,500 setting, $2,500 skirting. Note the vintage: those placement costs look low against anything quoted today.

Trade cost guides (directional only). Current published ranges: delivery and setup $2,000–$5,000 single / $4,000–$10,000 double; skirting $1,000–$2,500 / $2,000–$4,000; deck $4,000–$10,000; HVAC $4,000–$9,000; electrical service $2,500–$12,500; municipal water connection $1,000–$6,000; sewer $1,600–$11,000; well and septic where there is no municipal service $6,000–$20,000; building permits $500–$2,000.

All-in. Investor guidance puts a new home delivered, set and connected at $150,000–$250,000+ per lot. That is the number to underwrite against, not the factory price.

Do the arithmetic on twenty vacant lots and infill stops being an occupancy initiative and becomes a capital allocation decision competing with everything else on your balance sheet.

New versus used

The price gap is large enough to change the strategy entirely.

A public filer's disclosed 2025 figures make the comparison cleanly: 161 new homes sold at an average of roughly $150,000, and 208 used homes at an average of roughly $59,000. Same operator, same year, same programme — a 2.5x spread.

Used works when: your market's incomes will not support a payment on a new home, you have reliable sourcing, and you have someone who can assess condition properly before you buy. The transport and set costs are the same as new, which means a badly chosen used home carries full placement cost against a depreciating asset.

New works when: you can access a manufacturer or lender community programme, your market supports the payment, and you want the home to still be an asset in fifteen years. New homes also come with warranty, which materially reduces the maintenance drag if you rent rather than sell.

We could not verify any credible national dataset on repossessed home inventory, so sourcing availability is a market-by-market question you will have to answer locally rather than from published data.

The five routes to a filled lot

The fourth row deserves comment because operators plan around it and it almost never happens. A household that already owns a manufactured home and wants to move it is paying several thousand dollars to do so, which is why the number of homes actually relocating between communities is negligible. Do not build an infill plan on inbound migration.

The installation side of any of these — permits, set, tie-downs, inspection — is its own body of work, covered in the moving and installing guide.

Rent it or sell it — and why your lender has a view

This is the decision that most affects long-run value, and it is partly made for you.

Renting fills faster. No buyer qualification, no chattel loan, no closing. You place the home and lease it. Occupancy moves this quarter.

But every rental infill consumes agency headroom. Fannie Mae's MHC term sheet states that park-owned homes "generally may not exceed 25% but we allow for up to 35% with a business plan to reduce the percentage of park-owned homes over time." Freddie Mac caps borrower, affiliate and third-party ownership at 25% in aggregate.

Here is the mechanic operators miss: filling vacant lots with rental homes raises the numerator of that ratio against a fixed pad denominator. Every rental infill moves you toward the cap, not away from it. A community at 20% park-owned with thirty vacant lots cannot rent-fill all thirty and stay inside Fannie's ordinary box.

That is not an argument against renting. It is an argument for knowing your ratio before you commit capital, and for deciding at the outset which homes are permanent rentals and which are being placed to be sold later. The wider trade-off between the two models sits in the park-owned versus tenant-owned analysis, and the margin mechanics of selling are in the rent-or-sell decision guide.

The programmes that exist

Two categories are worth knowing about.

Manufacturer and lender community programmes. Several major manufacturers and chattel lenders run programmes aimed specifically at community operators — supplying homes for vacant lots, sometimes with the setup cost financed, plus buyer financing for the incoming resident and a rental option. Terms vary considerably and some have historically been available only to larger operators, though at least one has publicly expanded access to smaller ones. If you have vacant lots and have not had this conversation with a manufacturer's community division, it is the highest-value call on the list.

We have deliberately not named specific programmes here — confirm against your own commercial relationships first.

State infill funding, which is newer and underused. Vermont is the clearest working example and runs more than one programme:

• The Rapid Response Mobile Home Infill Program — $7 million approved in August 2024, targeting 250 homes by 1 July 2026. The state housing authority buys energy-rated homes and sells them at cost with no markup, with lots prepped with concrete pads. Buyers must be at or below 120% of area median income and be accepted by the park owner.
• MHIR infill grants paid directly to park owners — up to $20,000 per lot, maximum ten lots per community, covering lot preparation, utility upgrades, septic, municipal fees, abandoned-home removal and marketing. Two conditions matter: it excludes rental-home creation, and "projects must be approved before work begins — MHIR does not pay for retroactive work."
• A separate housing and conservation board initiative funding home removal, foundations, hookups and placement on vacant lots.

Vermont is unusual. We could not verify an equivalent funded programme in any other state, though at least one is publicly discussing it. Check your own state housing agency before assuming nothing exists — these programmes are new enough that they are not well indexed.

Why infill takes longer than the model says

Investor guidance, treated as directional, puts realistic stabilisation for a community with significant vacancy at two to three years, with communities underwritten to twelve months taking eighteen to thirty.

The public filer data is consistent with that and worth reading closely, because it is the only audited view available. That operator held 3,500 vacant sites at the end of 2025 and had invested $325 million in 4,200 rental homes over five years — implying roughly $77,000 per home. Its same-property occupancy moved 87.5% to 88.3% across 2025, a gain of 354 occupied units, having added 717 new rental homes. By Q2 2026 it reported 3,200 vacant sites, a gain of 430 occupied units in the first half, with 100 homes ready for occupancy on site and 300 more being set up.

