Yes, though the menu is shorter than for a larger home: a chattel loan secured by the home alone is the ordinary route, FHA insures a version of it through Title I, and an ordinary mortgage becomes possible only once the home sits on a permanent foundation on land the borrower owns and has been retitled as real property.
The obstacle is almost never the width. It is that a manufactured home starts life as titled personal property, like a vehicle, and most of the lending world is built for real estate. A single wide meets that wall the same way a double wide does, and then meets a second, smaller one: several loan programmes are written around multi-section homes, so the single wide owner has fewer doors even after clearing the first hurdle.
The gate everything passes through first
The home has to have been built on or after 15 June 1976, when the federal HUD code took effect, proved by the red HUD certification label on the outside and the data plate inside. This is absolute. FHA, VA, USDA and the agencies' programmes all require it, no appraisal gets round it, and a well-kept 1974 home is a cash purchase, a seller-financed purchase or a private personal-property loan.
After that the lender wants the home's condition and, on anything but a chattel loan, its address in the legal sense: whose land it is on and how the home is titled.
A chattel loan, which is the usual answer
A chattel loan is secured by the home itself rather than by land, the way a car loan is secured by the car. It is the standard instrument for a home on a rented space in a park, and for a home on land the borrower does not own or has not affixed the home to. Terms are commonly shorter than a mortgage, often in the range of 15 to 23 years, at a rate several percentage points above a mortgage rate, and it closes faster and cheaper because there is no title work on land.
What is different if you default is worth knowing before you sign. A chattel lender repossesses the home rather than foreclosing on real estate, which is a shorter process with fewer of the protections a mortgage foreclosure carries. Chattel lenders commonly look for a credit score in the mid-600s and will go lower at a higher rate; the deposit and the term move with the score too.
FHA Title I, and what Title II needs instead
FHA runs two different things and the numbers are not interchangeable. Title I insures a loan on the home alone, or on a home and lot together, over a shorter term and up to its own limits, through approved lenders, and it works for a home on a rented space. It is a government-insured version of the chattel loan rather than a mortgage. The programme's caps and terms are set by HUD and change, so ask the lender for the current figures rather than trusting a number you read somewhere.
Title II is the ordinary FHA mortgage, and it wants the home to be real estate. That means a permanent foundation meeting HUD's Permanent Foundations Guide for Manufactured Housing with a licensed engineer's certification, the land owned by the borrower, the running gear removed, the state certificate of title surrendered and the home recorded as part of the real property. Piers and straps installed to a park's standard normally do not qualify. Meet those and the loan prices and behaves like a mortgage on a house.
Where the single wide specifically loses options
Two constraints show up repeatedly. First, the agencies' upper-tier programmes for manufactured housing, Fannie Mae's MH Advantage and Freddie Mac's CHOICEHome, marketed as CrossMod, apply to multi-section homes built with site-built features, so a single wide is not eligible for them and falls back to the standard manufactured housing product. Second, some programme guides and many individual lenders apply their own minimum floor area or multi-section overlays, which is a lender policy rather than a rule of law and differs from lender to lender.
The other quiet constraint is the appraisal. A single wide is valued against other single-section sales, and in a market where those are scarce or are all cash sales in parks, the appraisal is often what holds a financed purchase up. Ask early whether the appraiser will have comparable sales to work with; it is a better question than the rate at that stage.
What to do about it
If the land is or can be yours, converting the home to real property is the single change that most improves the financing. It is a filing rather than a construction project on a home already on a compliant foundation, and it moves the loan from a chattel rate over 20 years to a mortgage rate over 30.
If the home is staying in a park, shop the chattel market properly. Credit unions, the manufactured housing lenders and the dealer's own finance arm price the same borrower differently, and dealer-arranged financing is convenient in a way that is usually paid for in the rate or in fees rolled into the contract price. Get two quotes in writing before signing one.
Questions people ask
Can you get an FHA loan on a single wide in a mobile home park?
Not an FHA mortgage, because the borrower does not own the land. FHA's Title I programme insures a home-only loan on a home in a park, but that is a chattel loan with a shorter term and its own limits rather than a 30-year mortgage.
What credit score do you need for a single wide?
Chattel lenders commonly look for a score in the mid-600s and will lend below it at a higher rate and a larger deposit. An FHA-insured mortgage on a converted home applies the same low-600s floor it applies to any house, since at that point it is a house.
Why will some lenders not finance a single wide?
Usually a policy overlay rather than a rule: the lender restricts itself to multi-section homes, or to homes titled as real property, because the resale market for a single-section home in a park is thin and the collateral is depreciating. A different lender may have no such rule, which is why it is worth asking more than one.