People talk about "mobile home parks in New Jersey" as if they were scattered evenly across the state. They are not. They are concentrated so heavily in the southern and shore counties that one of New Jersey's most populous counties contains zero of them.
Until recently nobody could say that with any precision, because manufactured housing communities are badly captured in standard public data. In June 2024 the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia fixed that. Eileen Divringi, its community development research manager, built a custom geocoded inventory of manufactured housing communities in New Jersey and published it as Manufactured Housing Communities in New Jersey: The Basics.
The inventory counts 268 communities statewide, home to an estimated 20,100 to 24,600 households. It was assembled from CoreLogic tax assessment data, Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data from the Department of Homeland Security, Facility Registry Service data from the EPA, and the membership directory of the New Jersey Manufactured Housing Association, then geocoded and merged against census geography.
This is the best public map of this housing type that exists for New Jersey. Here is what it shows.
The count, by county
From Appendix B of the report:
| County | Communities |
|---|---|
| Atlantic | 38 |
| Ocean | 38 |
| Monmouth | 31 |
| Cape May | 28 |
| Cumberland | 26 |
| Burlington | 21 |
| Gloucester | 17 |
| Middlesex | 15 |
| Camden | 10 |
| Salem | 9 |
| Morris | 9 |
| Warren | 8 |
| Bergen | 4 |
| Hunterdon | 4 |
| Sussex | 3 |
| Mercer | 2 |
| Somerset | 2 |
| Hudson | 1 |
| Passaic | 1 |
| Union | 1 |
| Essex | 0 |
| Total | 268 |
Two things jump out immediately.
The eleven counties we work in hold 235 of the 268. Ocean, Monmouth, Mercer, Middlesex, Burlington, Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Camden and Salem together account for roughly 88 percent of every manufactured housing community in New Jersey. Everything north of the Raritan, all of it combined, holds about 33.
Essex County has none. Not one. Essex contains Newark and is among the most populous counties in the state, and the Philadelphia Fed found it to be the only county in New Jersey with zero manufactured housing communities. Whatever is driving this pattern, population is not it.
Why the parks are where they are
Three forces explain most of the map.
Land assembly and municipal approval. A land-lease community is not a building, it is a subdivision of leased homesites that needs contiguous acreage, water and sewer, internal roads, and a municipality willing to permit the use. That combination was available in Burlington, Cumberland, Salem, Gloucester and inland Atlantic County in the decades when most of these communities were built, and it has been effectively unavailable in built-out Essex, Hudson, Union and Passaic for most of a century. Once a county is fully developed at high density, nobody assembles thirty acres to lease out homesites.
New Jersey's own land use law nods at this. The Affordable Housing Act of 1983 (N.J.S.A. 40:55D-105) says that when a municipal agency reviews development regulations for residential development, it "is to be encouraged to review those regulations to determine whether or not mobile home parks are a practicable means of providing affordable housing in the municipality." That is encouragement, not a mandate, and the map reflects how unevenly it has been taken up.
Shore geography and the seasonal market. The four counties with the most communities are all coastal: Atlantic (38), Ocean (38), Monmouth (31) and Cape May (28). The Fed's report notes that along the central and southern coastline many of these communities serve both year-round residents and seasonal vacation users, sometimes with dedicated recreational vehicle areas alongside the homesites. The 2017 to 2021 American Community Survey found that 9.8 percent of manufactured homes in New Jersey were vacant for seasonal or recreational use. That is a materially different market from a year-round community in Cumberland County, and it shows up in pricing, in turnover, and in how a park screens buyers.
Two metro pulls, in opposite directions. Gloucester (17), Camden (10) and Salem (9) sit in the Philadelphia commuter belt, where land has historically been cheaper and communities were viable. The New York side works the other way: Bergen has 4, Hudson 1, Passaic 1, Union 1. Mercer, despite sitting between Trenton and Princeton with plenty of population, has 2. Proximity to New York did not produce parks. It produced land prices that ruled them out.
