Older mobile and manufactured homes can be less expensive to buy, but they can sometimes be much harder—and more expensive—to insure. As a home gets older, some insurance companies may have stricter eligibility requirements, higher premiums, or may not offer coverage for the structure at all.
That can leave owners asking an important question: What insurance do I actually need for an older mobile home?
The answer depends on the home, how you use it, whether you have a mortgage or other insurance requirements, and what you are trying to protect.
Start With What You Need to Protect
If you own an older mobile home outright, your insurance needs may be different from someone who has a mortgage on the property. A lender may require certain coverage as a condition of the loan, while an owner without a mortgage has more flexibility in deciding how much risk they are comfortable retaining.
For some older homes, the cost of insuring the structure can become significant compared with the home’s market value. If premiums are extremely high, it may be worth discussing your options with an insurance professional rather than assuming that the only choices are pay the premium or have no insurance at all.
Some owners may choose to retain more of the financial risk themselves, particularly when they have sufficient savings to handle certain repairs or a potential loss. That isn’t appropriate for everyone, and it doesn’t eliminate the risks associated with owning a home, but it can be one consideration when evaluating the overall cost of insurance.
Your Mobile Home May Be Difficult to Insure—But That Doesn’t Mean Everything Is
One of the biggest misconceptions we hear is that if an older mobile home is difficult to insure, there is nothing else worth insuring.
That’s not necessarily the case. Even when coverage for the physical structure is unavailable, too expensive, or doesn’t fit the situation, there may be other insurance options worth discussing.
For example, imagine a neighbor comes over to visit, gets startled by a barking dog, falls, and is injured. The important insurance question isn’t necessarily what happens to the mobile home itself—it’s whether you have appropriate liability protection for an accident involving someone else.
Situations involving visitors, guests, pets, property damage, and injuries can create financial risks that have little to do with the value of the mobile home itself.
Coverage availability and eligibility vary, so an older mobile home that is difficult to insure does not automatically mean that every form of insurance is unavailable. An agent can help determine what options may fit the property and your circumstances.
Don’t Forget What’s Inside the Mobile Home
We hear it all the time: It’s only an $18,000 single wide mobile home. It can’t have that much in it.
But walk through the home and start adding up what it would cost to replace everything you own, and the number can become surprisingly large.
Typical homes include:
- sofa
- loveseat/recliner
- dining furniture
- beds and mattresses
- televisions/electronics
- appliances
- clothing
- shoes
- kitchenware
- tools
- decorations
- computers
- jewelry
- collectibles
- personal belongings
The value of your belongings has very little to do with the purchase price of the mobile home itself.
We’ve seen situations where the amount of personal property inside an older mobile home was dramatically higher than the owner expected. In one real-world claim example, the documented contents had already exceeded the policy’s contents limit before the inventory process was even finished.
The lesson isn’t that every mobile home contains tens of thousands of dollars in belongings. It’s that most people are surprisingly bad at estimating the replacement cost of everything they own.
Try this: Walk through your home room by room and estimate what it would cost to replace everything—not what you think it is worth today, but what it would cost to purchase comparable items again.
Ask What Options Are Available Before Assuming You Can’t Get Coverage
Older mobile homes can present more insurance challenges than newer homes, but availability isn’t always as simple as “insured” or “uninsured.” Different insurers have different eligibility requirements, and the right solution can depend on the home’s age, condition, location, occupancy, ownership, and intended use.
If one policy isn’t a good fit, an independent insurance agent may be able to explain whether other coverage options are available.
Have an older mobile or manufactured home? We can help you understand what coverage options may be available and where the major cost considerations come from.