Home loans can be borrowed to purchase the finance of a manufactured home. However, unlike conventional home mortgages, loans for manufactured homes are more difficult to obtain and a higher interest rate is charged.

In response to a rising number of delinquencies and foreclosures, mortgage giants like Fannie Mae are making it tougher to get manufactured home loans. Companies now require a 10 percent down payment for 30-year mortgages on such homes, and a fee of 0.5 percent of the loan amount. Earlier, people who qualified could put no money down, while others put down 3 percent or less. No fee was payable. Those who cannot afford an interest rate of 10 percent can opt for a 20 year loan from Fannie Mae that requires a 5 percent down payment. The monthly payments are higher since the loan term is less.

Fannie Mae is the popular name for the Federal National Mortgage Association. It is a publicly held company chartered by Congress to keep a steady supply of cash in the home mortgage market. It is presently the nation's largest source of money for mortgages, with a majority of loans being provided to first-time home buyers.

Fannie Mae and its associate company, Freddie Mac, lead the mortgage market and dictate the terms that banks, mortgage lenders and other financial institutions set on their home loans programs

Another factor that hampers approval of manufactured home loans is the tendency of mobile homes to depreciate quickly in resale value making loans that use these kinds of homes as collateral far more risky compared to traditional home loans.

According to the Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry trade group, the average sale price for a manufactured home is roughly $49,000, compared to about $164,000 for a traditional single-family home. Although, this price makes a manufactured home far more affordable, some of the price advantage is lost due to the higher interest costs and lower resale values of manufactured homes.