Not all of the inventory is where you would guess from that logic, though. Nearly four in five New Jersey communities (79.9 percent) sit inside census-designated urban areas, and the Fed report specifically names Edison, Camden and Vineland as places where communities sit inside midsize cities and townships. Rural communities are a minority statewide, and they cluster in Warren, Ocean, Burlington and Cumberland.
These are bigger communities than in neighboring states
New Jersey's communities skew large. Across the state, 62.3 percent are medium-sized (11 to 99 homesites) and 34.7 percent are large, meaning 100 or more homesites. Only 3 percent are small.
That large share is well above Delaware (26.3 percent) and far above Pennsylvania (11.3 percent). The report singles out Pine Ridge at Crestwood, an age-restricted community in Ocean County with over 1,000 units, as an example of the scale at the top end.
Size matters to a seller more than it sounds. A large community has a professional management office, a written application process, and a rulebook it applies consistently because it has to. A small one may be run by an owner who handles everything personally. Neither is inherently better, but they behave very differently when you bring them a buyer.
Almost nothing is sitting empty
The Fed flagged any community where 30 percent or more of the homesites had no home on them. Only 8 of the 268, about 3 percent, met that threshold. The comparable figures were 7.8 percent in Delaware and 11.5 percent in Pennsylvania.
The report's own reading of this is that New Jersey has a significantly tighter manufactured housing community market than its neighbors. For an owner, that cuts two ways. Demand for these homesites is real, which supports resale. It also means the community has very little incentive to bend on anything to help you fill your lot, because it does not have a vacancy problem.
The stock is not growing
New Jersey has roughly 33,600 manufactured homes on owned and leased land combined, slightly less than 1 percent of the state's housing stock. From 2018 to 2022 an average of 535 new manufactured homes were shipped to New Jersey each year, down from a peak of 724 a year between 2000 and 2004. The total number of manufactured homes in the state has been essentially unchanged since the 2000 census, meaning new shipments have roughly offset homes lost to demolition or relocation out of state.
Put plainly: this is a resale market. Nobody is building new communities at any scale, existing ones are close to full, and the number of homes is flat. When a buyer wants into a community in Ocean or Atlantic County, they are almost always buying an existing home from an existing resident.
What the geography means if you own one of these homes
If you are in Atlantic, Ocean, Monmouth, Cape May, Cumberland or Burlington, your buyer has options. There are dozens of communities within reasonable driving distance, so your home competes with other listings in other communities, not just the three on your street. Condition, lot rent, and the community's reputation for approving buyers all matter, because the buyer can walk to the next community if any of those go wrong.
If you are in Mercer, Camden or Salem, the picture flips. There are few communities, they rarely have vacancies, and a buyer who wants this style of housing in that area has almost nowhere else to go. Interest tends to be narrower but more motivated.
If you are in the northern counties, you are one of a very small number of owners in your county. That can mean a long, quiet search for a buyer who is specifically looking for what you have.
In every case, the community itself is part of the transaction. A buyer who intends to leave the home where it stands has to be approved as a tenant by the park, which is a separate approval from your sale agreement. It is the single most common reason a park-sited sale takes longer than the seller expected, and handling that coordination is part of how we work.
Where to start
If you own a home in one of these communities and you are trying to work out what it is worth and how to move it, there is no single right answer. Some homes do better listed on the open market where buyers can compete. Some do better sold outright for cash when speed or condition is the binding constraint.
We work across all eleven of these counties and we do it three ways: we buy homes for cash, we list homes for sale when the market will pay more than an offer, and we help buyers find a home in these communities. Which of those makes sense for you depends on your home, your community, and your timeline. Tell us about it and we will tell you straight which one fits.
This article summarizes published research and general information about New Jersey land use and housing. It is not legal or financial advice. Community counts reflect the Philadelphia Fed's 2024 data set and may have changed since it was compiled. For advice on your specific property, consult an attorney or a qualified professional.
Sources: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Manufactured Housing Communities in New Jersey: The Basics (June 2024); full report PDF, including the county table in Appendix B; New Jersey Legislature statute search
