I am rated at 60% and would like to build my home on some land. As anyone went this route? Was this process difficult?

PFC Trista Neal — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 14:09:16 -0500

Response by SPC Erich Guenther made Jan 23 at 2020 2:41 PM

SPC Erich Guenther — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 14:41:34 -0500

My parents have done all three: Manufactured Home, Plan Home, Custom Home. Of the three Custom Home has the most issues because the builder contractors are doing it for the very first time and not all of them are blueprint literate and so it is a constant game of negotiation with a custom home, do you ignore the error, make them redo it, accept the error and negotiate a price reduction. If your talking about building the home yourself, can't speak to that. Custom home builders almost always require you first to go to an architect for detailed plans and you have to pay for that as well. It is usually an architect that is in partnership with the custom home builder or employed by them. Getting plans done for a custom home will cost a chunk of money depending on the square footage.

Plan homes the architecture is done and your buying a home type via a built model. They still have issues but not as many as custom homes. I built a plan home it was the 7th iteration of the plan in the subdivision I live in so the builders only made like 3-4 visible mistakes that were either corrected, ignored or accepted.

Manufactured homes have the plans done and are primarily built in a factory and trucked to a lot and assembled in a matter of days. High quality manufactured home and you will rarely have issues with it because it is built repetitively over and over again in a factory under close and constant supervision. Only problem my parents had with a manufactured home was finding a subdivision that would allow them, and when they first trucked it in the neighbors right away tried to block it until they saw what the fininshed product would look like (the image in their heads was double wide mobile home but in reality it turned out looking like a custom built ranch so they were OK with that). The only problem with the manufactured home that I noticed was you could see the seams of the house if you looked carefully in places where the sections were joined together............only issue I noticed.

Response by SPC Stewart Smith made Jan 24 at 2020 1:15 AM

SPC Stewart Smith — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 01:15:35 -0500

I bought my house last year using VA loan.
They would not approve me for a "fixer upper" because it was my first time using the VA loan. So basically I had to buy a house that was move in ready.
It's ok though cause I got the perfect house after about 16 months of searching.