Why Mobile Home Parks Often Require an ALTA Survey 

Mobile home parks look simple from the road. Rows of homes, a shared driveway, maybe a small office near the entrance. But when one sells or gets refinanced, lenders almost always ask for an ALTA survey. That catches a lot of owners off guard. Here’s why it happens, and what makes a manufactured home community different from a strip mall or an office building.

Manufactured Home Communities Are Financed as Commercial Real Estate, Not Residential Property

The park owner holds title to the land. Residents own or rent the individual homes, but not the ground under them. They pay a lot of rent instead. That setup makes a mobile home park act like an apartment complex to a bank, not like a single-family house.

Loans on land that produces rental income fall under commercial lending rules, not home mortgage rules. Banks and credit unions that finance income property almost always require a survey built to ALTA and NSPS standards before they close. It’s part of how they check the property matches the numbers on the loan file. A residential appraisal and a walk-through don’t cut it here.

What Delaware’s Manufactured Home Communities Act Means for the Survey Scope

Delaware regulates these properties under Title 25, Chapter 70 of the Delaware Code, known as the Manufactured Homes and Manufactured Home Communities Act. This law sets rules for what a landlord must give a tenant, how much rent can go up, and what happens once a community grows past 25 lots. Communities above that size carry lot rental assistance duties under section 7022B. 

None of this changes how a surveyor measures a boundary line. But it explains why a lender or title company wants a clean, accurate lot count before closing. The number of lots on the seller’s rent roll needs to match what’s actually built on the ground. A survey is what confirms that number is real.

Counting Pads and Common Areas: Why Gross Land Area and Site Layout Carry More Weight Here

A single retail building sits on one clean footprint. A mobile home park doesn’t work that way. It might hold 60 pads or 300, plus internal roads, a laundry building, a playground, and open space between homes.

A surveyor plots every pad, every shared area, and the full acreage of the site. This matters to lenders because loan value often ties back to lot count and usable land. If the survey shows fewer buildable pads than the seller claimed, or if a chunk of the land can’t legally hold a home, that changes the math on the deal. Buyers want that number nailed down before they sign, not after.

Shared Utility Trunk Lines: Why Underground Utility Location Is Rarely Skipped

Most commercial buildings connect to one water line and one sewer line. A mobile home park runs water, sewer, and electric service to dozens or hundreds of homes off a shared trunk system, closer to how a small town works than a single building.

Buyers want to know where those lines sit and whether they fall inside recorded easements. A line that crosses under a home pad, or runs beneath a neighboring parcel with no easement on record, is worth catching before closing. That’s why Table A Item 11, underground utility location, gets requested on nearly every mobile home park survey. Skipping it on a property with this much buried pipe and wire is a rare choice, and not a wise one.

Access Roads, Setbacks, and Encroachments Across Delaware’s Three Counties

Delaware has three counties: New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. Sussex County holds a large share of the state’s manufactured home communities, tied to its coastal towns and open land outside the cities.

In any of these counties, a mobile home park depends on private roads to move residents, delivery trucks, and emergency vehicles in and out. A survey shows whether those roads sit on land the owner actually holds, or whether they cross a neighbor’s parcel through an easement that may or may not be recorded correctly. It also checks how far each home pad sits from the property line.

A pad placed too close to a boundary, or a road built without a proper right of way, can hold up a sale. Buyers would rather find that out from a survey than from a neighbor’s lawyer after closing.