{"id":2217,"date":"2014-11-11T13:42:21","date_gmt":"2014-11-11T19:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.manufacturedhomepronews.com\/industryvoices\/?p=2217"},"modified":"2014-11-11T13:42:21","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T19:42:21","slug":"who-represents-manufactured-housing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.manufacturedhomepronews.com\/industryvoices\/who-represents-manufactured-housing\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Represents Manufactured Housing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Call me a geezer from the distant past? It’s true. My MH career started and ended back in the days when our industry was a scattered flock, competing madly for market share with little concern for industry strategy, making profits hand over fist.<\/p>\n

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That ebullient era came to a crashing halt with the Seventies’ problem. Faced with the industry’s first real crunch (shipments cut in half, dropping to five times what they are today), combined with ongoing regulatory pressure, we united under HUD’s banner. We changed our product’s name to “manufactured housing” (whatever that means) and went on to further difficulties. That gut-wrenching and controversial change solved no problems and made no one happy. The glory days were over and survival days ensued.<\/p>\n

True, there were some product improvements, but they piggybacked on some decades of learning curve product improvements and efficiency gains. Our product delivered pretty darned good value for the bucks as early as the Fifties, and never stopped getting better. Consumer Reports did an analysis and could find no watershed product improvements that accompanied the name change or the advent of HUD.<\/p>\n

The products of the leading companies, pre and post-Seventies, were rather boring and undifferentiated, as happens in leaderless, price driven industries. Manufactured homes and the mobile homes preceding them were startlingly different from “real houses” but looked as alike as peas in a pod—or a row of cheap tract houses.<\/p>\n

Any manufacture that attempted to break the mold was crushed by industry reliance on a narrow range of specialty building materials from large suppliers who dominated the industry and played a key role in making our low priced homes economically viable. Our industry’s lack of vision and strategy earned us a lousy image. I shoulder part of the blame. I was there and should have done better. Shame on us all.<\/p>\n

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Image credit – FlickrCreativeCommons.<\/i><\/p>\n

Ah well, that’s ancient history I mention here because it resulted from a lack of industry strategy, which in turn, sprung from a distressing lack of leadership. There were good companies with good leaders at the helm, but no one—company or person—could be said to be the industry leader. The largest producer commanded something like a ten percent market share. The elephants were small, and marched with trunks locked to tails.<\/p>\n

Leap forward a few decades to today. We find:<\/p>\n