My Take on Mobile Home Taxes

The Texas Property Tax Code is biased against low income property owners. You can own a mobile home and declare it as your primary residence, but if you do not own or lease the land on which it resides, than your mobile home is taxed as personal property tax. When a mobile home is taxed as business personal property tax there are no protections in place against rapidly rising property taxes. The taxable value for your mobile home, when considered personal property, can easily rise by 20% or more in a given year. Furthermore, if your mobile home has any outstanding personal property taxes, it can’t qualify for the homestead exemption. The bias comes in when you consider how many mobile home parks are sold on annual basis in Texas. Through no fault of their own, mobile home residents who have had leases for years are evicted after their mobile home park is purchased in a sale. On the flipside, when someone owns their condo, and the building in which their condo resides is sold- they continue to maintain their ownership of the condo and their homestead exemption (providing it is their primary residence).

When someone is forced into eviction of their mobile home, when the property is sold out from under them, it can often take months to find a new mobile home park to set up residency at, and in the mean time it is not uncommon for mobile home owners to set up temporarily at friends/family properties. A mobile home owner who is forced to evict when the land is sold out from underneath them should not immediately lose their homestead exemption and real estate tax status for their homes. It’s far easier to rack up higher property taxes when a mobile home is taxed as personal property. Currently there are not enough protections in place for low income mobile home owners who do not own/lease the land on which their home resides.