Roughly 85 percent of manufactured home transactions never touch an MLS. They move through DMV title transfers, retailer inventory lists, community management offices and for-sale-by-owner postings that leave no trail in the data systems traditional real estate runs on.
The result is a housing segment that accounts for a significant share of affordable inventory nationwide but operates almost entirely in the dark.
LotRoll is trying to change that, and the National Association of Realtors just signed on to help.
The Colorado-based startup, founded five years ago by Grayson Gibson and Omar Husain, was named to NAR’s REACH 2026 accelerator class on May 28, one of six companies selected for the program.
“For us, it’s credibility,” Gibson told Inman when asked about the significance of being selected for REACH. “NAR being willing to step up and bridge the gap between modern real estate infrastructure and manufactured housing is sorely needed.”
Why the data never existed in the first place
Gibson has spent 15 years in manufactured housing, including running a mortgage company that specializes in the segment. The daily friction he and Husain encountered, such as missing comps, incomplete records and no standardized listing fields, became the thesis for LotRoll.
Manufactured homes, Gibson noted, don’t transact the way site-built homes do. Title transfers occur through DMVs, similar to vehicle transfers, so the public records that feed CoreLogic and similar providers largely miss them.
MLS systems have historically ignored them. The result is that no single data source has ever captured a complete picture of the manufactured housing market.
LotRoll’s approach is to build that picture from scratch, county by county. The company ingests publicly available but unstructured county-level records, normalizes and verifies them, and pairs the output with any existing MLS data to produce what Gibson describes as a unified view of every manufactured home in its active markets.
“Think about what MLSs do for traditional real estate,” Gibson said. “They aggregate listings and make them usable for proptech companies to improve services and the overall transaction process. We’re doing exactly that for manufactured housing.”
The company is currently live in five states — Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, California and South Carolina — with Texas and Florida coming in June.
Those seven states would represent a substantial share of the U.S. manufactured housing supply, though Gibson acknowledged the platform offers agent tools and guidance in states where the data buildout isn’t yet complete.
How missing data locks lenders out
The data gap LotRoll is trying to close is wider than most people in traditional real estate realize.
Gibson puts the off-MLS share of manufactured home transactions at roughly 85 percent, a figure that reflects not just FSBO sales but an entire parallel distribution ecosystem of community operators, retailers and private sellers who never intersect with standard listing infrastructure.
That invisibility has downstream consequences. Without reliable comps, pricing manufactured homes is guesswork. Without pricing confidence, lenders pull back.
Without lender participation, the secondary market for manufactured home loans stays thin, which in turn keeps institutional capital out and rates elevated.
Gibson cited the recent news that Wells Fargo will begin writing mortgages on homes built by Icon, the 3D-printed homebuilder, as evidence that institutional appetite for non-traditional housing finance is starting to move.
“The reason lenders haven’t participated more in this space is that they haven’t had the ability to assess resale value,” Gibson said. “There’s no secondary market infrastructure. That’s exactly what we can provide.”
‘People are really embracing it’
LotRoll’s REACH selection comes at a time when manufactured housing is receiving more attention from both ends of the affordability spectrum. On the demand side, buyers priced out of site-built homes, particularly first-time buyers in high-cost metros, are increasingly considering manufactured options.
The cost gap between manufactured and site-built homes is wider than most people realize, and it’s still growing. In 2023, new manufactured homes averaged $86.62 per square foot, compared to $164.94 for site-built construction, according to the National Association of Home Builders. That difference has nearly doubled since 2014, representing roughly $119,000 in savings for a typical 1,500-square-foot home.
On the supply side, HUD Code updates have expanded what’s permissible in manufactured construction, potentially improving aesthetics and opening the door to conventional financing for more homes.
Gibson said the demand for manufactured homes has increased significantly, and many new technologies and manufacturing methods have emerged, not only from well-known manufacturers like Clayton, Champion and Cavco, but also from smaller companies producing tiny homes and 3D-printed options.
According to Northmarq, manufacturers shipped 53,800 homes in the first half of 2025 — up 5 percent year over year and the second-highest first-half total in a decade — as first-time buyers, retirees and working families increasingly turn to manufactured housing when the conventional market prices them out.
MHInsider reports that more than 20 million Americans already live in these communities, and that manufactured homes account for about 9 percent of annual home starts.
“People are really embracing it,” he said. “In the past, it was always stigmatized — the “trailer trash” perception — but our data now shows exactly what a great opportunity it has been, both historically and going forward. The big key thing that’s been missing is the ability to act on people’s demand, and that’s kind of where we come in.”
Below rent, building equity
Gibson makes an affordability case that’s hard to argue with on the numbers.
With some lenders offering 0 percent down and others at 5 percent, and with interest rates on manufactured home loans running around 8 percent, he says a three-bedroom manufactured home in most markets carries a monthly payment below comparable local rents and builds equity in the process.
“I’ve seen a lot of people use these homes for five years and then sell and roll that equity into a traditional home purchase,” Gibson said. “That’s a wealth-building path that wouldn’t have been available to them through renting.”
For real estate agents, LotRoll’s pitch is that manufactured housing represents an underserved corner of the market they’re already licensed to work in with real demand, limited professional competition and a platform now designed to support them.
“Don’t be afraid,” Gibson said. “We have all the tools you need, all the data. Add this to your portfolio.”
The REACH backing gives LotRoll NAR’s distribution network and, perhaps more importantly, the institutional signal that manufactured housing is no longer a market the real estate industry can afford to ignore.
“This should be part of every real estate agent’s toolkit,” Gibson said.
