On Bent Street just off Highway 78 in San Marcos, shoppers can stock up on electronic goods at Best Buy or Fry's, pick up hardware at Lowes ---- and tote away a whole house from another store.

Several completed factory-built model houses await buyers at the Pacific Homes lot, and customers are buying again, company officials said.

December was the best month in two years, said Sean Feeney, general manager for the company. Pacific Homes is a dealer for Golden West Homes, which is a unit of Marysville, Tenn.-based Clayton Homes. Pacific sold about 30 houses last month, double the monthly totals for the rest of the year.

The sales could signal rising interest in factory-built houses, which long have suffered from an earlier association with flimsy mobile homes and trailers. Now though, factory-built homes are riding the wave of interest in stronger buildings, energy-saving construction and cutting costs.

Feeney and others say factory-built houses are 20 to 30 percent cheaper than site-built houses.

However, the credit squeeze is thwarting builders and buyers of new houses, regardless of construction methods.

"Builders cannot get land, builders cannot get money," said Sharon Hanley, an Oceanside-based housing industry market researcher. The quality of factory-built houses is good, she said. But "the biggest obstacle is psychological" ---- people think site-built houses are better, Hanley said.

"Perception is the biggest obstacle," agreed Feeney, Pacific Homes general manager.

Feeney and others in the industry say factory-built houses are stronger because they tend to use more lumber. Moreover, they are more carefully built and less wasteful of materials than site-built houses, called "stick" houses in industry parlance.

Some cities' building codes also make it tough for factory-builts, Hanley and other experts said.

At the Golden West Homes manufacturing plant in Perris, it takes about two weeks from order to completed house. Houses start with a steel foundation frame and move through a 20-acre hangarlike complex where hardly a nail is wasted. For example, pieces of wood left over from cuttings on one house are used where needed for fittings in other houses.

Given a consensus that factory-built houses are stronger, greener and cheaper, what stops their sales? A poor economy and lack of marketing, said Brian Cooney, spokesman for the Arlington, Va.-based Manufactured Housing Institute.

"Blue-collar workers tend to be our customers, and many of them are without a job," Cooney said.

Nationally, factory-built house sales fell to about 50,000 last year, or about 12 percent of the total housing market, MHI figures show. That's down from 350,000 factory houses a year in the booming late 1990s.

Still, the forces that make factory-built houses stronger and cheaper are pushing traditional builders to adopt factory techniques.

For example, most houses now use at least some factory-built systems, such as roof trusses, said Tony Gacek, executive director of the Building Systems Councils, part of the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Home Builders.

Recent buyers say they are very pleased with their factory-built houses.

Sharon Cully and her family lost their house on the Rincon Indian reservation in the 2007 wildfires. After considering their options, they decided on a house from Pacific Homes that was built at the Golden West factory in Perris.

"We were able to get more for our money," Cully said. "We love it. The quality of the house is good, and bigger than the one we were living in."

John and Patti White of San Marcos recently bought a Golden West house and reckon they saved $100,000 over what they were going to spend on a traditionally built house. "We're extremely pleased with it," said John, who is part owner of a software consulting business.

In a recent survey of San Diego and Riverside county economists, all predicted a slow recovery from the great recession. Housing construction has plummeted in both counties, which would seem to suggest a dour near-term prognosis for factory-built houses also.

Yet workers at Golden West like to point out that a businessman with a history of making good long-term decisions bought their company almost six years ago ---- Warren Buffett, the super-investor who runs Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Call staff writer Jeff Rowe at 760-740-5417.