Manufactured home showrooms face rising security pressures, as colder months bring increased attempts at unauthorized occupancy, theft, and vandalism. Empty models with high-value fixtures create opportunities for break-ins that can lead to costly repairs and delivery delays.
A layered perimeter security strategy reduces these risks, enhances on-site safety for personnel, and safeguards inventory from damage that can slow sales. With the right defenses in place, your business can stay operational and reduce expenses tied to preventable incidents.
Why Showroom Properties Face Unique Risks
Manufactured home showrooms often feature open layouts, high-value inventory, and extended hours. These factors create predictable opportunities for intruders looking to break into units for shelter or items they can quickly remove. Each home is staged for customer tours, which means it contains valuable items like appliances, fixtures, and HVAC components. Moreover, the copper wiring used in a manufactured home can sell for up to $5.60 a pound on the resale market.
Any break-in, whether driven by theft or the search for overnight shelter in the colder months, can trigger hazardous cleanup requirements and force missed predelivery checks. This combination increases freight costs and damages customer trust. Additionally, employees who arrive early or close late face elevated safety risks when a unit is occupied by trespassers.
Other factors that increase vulnerability include:
- Large lot footprints: Perimeter blind spots make it harder to detect intruders entering or already settled in vacant model homes.
- Seasonal spikes: Colder temperatures drive individuals to seek shelter, and empty model homes make tempting targets.
- Unoccupied units after hours: Homes left unattended after hours are easy targets for intruders.
- Customer-friendly lot design: Open pathways and walls that block lines of sight let intruders move between units easily.
- Poor lighting conditions: Without adequate lighting, thieves use the cover of darkness to move from your perimeter into the units.
9 Security Risks Common on Manufactured Home Lots
Showroom lots have a mix of predictable and often overlooked risks that can disrupt daily operations and erode profits. Because each model home functions as both inventory and a sales asset, even minor damage leads to missed handoffs and stalled revenue. Many lots also operate with skeleton crews after business hours, which leaves long stretches where activity goes unmonitored.
Understanding these challenges helps you close vulnerability gaps that expose employees, customers, and assets.
1. After-Hours Trespassing
Intruders who stay inside model homes create problems beyond theft and cleanup requirements. If heating systems are left running, water is left on, or smoke detectors are damaged, these issues can cause utility surges and result in safety violations during inspection. Units may also need restaging, which results in additional labor hours and delays customer tour availability.
2. Break-Ins and Forced Entry
Forced entry often damages trim, thresholds, and weatherproofing. Even if nothing is stolen, broken seals allow moisture ingress during rain or snow, causing floor swelling and stains. These defects can cause the home to be categorized as discount inventory, resulting in reduced profit margins.
3. Appliance Theft
Some thieves target appliance serial numbers rather than the appliances themselves. They then resell the numbers for warranty fraud, leaving showroom operators with units that appear preregistered. This complicates warranty claims and pushes replacement costs back onto your business.
4. Biohazard Contamination
Some intruders leave behind biohazard contamination, such as drug paraphernalia, bodily fluids, or spoiled food, in enclosed spaces. These hazards trigger mandatory professional remediation and air-quality checks before the home can pass inspection. During colder months, contaminated units hold odors longer due to reduced ventilation.
5. Gate and Perimeter Gaps
Improvised access points, delivery callouts left unlocked, or gaps behind stacked inventory, give intruders a direct path to less visible areas of the lot. Seasonal vegetation growth can also conceal existing damage to defense, which may go unnoticed.
6. Blind Spots
Tall models, signage, and display structures can block a security guard’s line of sight. Intruders use these blind zones to stage tools, scout units, or move stolen items to a drop-off point. Visibility gaps also make it harder to verify the sequence of events for insurance claims.
7. Gaps in Access Control
Access control failures start at the gate. Many showroom lots rely on manual padlocks or keypad codes shared among staff. These shared codes circulate quickly and are rarely updated, creating a risk where unauthorized people can gain access to the property. At the model level, standard lockboxes and basic door hardware create additional weak points.
8. Technological Security
Showroom Wi-Fi networks often contain tablets used for financing approvals in interactive home customization tools. Weak passwords create cybersecurity and digital challenges, allowing unauthorized users to access these devices, download sensitive documents, or disable existing alarm systems connected to the same network.
9. Data Handling
Sales offices frequently rely on paper forms before uploading them into digital systems. Paper packets left on desks, in unlocked drawers, or inside unmonitored trailers create exposure points for identity theft. A single mishandled application can trigger internal audits, retraining, and lost customer trust.
Perimeter Security Solutions and Best Practices
You can prevent physical security challenges by implementing the five D’s of perimeter security. A multi-layered perimeter security approach that detects, deters, denies, delays, and defends will safeguard your property by combining multiple systems:
- Electric fencing: An electric fence delivers a safe but memorable pulsed shock should intruders attempt to breach your perimeter. The fence prevents unauthorized access and comes with yellow warning signs to let would-be thieves know your lot is protected.
- Video surveillance systems: Integrated video surveillance systems provide high-resolution coverage of key perimeter zones, display areas, and back-lot storage. These systems support rapid alarm verification, reducing response time when seconds matter.
- Access Control: Gate Access Control systems manage entry and exit points utilizing credential-based verification methods such as biometrics, fobs, or PINs, thereby preventing the use of shared or outdated codes. The system offers detailed activity logs to show who entered or exited the property and when.
- Lighting: Perimeter lighting solutions activate when a fence alarm triggers, flooding the area with light to support deterrence, detection, and denial simultaneously.
Secure Your Showrooms With AMAROK
Unauthorized occupancy, perimeter gaps, and inconsistent monitoring all create preventable costs for manufactured home showroom lots. With a multi-layered perimeter security strategy, owners and managers of these lots can implement a proactive response to intrusion.
AMAROK’s perimeter security solutions have helped over 8,000 customers across the U.S. prevent 99% of external theft. Our perimeter security experts conduct on-site inspections to identify perimeter vulnerabilities and analyze your business’s security posture. We then develop a turnkey solution featuring our flagship product, The Electric Guard Dog™ Fence, to safeguard your personnel and property. With zero up-front costs, your new perimeter security system comes at a manageable monthly fee that delivers 5x ROI for our average customer.
Schedule your free threat assessment today.
