Friendly Village Homes for Sale

Living in Friendly Village

Friendly Village is the original section of Summerfields Friendly Village, a manufactured home community in Williamstown, Monroe Township, running along Cornwall Place, Rita Place, New Hope Lane, Dale Lane, Jasmine Lane, Orange Lane, Edgemont Avenue, Virginia Place, Dogwood Lane, Cranberry Drive and Hanover Lane. Two bedrooms predominate with threes in the mix, most of them ranch layouts, on public water and sewer with central air and natural gas heat.

Three things to clear up before anything else, because all three trip people up constantly.

Friendly Village is not age-restricted. Manufactured housing and 55+ living get conflated all the time, and they are separate things. Anyone can buy here. That matters more than it sounds: a first-time buyer and a downsizer who wants to stop carrying a mortgage are shopping the same streets, and the eventual resale pool is everybody rather than a slice of the market.

Friendly Village and Summerfields are two sections of the same park. One landlord, one management office at 255 Village Parkway, one clubhouse and pool, one set of community rules. Listings get filed under both names, which is why the same community can look like two on a search portal. The sections are not identical — the older Friendly Village side carries its own requirements, including heat tape on the water lines, which the community’s own resale inspection applies to that section and not the rest of the park — but you are touring one place under one lease.

Summerfields West is the one that really is separate. Different development, built from 2014 onward, and age-restricted where Friendly Village is not. If you searched one name and landed on another, that is the split that caused it, and it is worth knowing which one you are actually standing in before you fall for a house.

Then there is the structure of the purchase, which is not the one most buyers arrive expecting. You own the home. You lease the land underneath it. That is why these properties carry no separate tax record — the taxes are folded into the monthly lot lease rather than billed to you. It also means this is cash or manufactured-home financing rather than a conventional mortgage, and the community has to approve you before you close. There is an application with a credit standard and an income test tied to the monthly lease. None of that is unusual for this kind of community, but it is a real step and it is not optional.

What the lease covers here is unusually broad, and it is the reason the number looks the way it does. Alongside the taxes it takes in water, sewer, trash, lawn maintenance, snow removal, a clubhouse, a pool and bus service. That is a longer list than Colonial Estates, the township’s other all-ages manufactured community, where the fee covers common areas and little else. Williamstown’s two age-restricted manufactured communities, Summerfields West and Sunny Estates, run on the same ownership model — home yours, ground leased — so the four of them are best compared against each other rather than against a house with a deed. The right comparison is never the lease against a mortgage payment. It is the lease against a mortgage payment plus taxes, water, sewer, trash and a lawn service.

Two features of that lease are worth knowing going in, because neither shows up on a listing sheet. The base rent adjusts every January 1st, tied to the Philadelphia consumer price index — the mechanism is written into the lease itself, so it is knowable in advance rather than arbitrary. And the lot rent a seller is paying is not the lot rent you will pay. A new lease amount is set at the time of resale, with its own expiration date. Ask what the number will be for you, not what the current resident has been paying.

The resale process itself is more structured here than in a typical neighborhood, and it works in a buyer’s favor more often than not. Before a home changes hands and stays on its site, management inspects it against a written checklist — driveway and patio concrete, steps, foundation enclosure, siding and trim, windows and screens, gutters, the shed, the sewer and water connections, address numbers. The seller has a set window to correct anything flagged, and the work has to be finished before the sale. Also worth knowing: patios, trees and shrubs installed on a homesite become community property and stay when the home leaves. What you see planted is what conveys.

One more thing, and it is the detail that matters most when you are actually shopping here: homes in Friendly Village date from 1973 all the way to 2022. That fifty-year spread is not piecemeal development — it is individual homes being replaced on their lots over the decades while the community itself stays put. Two homes on the same street can be four decades apart in age, construction standard and mechanical condition.

And that spread crosses a line most buyers have never heard of. June 15, 1976 is the date the federal HUD Code took effect. A home built on or after it is legally a manufactured home, built to a national construction and safety standard, and it carries a red certification label on the exterior. A home built before it is legally a mobile home — no federal standard applied. The MLS flags this right in the structure type field, where you will see “Mobile Pre 1976” on some listings here and “Manufactured” on others, and almost nobody explains what the difference means. It is financing. FHA, VA and USDA loans are not available on a pre-1976 home, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will not buy those loans either, which leaves specialty lenders or cash. Insurance carriers are narrower too. None of that makes an older home a bad buy — the price reflects it — but the two labels describe two genuinely different products sitting on the same street.