How lenders treat park-owned homes

Agency lenders will count rent from homes the park owns, but only up to a cap. Freddie Mac won’t make an MHC loan if homes owned by the borrower, its affiliates and outside investors add up to more than 25% of the homes in the park. Fannie Mae allows tenant-occupied homes up to 35%, and asks for a plan to sell them down once they pass 25%. Over 35%, you’re looking at a bank, a credit union or a seller note until the share comes down.

Why lenders cap them

Lot rent is paid by a resident who owns a home that costs real money to move. The resident fixes their own roof. A park-owned home is a rental house: the park pays for the roof, the water heater and the turnover, and the renter can leave when a short lease runs out. Two parks with the same NOI are different risks if one earns it all from lots and the other earns a third from home rentals. The caps keep most of the income coming from land.

How the share is measured

The two agencies word it differently.

Freddie Mac counts ownership: homes owned by the borrower, its affiliates and third-party investors, combined, as a share of homes in the park. A home your brother-in-law’s LLC owns and rents out counts. Freddie also bars the park from selling or financing homes at retail, including rent-to-own.

Fannie Mae counts occupancy: tenant-occupied homes as a share of homes. Its term sheet puts it more plainly as “park-owned homes generally may not exceed 25%,” allowing up to 35% with a business plan. When the share is above 25%, the home sales or rental business has to be run by an affiliate, not the borrower entity.

A worked example

A 60-pad park has 50 homes on site. The owner holds 15 of them as rentals.

• Share: 15 ÷ 50 = 30%.
• Freddie Mac: over 25%, so no.
• Fannie Mae: under 35%, so possible, with a business plan to bring it down and an affiliate running the rentals. The park clears the 50-site floor with 60.

To get under Freddie’s 25%, the owner needs 12 or fewer park-owned homes out of 50: sell 3 to residents. If the sales are financed with seller notes or rent-to-own, Freddie’s retail-financing rule comes into play, so talk to the lender before you structure them.

Filling vacant pads with new homes

One way to fill empty pads is to buy homes for them, which pushes the share up. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Manufactured Housing Survey put the average sales price of a new single-section home at $82,200 for May 2026 shipments (double-section: $166,600). If a renter pays $500 a month for the home on top of lot rent, that’s $6,000 a year, about 7.3% of the price before repairs, taxes on the home, vacancy and turnover. The lot rent comes on top of that and needs no roof, and once the home sells to the resident, the lot rent is all that’s left.

Freddie Mac’s Guide sets a replacement reserve of $250 a year for each borrower-owned home on top of the $50 per site minimum. Put both in your numbers; the valuation worksheet does it by default and shows your NOI with and without the homes.

Selling homes to residents

Selling park-owned homes to residents is the direct way to bring the share down. Two cautions. First, the resident becomes a lot tenant, and under agency loans their lease has to include the tenant site lease protections. Second, terms of any sale have to be the same for every buyer: no different prices, down payments or screening based on race, religion, sex, disability, familial status, national origin or any class your state adds. That’s the Fair Housing Act, and it applies to home sales inside a park like anywhere else.

Sources

• Freddie Mac, MHC term sheet (April 2026) and Seller/Servicer Guide Ch. 22, Section 22.2(b) (update of April 22, 2025).
• Fannie Mae, MHC term sheet (© 2026) and Multifamily Guide Section 603.01B (effective September 28, 2026).
• U.S. Census Bureau, Manufactured Housing Survey, average sales price by size of home, May 2026 (file updated October 6, 2026).