Cavco Industries, Inc. CVCO

The business

Cavco designs, builds, and partly retails manufactured and modular homes under brands including Cavco, Fleetwood, Palm Harbor, and Commodore, and runs a second segment, Financial Services, that lends to its home buyers and sells property-and-casualty insurance to manufactured-home owners. Factory-Built Housing carries the franchise: $2.157B of FY2026 revenue, about 96% of the total, against $87M from Financial Services. The volume-and-price engine just shipped a record year. The differentiator versus Champion is that finance arm, a higher-margin, stickier earnings stream that captures the customer at the point of finance and insurance, smooths the cyclicality of the core, and gives Cavco a real-time read on buyer credit and demand.

The thing the financials do not show is twofold. The captive finance book is both an asset and a risk: it deepens the customer relationship and adds recurring earnings, but the loan portfolio carries credit exposure that widens if the consumer weakens. And forward visibility is short. Cavco builds against a thin order book, only a few weeks of production, so management steers with a limited forward view even when the trailing results look like a clean up-leg. The backdrop is a tight oligopoly behind Berkshire's Clayton Homes, riding a structural affordability gap to site-built housing and a chronic supply shortage, financed through the tighter home-only chattel market.