The Manufactured Housing Forums

Two years ago Randy Eaton recommended Silvercrest and Fuqua homes as the "top manufacturers in California based on quality construction" (found in the Search feature of this forum). Can you please tell me if these manufactures are still rated high. Thanks so much for helping with this.

I'm researching a manufactured home purchase. To assist in that research, I've purchased a book "The complete Buyer's guide to Manufactured homes and Land" by John Grissom. (a highly useful book). The book was last updated last month.

In that book he talked about Silvercrest being the "Mercedes of Manufactured Housing"
and Fuqua was mentioned as a high quality manufacturer that was too small to mention in his listing top 25 manufacturers (listing by number of units sold)

Silvercrest has been bought out by Champion in the last few years and the manufactuiring plant for my area of the Western US (Washington) has been moved to Oregon. I don't know if the old high quality reputation of Silvercrest still pertains but the revision date on Grissom's book indicates a high probability that it still is applicable.

The two manufacturers were among the finalists in my purchase decision but I finally had to disqualify Fuqua soley on the basis of not having a floorplan that fits my needs and the sales rep statement that they would not build a design that contains more than insignifigant deviations from a Fuqua floor plan.

Fuqua sales rep was either misquoted or misinformed. Fuqua is very willing to make quite extensive changes to floor plans. One structural difference that installers have noticed is that Silvercrest (in CA anyway) uses 2x6 ridge supports at marriage line where Fuqua uses a plywood beam which is less susceptible to splitting and would seem to be structurally stronger. I will qualify this with the disclaimer that I sell Fuqua Homes currently and have dealt with Silvercrest in the past. My preference is Fuqua.

Thank you, Gary and Rschmitt for your thoughts on this. Since Silvercrest and Fuqua are still both good quality homes, I will let the designs and Dealer quality be the deciding factor. I submitted my floorplan to the Fuqua dealer and he said that they could not modify the house that much. The Fuqua Company did seem agreeable to some modifications though.
Again, I appreciate your feedback.
Carol