Summerfields Homes for Sale

Living in Summerfields

Summerfields is a manufactured and modular home community in Williamstown, Monroe Township, and it has been filling in for a long time — the oldest homes date to 1970 and the newest arrived at the end of the 2000s. Streets include Edgemont Drive, Shadowcreek Lane, Jasmine Lane, Starlight Lane, Sunnyside Lane, Walden Lane, Dogwood Lane, Palomino Place, Totem Place and Virginia Place. Almost everything here is a two-bedroom, two-bath ranch, with a few raised ranchers mixed in.

Start with the name, because it causes more confusion than anything else about this place. Summerfields and Friendly Village are two sections of one community — Summerfields Friendly Village, one landlord, one management office at 255 Village Parkway, one clubhouse and pool, one rulebook. Listings get filed under both names, so the same place shows up twice on a search portal. Summerfields is the newer side; Friendly Village is the original 1970s section and carries a few requirements of its own, including heat tape on the water lines that the community’s resale inspection applies to that section and not to this one.

And Summerfields is not age-restricted. Manufactured housing and 55+ living get run together constantly, and they are separate things. Anyone can buy here. It matters on the way out as much as the way in: your resale pool is everybody, not a slice of the market.

The thing that actually defines Summerfields is how you own it, and it is not the same as owning a house down the road. On most homes here the MLS shows no tax record at all — no assessed value, no lot size, nothing. That is the signature of a land-lease community: you own the home itself, the ground underneath stays with the community, and you pay a monthly fee instead of a property tax bill. That fee is doing real work here — depending on the section it covers water, sewer, trash, snow removal, common area maintenance, the pool and the recreation facility, and on some homes the taxes and gas as well. It also means the purchase runs on cash or manufactured-home financing rather than a conventional mortgage, and the community approves the buyer before the sale can close — an application with a credit standard and an income test tied to the monthly lease.

Two features of that lease never appear on a listing sheet and both are worth knowing before you tour. The base rent adjusts every January 1st against the Philadelphia consumer price index, written into the lease itself, so the mechanism is knowable in advance rather than arbitrary. And the lot rent the seller pays is not the lot rent you will pay — a new lease amount gets set at 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 here is more structured than in a typical neighborhood, and it tends to favor the buyer. 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 gets a set window to correct whatever is flagged, and the work has to be finished before settlement. One related detail: patios, trees and shrubs installed on a homesite become community property and stay put. What you see planted is what conveys.

It is also worth checking address by address, because Summerfields is not uniform. A handful of records do carry a real parcel with acreage and a private community sewer, and at least one home is listed as a conventional detached ranch rather than a manufactured unit. Two homes on the same street can be two different arrangements, and the MLS tax line is where it shows up first.

The age 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 wears 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 and “Manufactured” on others, and almost nobody explains the difference. 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. Summerfields starts in 1970, so both labels are on these streets.

Williamstown has three other communities built on leased ground, and the useful comparison depends on who you are. Colonial Estates is the township’s other all-ages manufactured community, and its monthly fee covers a good deal less than what is bundled here — worth pricing against each other rather than against a mortgage payment. Summerfields West is the newer development next door, built from 2014 on and age-restricted, which is the single biggest difference between it and this page. Sunny Estates is age-restricted as well. Same ownership model across all four; different rules about who can live there.