Dreeym / The honest page
What happens
to your money.
The three things about this way of living that genuinely count against it — published by us, before you find them somewhere else.
The position
“Do these homes lose value?”
It’s the question that stops most people, it deserves a straight answer, and the honest one has three parts. Here they all are.
We won’t tell you this is an investment. We’ll tell you exactly what happens to your money.
First: almost every horror story you’ve read is about a different product
Search this sector and you’ll find people who bought a holiday caravan — sold on a licence, occupiable only part of the year, marketed on rental yield, and subject to forced replacement after ten or fifteen years. Those stories are real and those people were badly treated.
They are not this. A residential park home is protected under the Mobile Homes Act 1983 as amended in 2013, built to BS 3632, occupied as your only home, with a written agreement, security of tenure and succession rights. The difference is the whole answer — so we lead with it rather than hoping you won’t notice.
1. You own the home, not the land
Your home is a well-made manufactured building with a working life of roughly 40 to 70 years, and like any building it ages. What you also hold is the right to occupy a pitch in a place people want to be — and that can go the other way. Which of the two dominates depends mostly on where it is and how it’s kept.
2. The 10% commission is real
When you sell, up to 10% of the price goes to the community owner. It is the industry-wide rule, it applies everywhere in Britain, and it is capped by law. Campaigners have fought it for years and we understand why. Plan on netting around 90% — and we’ll put that in writing at the start, not in clause 47.
3. Selling takes longer
Mainstream mortgages don’t apply to this kind of home, so your buyer is paying cash or using specialist finance. That’s a smaller pool of buyers and usually a slower sale than the bungalow down the road. Our resales have averaged 38 days — but we publish every one so you can judge for yourself.
And on the other side of the ledger
A worked example, with the commission taken off
The Rowan at Willowmere, bought today at £268,000, sold at three points in the future. We’ve assumed the home itself softens 1% a year and nothing at all happens to the location — deliberately pessimistic, because optimistic assumptions are how this sector lost people’s trust.
| When you sell | Likely sale price | Less 10% commission | You receive | Versus what you paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| In 10 years | £242,300 | −£24,230 | £218,070 | −£49,930 |
| In 15 years | £230,400 | −£23,040 | £207,360 | −£60,640 |
| In 20 years | £219,100 | −£21,910 | £197,190 | −£70,810 |
Now put it beside the other column. On a typical move you’d release around £127,000 on day one, save £7,500 in stamp duty, and spend roughly £120 a month less on energy and £70 less on council tax — about £45,600 over twenty years. Add it up and the arithmetic is close to a wash, and you spent those twenty years somewhere you wanted to be, on one level, with the gutters seen to.
That is the honest case. It is not “an investment”. It is a good way to live that costs about what living costs.
While we’re being honest
The three things people complain about most.
Every community has them. Most operators would rather you found out later.
“The 10% when you sell still stings.”
It does, and no amount of explanation makes it not sting. What we can do is be straight about it from the first conversation, put it on page one of the agreement, and be clear about what it funds — the covenant land, the grounds team, The Hearth, the manager. We’d rather you disliked a fee you understood than discovered one you didn’t.
“Broadband at Foxbarrow was slow for the first year.”
True, and it was our fault for assuming the exchange upgrade would land when the provider said it would. Six residents were on 12Mb for eleven months. We paid for 4G routers in the interim and it’s full fibre now — but we should have checked the schedule before we sold the plots, and we now do.
“Nobody warned us how quiet the first winter would be.”
A fair one, and it’s about a community filling up rather than anything going wrong. If you’re among the first six households at a new community, the first winter is genuinely quiet — the timetable is thin because there aren’t enough people yet. We now say so before people reserve, and we don’t start the events calendar until there are ten homes occupied, because an empty coffee morning is worse than no coffee morning.
Complaints reviewed and republished quarterly · last updated 30 July 2026
Bring us the objection we haven’t answered.
If there’s something on this page you think we’ve dodged, tell us and we’ll add it. That offer is genuine and we’ve taken it up twice.