Read that as a benchmark. A well-capitalised operator with in-house sales, in-house financing and dedicated infill infrastructure is moving occupancy roughly one percentage point a year and still holding thousands of empty pads. If your plan assumes faster than that without those advantages, the plan is wrong.

The three things that actually stall it

1. Home sourcing: Operators who close on a community without established manufacturer or dealer relationships spend the first six months building them. Sourcing is a relationship, not a purchase order, and it should be established before the acquisition closes, not after.

2. The financing gap: This is the real constraint and it sits with your buyer, not with you. Chattel loans carry materially higher rates than mortgages — trade sources currently cite 8–13% — with shorter terms and lower approval rates. A household that would qualify for a site-built mortgage often cannot qualify for a home-only loan on a cheaper asset. That is why your infill pipeline stalls at the qualification stage rather than the interest stage. The product landscape is set out in the manufactured home financing guide, and the qualification side in resident screening.

3. Permitting: Four to six months per home placement, varying by jurisdiction, and largely outside your control. The mitigation is to run permits in parallel batches rather than sequentially per home, and to establish the process with the local authority once rather than rediscovering it each time.

Sequencing an infill programme

1. Inventory the lots properly — not just a count. Which are genuinely buildable? Which need utility work, pad work, or an abandoned home removed first? A lot that needs $18,000 of site work before a home can arrive is not a vacant lot, it is a project.
2. Establish your ratio — current park-owned homes as a percentage of total homes, against your lender's cap. This bounds how much of the programme can be rental.
3. Source before you buy — manufacturer relationship, used-home channel, or a community programme, established and priced.
4. Fix the buyer path — who finances your buyers, at what approval rate. If you do not know, you do not have a sales programme.
5. Batch the permits.
6. Set a realistic absorption assumption — two to three years for meaningful vacancy, and model the carry.
7. Track each lot as a pipeline stage, not a binary.

What the records have to carry

Infill is where a homesite-level record earns its keep, because a vacant lot is not one state — it is a pipeline:

• Lot condition and readiness — buildable now, needs site work, or blocked by an existing structure
• Pipeline stage — home ordered, in transit, set, connected, listed, under contract, occupied
• Capital committed to date per lot, so you can see the real cost of the programme rather than the invoice total
• Intended disposition — rental or for sale — recorded at placement, because that is what feeds the park-owned ratio
• The park-owned count as a live number, since it governs your financing headroom
• Buyer pipeline — applications, approvals, declines, and why, because the decline reasons tell you whether the constraint is sourcing or financing

Most operators run this in a spreadsheet that shows occupied and vacant, which cannot answer any of the above.

How RIOO fits

RIOO is a property management platform built natively on Oracle NetSuite, and the homesite is the record — which is what turns infill from a side project into something you can actually manage.

A vacant homesite carries its own readiness status and pipeline stage, so "thirty vacant lots" resolves into how many are buildable today, how many have homes on the way, and how many are blocked. Capital spent per lot accumulates on the homesite in the same ledger as the rent it will eventually produce, so the return on an infill programme is measurable rather than inferred. And because home ownership status is a dated attribute rather than a checkbox, the park-owned percentage that governs your agency headroom is a number you can read before you commit to the next twenty homes.

See how RIOO handles manufactured housing communities.

Conclusion

The reason operator forums are full of this question is that infill sits awkwardly between three departments. It looks like marketing, is funded like capital expenditure, and is constrained by consumer credit you do not control.

The operators who do it well treat it as a pipeline with stages and a cost per lot, establish home sourcing and buyer financing before they need them, know their park-owned ratio to the decimal, and underwrite two to three years rather than one.

The ones who struggle count vacant lots, order some homes, and discover eighteen months later that the constraint was never the homes — it was that their buyers could not get approved.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What does it cost to put a new home on a vacant lot?
Census reports average new home sales prices of $90,700 single-section and $164,200 double-section as of March 2026. Delivery, set, skirting, steps, HVAC and utility connections are additional; investor guidance puts an all-in delivered-and-set new home at $150,000–$250,000 or more per lot.

Q2. Is it better to bring in new or used homes?
Used homes cost roughly a third of new — one public filer averaged ~$59,000 used against ~$150,000 new in the same year. Used suits constrained markets with reliable sourcing; new suits markets that support the payment, and carries warranty, which matters if you rent.

Q3. Should I rent the homes or sell them?
Renting fills faster but consumes agency headroom: Fannie caps park-owned homes at 25%, or 35% with a documented reduction plan, and Freddie at 25%. Every rental infill moves you toward the cap. Decide the mix before you commit capital.

Q4. How long does it realistically take to fill vacant lots?
Two to three years for a community with meaningful vacancy, per investor guidance. Permitting alone runs four to six months per home placement. A large, well-capitalised public operator moved same-property occupancy about one point across 2025 while adding over 700 homes.

Q5. Are there programmes that help fund infill?
Yes, and they are underused. Several manufacturers and chattel lenders run community programmes supplying homes and buyer financing. Vermont runs multiple state-funded infill programmes, including grants of up to $20,000 per lot to park owners, capped at ten lots. Check your own state housing agency — these are new and poorly indexed.

Q6. Why do infill programmes stall?
Usually at buyer qualification rather than home supply. Chattel financing carries higher rates, shorter terms and lower approval rates than mortgages, so households who could buy a site-built home often cannot finance a cheaper manufactured one.