Make manufactured housing a fair deal.(View point: THE CONSUMERS UNION PERSPECTIVE)

The manufactured-housing industry markets mobile homes as an affordable option. But the process of purchasing and installing the homes jeopardizes the buyers' financial as well as physical safety. Over the past three years, Consumers Union, publisher of CONSUMER REPORTS, with support from the Ford Foundation, has examined the manufactured housing industry. Some of the most important findings are in the following areas:

GETTING THE REAL PRICE

Manufactured homes don't look at all like trailers anymore, but the sales pitch harks back to a 1950s car lot, before mandatory sticker pricing. Sammy J. Huey of Monahans, Texas, knows. When he was shopping for a manufactured home in spring 2003, Huey, a shop foreman at an oil-service company found that the dealerships he visited didn't have prices posted. And one dealer refused to give him a price until he had a chance to check Huey's credit to see what he could afford.

Even the dealership from which he finally bought his home was vague about the price. "They'd say 'It's about this' and 'It's about that," but "about' is a couple of thousands of dollars higher," Huey says. He ended up paying thousands more than the teaser price discussed earlier in the purchase process.

Stories like that are all too common. Even worse, the CU study found significant variations in the prices paid for exactly the same home. Because dealers don't display their prices, shopping around is unnecessarily difficult. Federal law has mandated sticker prices on autos since the late 1950s to help consumers comparison shop. Why not do the same for manufactured-home buyers?

Sticker prices would make it easy to see the cost of options as well as to compare prices among dealers. Independent lenders already demand invoice information from dealers to ...