Know Your Rights: “Immobilizing” a Mobile Home

Whether the law calls your mobile home moveable or immovable can affects your finances. This is because it can affect your ability to get loans and affects your property taxes. You may be able to switch the legal label for your mobile home from “moveable” to “immoveable, ” through something called an “Act of Immobilization.” Learn more about the Act of Immobilization document at this link: Act of Immobilization.

After recordation, the owner, or the owner’s agent, must file a certified copy with the Secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections, who creates an Internet-accessible searchable database providing a public record.

You must also submit other required documents to the OMV. Find out more here on the site of the Louisiana OMV: Mobile Home Immobilization.

What kind of property is your mobile home?

Louisiana classifies property as either immovable or movable.

• Immovable property refers to things like land and everything permanently attached to it like a house or buildings.
• Movable property is things that physically exist and can be moved from one place to another.

Mobile homes are called movable property unless the mobile home is immobilized.

Immobilizing means the home is made a part of the land, both physically and legally. If made immovable, it is legally treated like land and other buildings on the land.

Here is how you can find out if your mobile home is already “immovable” property.

A mobile home is not immobilized if the land and the home are owned by different people. (If the mobile home is owned, but the land is leased, the mobile home is considered moveable under the law and is treated like cars and boats.)

A mobile home is not immobilized if it is not permanently attached to the land, it can usually be made an immovable property.

A mobile home is not immobilized unless an Act of Immobilization has been notarized and officially recorded.

If you do not know if an Affidavit of Immobilization has been done and filed you can search the parish land records, the Louisiana OMV database, and also.

The parish Clerk of Court’s office can tell you where to check for an “Act of Immobilization.” If you find an Act of Immobilization recorded with the conveyance or mortgage records, then your mobile home is labeled immovable unless there is also an “Act to De-Immobilize a Manufactured Home” there.

What if there is no Act of Immobilization or Act to De-Immobilize a Manufactured Home?

That should mean your mobile home is classified as moveable.

How to change your mobile home to “immovable” property.

You can sign something called an Act of Immobilization to have your mobile home labeled as “immovable” under the law.

Warning: If you sign this you are swearing that the mobile home will remain permanently attached to the land listed in it.

• An act of immobilization must have these things to be valid:
  • The document must be notarized in front of two other witnesses. This can be part of a sale or mortgage or be separate.
  • The Act must include a complete legally sufficient description of and location of the mobile home and land where it is installed, and
  • The Act must say that the mobile home will remain permanently attached to the land named in the act.
  • The law that covers this isLA Rev Stat § 9:1149.4.

  Converting a mobile home to a moveable

  If you want to move your immovable mobile home, you need to change it from immovable to moveable. There are steps you can take.

  • The rules are for a factory-built home.
  • See this information from the Louisiana OMV.
  • Classification of a Factory Built Home as Immovable
  • Find “reclassifying”, where you will see the required documents.