What is a double wide mobile home? A manufactured home built in two transportable sections and joined together on site, against a single-wide's one section and a triple-wide's three.
The word counts sections, not bedrooms. A single-wide leaves the factory as one transportable box, commonly 14 to 18 feet wide and 60 to 80 feet long, which puts most of them somewhere between about 600 and 1,300 square feet with the rooms strung along a corridor. A double-wide is two sections towed separately and bolted together on the pad, commonly 24 to 32 feet wide and, in public figures, roughly 1,000 to 2,300 square feet, wide enough for a central living space with bedrooms off both sides. A triple-wide is three, and often an L or a T rather than a rectangle. The industry word for anything past one section is multi-section.
Each extra section changes more than the floor plan. The halves meet at a marriage line, a seam carried on a ridge beam and sealed with a gasket, and that seam is the first place to look for a roof leak or a settling problem in an older home. Two sections mean two transport permits and two moves, a wider and better prepared pad, and a longer set, so delivery and installation cost more per home than a single-wide's. Appraisers draw comparables from homes of the same section count, and park spaces have a maximum width, so a park with single-wide spaces cannot take a double-wide at all.
Prices in public figures run roughly in proportion to sections before land, with single-wides the cheapest new and triple-wides approaching a small site-built house, and the sale price of a used home in a park is a fraction of that. The purchase price is the smaller half of the question anyway: what the home sits on decides whether there is lot rent, whether the loan is a mortgage or a chattel loan, and whether the thing appreciates.
A worked example
Two homes sit on adjacent spaces in the same park. The single-wide is 16 by 70 feet, about 1,120 square feet, and sells at $58,000. The double-wide is 28 by 56 feet, about 1,570 square feet, and sells at $96,000. Lot rent is $725 a month on both, so the section count changes the purchase price by $38,000 and the monthly ground cost by nothing at all.
Manufactured homes for sale in Las Vegas
Questions people ask
How wide is a double wide?
Commonly 24 to 32 feet once the two sections are joined, against roughly 14 to 18 feet for a single-wide. Lengths run from about 40 to 80 feet, which puts most double-wides somewhere between 1,000 and 2,300 square feet in public figures. The exact figures are on the data plate inside the home.
Can a double wide be moved?
Physically yes, since each section is separately transportable, but it is expensive and it is a job for a licensed transporter with permits, a new pad and a fresh set. Older homes often do not survive the move well, and a home converted to real property cannot simply be towed away without unwinding that conversion first.