Resort area residents are struggling to find answers after learning that their insurance carriers are dropping policies on their manufactured homes.
When Ocean City resident Jaime Strickland and her husband decided to sell their Montego Bay property earlier this summer, they were shocked to discover their buyer could not secure the homeowners insurance required by the mortgage company. After further investigation, she learned insurance companies are choosing not to offer, or to continue, policies on decades-old manufactured homes.
“People are in a panic,” she said. “A lot of homes here are older than 35 years.”
With two children preparing to attend college, Strickland is worried about how this change could affect the sale of her property, which her family had purchased as a vacation home. She is now holding out for a buyer who is willing to pay cash and self-insure.
“Who’s going to do that?” she asked.
While Strickland said she has yet to be dropped by her insurance carrier, others in the Montego Bay community – including Strickland’s 97-year-old neighbor – are not so fortunate.
Realtor Mike Grimes of Montego Bay Realty said the lack of insurance coverage for manufactured homes 20 years of age or older has been a problem for more than a year. He said the manufactured homes affected by the change account for more than half of the 1,523 properties that make up the Montego Bay community.
“To the best of my knowledge, there’s no insurance carriers at the moment that will hand out homeowners insurance policies for single-wide, double-wide or buildovers, which is a single-wide that’s been added onto,” he said. “So, because of this current situation, anybody buying those types of homes have to buy in cash because lenders require a homeowners insurance policy.”
Relax,
With all the visiting Thugs, OC will be boarded up like the Wild West in a few years.
Best, to move out of Ocean City
Why would an insurance company insure something that has no real value?
35 year old mobile homes are worthless.
It is not a surprise.. The insurace companies have found the golden key to the government regulators that allows them to raise rates every few months and double them on low-risk properties with NO government restraint., It is corporate greed at it’s best ( or worst.)