My father owned a successful mobile home dealership for about 40 years. As a teenager, and later in college, I did grunt work (mostly manual labor) at the business in the summers.
Later, in my mid-thirties, I left corporate software development for six or seven years, and managed the business for my dad. While I was there I wrote software to help me manage things, which, after I left the business to return to software development, I turned into the SaaS product which I've sold to other dealerships.
I created a SaaS CRM/DMS for manufactured housing retailers ("mobile home" dealerships.) Monthly gross is about $4,000. Expenses other than my own time are $400 per month for the server. So about $3,600 a month net.
The MH industry contracted drastically after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, and the handful of dealership software companies still in the industry went under. So I basically have the market to myself right now. The total market is not very big, though - maybe 1,500 independent manufactured housing "street dealerships" in the USA at this point.
I have 15-ish paying customers right now. I'd love to be able to spend all my time on growing the business, but I've been too afraid to quit the other freelance dev work I do. Also, I unwisely took on a big contract that I haven't been able to finish in a timely manner, which is dragging me down. I wish I'd spent that time growing the MH SaaS instead.
I don't know about conditions anywhere in the world except the USA. But I've ridden across the USA, on different routes, multiple times.
When bicycle touring in this country, you don't usually (almost never, in my case) do bike touring on roads that carry heavy traffic. You ride on mostly empty roads that have very low traffic counts. Every state compiles Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT) statistics. There are roads where you might see one or two cars an hour.
I have a couple of SaaS products: Belt drive design tools for companies in the mechanical power transmission industry, and dealership management software for manufactured housing ("mobile home") retailers.
Back end:
- Windows Server 2012
- MS SQL Server
- ASP.NET
- Web API 2
- C#
- Dapper "micro ORM" (I dislike heavy ORMS and would rather write my own SQL)
There's almost nothing in the manufactured housing (AKA "mobile home", AKA "trailer" AKA "HUD-code home") industry. The industry experienced a severe contraction even before the Great Recession, declining in the 2000's from its most recent boom years of the 90's.
In that earlier era, there were several vertical software companies selling Windows and DOS dealership management systems to the many independent (mom-and-pop) dealerships of manufactured homes
By the time the industry started to recover in the last several years, they had all gone out of business. Because of the timing of the near-death of the MH industry, none of those companies even tried to move to web-based SaaS products.
As far as I know, the only new dealership management (line of business) system for the industry is my own SaaS product, which I started selling a year ago.
I'm a software developer, but my family owned a dealership for decades, so I know the business well. The industry is weird, and different enough from automobiles and motor homes that software for those (seemingly related) industries isn't really a good fit.
I've had some success bootstrapping my business. The industry is big enough at this point that I can make pretty good money as a small player, but it's still small enough that it's unlikely to attract any big operators. The market is too small for them, I'm pretty sure.
I think it would be difficult for someone who doesn't know the way things are done in the industry to create software for it. It's certainly possible, but for sure you'd have to partner with someone who has expertise already.
But I guess that's true of almost any niche industry.
No. "Manufactured Home" has a specific, legal meaning in the USA. They are also referred to as "HUD Code" homes. "HUD Code" refers to the building code under which they are constructed. There are multi-section Manufactured Homes (informally called "double wides"), and single-section Manufactured Homes (informally called "single wides").
Manufactured Homes used to be called "Mobile Homes", and that term is still sometimes used, but it has no legal meaning; the last "Mobile Home" was built in 1976, before the HUD Code was codified.
"Modular Homes" also has a distinct meaning. Modular Homes are different than Manufactured Homes because they are built to different building codes - basically to whatever local or state building codes apply where the Modular Home will be sited. Modular Homes (informally, "Mods") are typically more expensive because they are generally fancier, but also because of the additional cost in constructing a home to varying (and usually more stringent) local and state building codes.
I'm a software developer, but I know a lot about this because my family owned a manufactured home dealership for four decades. And, I wrote and sell MH dealership management software.
Later, in my mid-thirties, I left corporate software development for six or seven years, and managed the business for my dad. While I was there I wrote software to help me manage things, which, after I left the business to return to software development, I turned into the SaaS product which I've sold to other dealerships.