Manufactured Housing in Australia

One of my best friends just came back to West Virginia after spending 8 years in Australia. There’s a lot of coal mines over there and the companies recruit miners from WV to work on contract for a couple years over there, all expenses paid plus a handsome annual salary. If they like it, they extend the contracts. If not, they come home. Needless to say, he loved it over there!

I researched a bit and found some pretty neat information on manufactured housing in Australia:

They use 3 main terms: caravans, relocatable homes, and manufactured homes. Of course, you have the pre-fab homes as well.

What we consider campers or mobile homes they call ‘caravans’ and there are caravan parks. Caravans and caravan parks can be classified into 2 sub-categories: tourists parks and retirement parks, just like here in the US. There are caravan parks that are dominated by the poor but not many that I’ve been able to find. Those do have a stigma and stereotype. I was unable to find much about them online. The little bit I did find emphasized that mostly single people live in those types of parks.

Related: Australian Campers, Caravans and RV’s.

The photo below is a new mining park being set up. It shows modern single wide manufactured homes being placed in a way that utilizes the land so that each home has a decent yard and are placed in smaller pods within the park. I like it!

This next photo shows a typical caravan park for tourists. There are a lot of caravan parks for tourists in Australia! Here are a few photos I found from Caravan Park Photography.

While caravan parks have a slight stigma, it seems the actual homes do not. In several references, I found that manufactured homes (either double wide, single wide or pre-fab) are placed right beside a stick built home within some communities.

One Company I found is apparently well known for their community development in Australia. They are using them within their communities quite a bit. For them, it’s about putting families in homes that best suit their needs and size requirements, not about who has the biggest and most expensive homes. Heck, the manufactured homes cost just as much as a stick built home! I found a single wide on a lot for $355,000 and it sits right beside stick built homes!

You can search through their houses for sale in Perth and find several single wide and double wides being sold in their developed communities. You can buy land and place your own manufactured home or pre-fab, too. They all seem like great communities and their renewal plans include beautification projects, preservation of the land as well as restoring and remodeling the homes. To me, it seems like a great place to live!

This is what I would love to see happen in the United States. Communities being built that place emphasis on the people, not the homes. A family of 3 does not need a 6000 square foot home and if they do, well, there are some serious issues going on. We should accept each others decisions to live in whatever type or size of home they want and stop labeling each other. There are benefits and advantages to living in smaller homes and just because it is long and narrow and had wheels under it at some point doesn’t mean it or the people living in them are inferior or poor.

Do you know about manufactured homes in Australia? We’d love to hear your thoughts, just add them to the comments below.

As always, thank you for reading Mobile Home Living!