Approximately 85% of manufactured home transactions never touch the MLS. They travel through DMV title transfers, retailer inventory listings, community management offices, and for sale postings by owners, leaving no trace in the data systems on which traditional real estate operates.
As a result, the housing segment, which accounts for a large share of the nation’s affordable inventory, operates almost completely in the dark.
LotRoll is trying to change that, and the National Association of Realtors has just signed on to support it.
The Colorado-based startup, founded five years ago by Grayson Gibson and Omar Husain, was selected to NAR’s REACH 2026 accelerator class on May 28, making it one of six companies selected for the program.
“For us, it’s credibility,” Gibson told Inman when asked about the importance of being selected for REACH. “NAR is desperately needed to step up to the plate and bridge the gap between modern real estate infrastructure and manufactured housing.”
Why didn’t the data exist in the first place?
Mr. Gibson has been involved in home manufacturing for 15 years, including managing a mortgage company specializing in this field. The frictions he and Hussain encountered on a daily basis, such as missing comps, incomplete records, and the lack of standardized list fields, became the theme of LotRoll.
Mr Gibson pointed out that engineered homes cannot be traded like homes built on site. Title transfers, like vehicle transfers, are done through the DMV and are largely invisible in the public records provided to CoreLogic and similar providers.
The MLS system has historically ignored them. As a result, there is no single data source that captures the complete picture of the housing market.
LotRoll’s approach is to build a complete picture for each county from the ground up. The company ingests publicly available but unstructured county-level records, normalizes and validates them, and combines the output with existing MLS data to produce what Gibson describes as a unified view of all manufactured homes in active markets.
“Think about what MLS is doing for traditional real estate,” Gibson said. “They aggregate the list and make it available to proptech companies to improve their services and the entire transaction process. That’s exactly what we’re doing for manufactured housing.”
The company currently has locations in five states: Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and South Carolina, and will expand to Texas and Florida in June.
While these seven states will account for a significant share of the U.S. manufactured housing supply, Gibson acknowledged that the platform provides agent tools and guidance for states that have not yet completed building their data.
How missing data can lock out lenders
The data gap LotRoll is filling is wider than most traditional real estate players realize.
Gibson puts its non-MLS share of manufactured home transactions at about 85 percent. This number reflects not just FSBO sales, but the entire parallel distribution ecosystem of community operators, retailers, and individual sellers that don’t intersect with standard listing infrastructure.
That invisibility has downstream effects. Without reliable comps, pricing a manufactured home is a lot of guesswork. If you are not confident in your pricing, lenders will walk away.
Without lender participation, the secondary market for manufactured mortgages would remain thin, resulting in no inflow of institutional capital and higher interest rates.
Gibson cited recent news that Wells Fargo will begin financing homes built by 3D-printed home builder Icon as evidence that financial institutions’ demand for non-traditional housing finance is starting to move.
“The reason financiers haven’t been more involved in this space is because they haven’t had the ability to assess resale value,” Gibson said. “The secondary market infrastructure doesn’t exist. That’s exactly what we can offer.”
“People are really embracing it.”
LotRoll’s REACH selection comes at a time when engineered housing is receiving more attention from both ends of the affordability spectrum. On the demand side, buyers who have priced their own build homes, especially first-time buyers in high-cost metros, are increasingly considering manufacturing options.
The cost difference between manufactured homes and homes built on site is larger than most people realize, and it continues to widen. The average price per square foot for new homes in 2023 was $86.62, compared to $164.94 for locally built homes, according to the National Association of Home Builders. This difference has nearly doubled since 2014 and equates to a savings of approximately $119,000 for a typical 1,500 square foot home.
On the supply side, HUD code updates expand what is allowed in manufactured buildings, potentially improving aesthetics, and opening the door to conventional financing for more homes.
Mr Gibson said the demand for engineered homes has increased significantly, with many new technologies and manufacturing methods emerging from well-known manufacturers such as Clayton, Champion and Kabuco, as well as smaller companies producing tiny homes and 3D printing options.
According to Northmarq, manufacturers shipped 53,800 homes in the first half of 2025. This was a 5% increase over the same period last year and the second-highest total shipments in the first half of the decade. This is because first-time buyers, retirees, and working families are increasingly interested in manufactured homes as prices rise in the traditional market.
More than 20 million Americans already live in these communities, and about 9 percent of annual housing starts are manufactured housing, MHInsider reports.
“People are really embracing it,” he said. “Before, it always had a stigma – the perception of ‘trailer trash’ – but our data shows exactly what a great opportunity it is, both historically and in the future. The big important thing that was missing was the ability to act on people’s demands and that’s where we come in. ”
Less than rent, building assets
Gibson makes an undisputed affordability claim when it comes to numbers.
With some lenders offering 0 percent down, others 5 percent, and manufactured mortgage interest rates around 8 percent, the monthly payment for a three-bedroom manufactured home in most markets will be lower than comparable local rents, building equity in the process, he said.
“I’ve seen a lot of people use these homes for five years and then sell the property and roll it into a traditional home purchase,” Mr Gibson said. “This is a path to building wealth that you couldn’t get by renting.”
For real estate agents, Lotroll’s pitch is that manufactured homes represent an underserved corner of the already licensed market, despite real demand, limited specialized competition, and platforms currently designed to support them.
“There’s no need to be afraid,” Gibson said. “We have all the tools and data you need. Add this to your portfolio.”
REACH support gives LotRoll NAR’s distribution network and, perhaps more importantly, an institutional signal that manufactured housing is no longer a market that the real estate industry can ignore.
“This should be part of every real estate agent’s toolkit,” Gibson says.
Email Nick Pipitone
