“Homes built in factories have long been stuck at the fringe of the U.S. housing market. Now, supporters are cheering a new federal housing law that should make it easier and cheaper to build modular and manufactured homes.

Modular homes are built in pieces at a factory and assembled on site, and they often appear quite similar to traditional, stick-built houses. Manufactured homes—often referred to as mobile homes or trailers—are built entirely at a factory and shipped whole to their destination.

The new law aims to slash some of the red tape associated with both these alternative housing types.

One provision, which removes the requirement that manufactured homes come with the permanent steel frame used for transporting the houses, means that they can be built for roughly $5,000 to $10,000 less than before, according to Andrew Justus, a housing policy researcher at the Niskanen Center.

For some homes, those savings to home buyers could equal more than 10% of the original cost.”

From Wall Street Journal.