Mobile Home Municipal Fees

Manufactured or Mobile Homes

Mobile Home Owners Assessment Guide

The Wisconsin Department of Revenue publishes a Mobile Home Owners Assessment Guide for your information. Download a copy for your records.

Purchasing a Manufactured or Mobile Home in a West Allis Mobile Home Park

When purchasing a manufactured or mobile home in one of the parks located in the City of West Allis, there are two different "New Owner / Sale" forms that need to be filed with the City.

  1. Code Enforcement Mobile Home Sale Form  - The Building Inspector's office requires that you timely submit this form along with a registration fee. Call 414-302-8400 to ask whether a separate building permit is required for your planned repairs, construction, or remodeling work.

  2. Assessor's Office Mobile Home Sale Form (PDF) - The Assessor's Office form must also be filed in a timely fashion but does not require a registration fee. We use this form to keep track of market activity and any ownership changes that take place and collect and verify descriptive information on each home for our records. If you have any questions about the Manufactured or Mobile Home Statement of Monthly Municipal Permit Fee Form, you may send an email to the Assessor's Office.

Please file these forms within five days of taking ownership.

Mobile Home Market Value Estimates and Municipal Fees

Every year around Feb. 1, manufactured or mobile home owners will receive a statement from the Assessor's Office indicating that an update has been made to the estimate of market value on their home. The statement will also include the amount that the monthly municipal permit fee (mobile home property taxes) will be for the upcoming year.

This notification is not a bill and should not be paid to the City. The "monthly municipal permit fee" is already a part of the total amount you pay each month to the park owner with your rent. The park owners then turn over the correct "tax" amount for the whole park to the City Treasurer each month.

Sharing Property Tax Burden

The purpose of assigning an estimated market value to each manufactured or mobile home is to make sure that the property tax burden is shared fairly between home owners. Typically the value of most manufactured or mobile homes is not estimated using the sales comparison approach.

Although we examine each sale that occurs throughout the year, they are generally too variable to clearly indicate a usual selling price to use as a benchmark and therefore cannot be used as a reliable indicator of market value.

Most commonly, we use a depreciated cost approach to derive at a fair value for each home, resulting with similar homes bearing a similar share of the tax burden.