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Manufactured Home Complaint Ratios
Know Your Company’s Complaint History
Many states collect information about problems consumers have with
their manufactured home purchase. Unfortunately, this information
all too often ends up siting in dusty files, effectively inaccessible
to the marketplace. New consumers end up learning the hard way
which market participants are out for a quick buck and which are
looking to build value for their customers.
Consumers Union believes that the state and federal agencies that
collect complaint information about licensed manufactured home
manufacturers, dealers, and installers should make
information about the comparative performance of its licensees freely
and easily available to consumers in the form of complaint ratios.
Complaint ratios may indicate significant differences in the
experiences
of homeowners. Consumers who file formal complaints with
a state agency about a purchase are often already frustrated
and disappointed with their efforts to get satisfaction informally. The
regulators of other industries, such as insurance, have provided
complaint ratios for years, successfully
allowing new buyers to factor existing consumer satisfaction into their
purchase
decisions.
In order to show how easily this information can be presented by
regulators to consumers, Consumers Union calculated
complaint ratios in 2002 for the largest
manufacturers selling in Texas. Although the retailers or
installers
may be legally responsible for some of these complaints, manufacturers
have the ability to select those retailers through whom they market
their product. Manufacturers can refuse to sell through retailers with
a history of problems.
The Texas complaint ratios are displayed in
the following chart:
Graph: Manufacturers with over 1000 Homes sold in Texas from July 1998
through June 2002. Champion Homes includes Redman and Crest
Ridge. American Homestar includes Guerdon and Oak Creek.
Cavalier includes Town & Country and Belmont brands.
Our recommendation:
State and Federal regulators who collect information about consumer
satisfaction as part of a licensing or dispute resolution program
should make this information easily available to consumers.
Consumers should be able to order by phone or download from the
internet a list of
licensee complaint ratios and any history of enforcement actions
against the companies.
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Notes on Calculation:
The ratios were complied from TDHCA’s complaint database from July 1998
through June of 2002. The
total number of complaints about homes manufactured by a manufacturer
(including canceled titles after 1/1/2000) is divided by the number of
titles on new homes issued to that manufacturer during the period.
Roughly a third, or 32 percent, of the complaints were not about or
could not be matched to a specific home and therefore were not
considered. Therefore, the industry overall complaint ratio is higher
than this chart shows. To make certain manufacturers could control the
dealer relationship; we limited our calculation to complaints about new
homes.
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