A noticeable change is coming to homes built in a factory and transported on wheels. After half a century, the heavy-duty steel base known as the “chassis,” what some considered a regulatory relic that made manufactured homes portable but also more restrictive, is now optional.
Cavco Industries, one of the largest manufactured home producers, presented the first chassis-less manufactured home during the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Innovative Housing Showcase last month.
“I am more than pleased to be able to show the public the very first HUD-coded home that is being built without a chassis,” says Colleen Rogers, senior vice president of marketing and communications at Cavco Industries, Inc.
The 2-bed-2.5-bath “Grande Arbor” prototype was constructed at Cavco’s Rocky Mount, Virginia facility. It was pre-sold to a Pennsylvania community where it will retail for $139,900, Rogers explains.
Removing the chassis gives the home “a much more residential look at an affordable price point for so many Americans,” she adds.
The exhibit sat just steps from the U.S. Capitol—a fitting reminder of the bipartisan housing law that made this sleeker model a reality.
Congress Makes Affordable Homes More Enticing
After more than 21 months of tireless lobbying, the National Association of REALTORS® helped pass the country’s most significant housing package in a generation. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act revolutionized the manufactured housing industry through several key provisions.
In addition to the law eliminating the long-standing permanent chassis requirement, it also set the stage for states to start treating manufactured homes the same as traditional ones by encouraging zoning reform.
“That is the last remaining barrier,” Rogers says.
For instance, in Virginia manufactured homes used to only be allowed in areas zoned for agricultural use. That changed in March, when Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a law that allows them anywhere site-built housing is allowed.
“We’re doing everything we can to get people aware of what they need to do locally to get those old, old codes changed,” Rogers says.
The law also raised FHA Title I loan limits for manufactured homes purchased as personal property, allowed longer repayment terms of up to 30 years, and gave HUD more flexibility over the lease requirements for homes on leased land.
Back in 2024, the FHA upped its loan limitpdf to better reflect the true cost of purchasing a manufactured home. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act increased those limits further to $106,405 (single-section), $195,322 (multi-section), $149,782 (single-section + lot) and $238,699 (multi-section + lot), and also requires that limits be indexed annually.
Within the manufactured homes industry, the law was celebrated for working to boost affordable supply.
What Comes Next?
While Cavco has their Grande Arbor design ready, they can’t start commercializing the product en masse until HUD finalizes its new chassis-less regulations. States will also need to certify that their laws treat the chassis-free homes the same as traditional manufactured homes before the models can be sold there.
As it is, Cavco could only exhibit its chassis-less unit because HUD granted them an exception, in order “to demonstrate to people what’s possible,” Rogers says.
That’s why it’ll take a bit before you see one of these new models in the wild.
“[That’s the] million-dollar question, right?” says Ross Mueller, national director of business development at Cavco Industries, Inc. “Our factories are physically capable of producing this now. They have the technical knowledge—the experience to do it. It’s having that code updated to remove the chassis from the requirements of the HUD language and it has to be written and adopted.”
