Who Can Certify a Manufactured Home Foundation in Texas?

Who Is Allowed to Sign the Letter?

The rule comes from the lender's side. FHA's handbook says the mortgagee must obtain a certification by an engineer or architect who is licensed or registered in the state where the manufactured home is located, attesting to compliance with the Permanent Foundations Guide for Manufactured Housing. For a home in Texas that means a Texas license. A home inspector's license does not meet it, and neither does a manufacturer's statement about the model.

For a home in North Texas, HGS Engineering sends a Texas engineer to the house. The engineer measures what is there and signs a letter written for that address. The guide to the HUD engineering report lists what gets checked and what the letter has to say. This page takes up two other questions: how big the pool of homes is, and whether the state will say.

Does Texas Publish Manufactured Home Counts by County?

We checked on 2026-10-16. The Manufactured Housing Division of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs handles licensing, titling and installation reporting for the state, so it is the obvious place for a county count. Its public pages cover license holders, online transactions, ownership and titling, tax liens, board meetings, announcements and the federal and state rules. None of them is a count of homes by county.

Two details matter for anyone who needs a number. Licensed installers report each installation to the department on a Notice of Installation, Form T, with a fee. That is a filing, and the page that describes it prints no totals. The department also offers a download of active license holders, but that list names firms and not homes, and the download page answered with a 503 error when we tried it, so we could not read its columns. We have not asked TDHCA for a count under the public information act. If you know a published county figure, tell us and this page will use it.

The saved record of what we read sits in the site repository as data/public/tdhca/mhd-data-check-2026-10-16.txt. Without a state count, the next best public source is the Census Bureau.

How Many Manufactured Homes Are in Each County?

The American Community Survey asks households what kind of structure they live in, and "mobile home" is one of the answers. For 2019 to 2023 the survey puts 777,911 homes in that category across Texas, 6.5% of the state's housing units. The seven counties the firm works in hold 74,666 of them, 9.6% of the state total, and they make up 2.6% of the housing in those counties.

The largest count is in Dallas County at 17,521, followed by Tarrant at 15,382, yet in both the homes are under 2% of all housing. The pattern flips in the south and west. Johnson County has 11,723 manufactured homes and they are 17.1% of its housing, and Parker County has 8,211 at 14%. A request for a HUD letter in Johnson or Parker County is part of ordinary business. In Collin County, with 1.5%, it is a rare one.

Every count is a survey estimate with a margin of error, printed in the table at the 90 percent level the Census Bureau uses. Johnson County's 11,723 could be off by about 770 in either direction, so read it as roughly eleven to twelve and a half thousand and not as an exact tally.

Why Put Soil Beside the Home Count?

HUD's own introductory comments to the guide give the reason. They say the size of the foundation, the depth of the footings and the anchorage requirements depend on the building's site, and that chapters 2 and 3 flag unusual conditions, such as sloping sites and problem soils, that may call for an added geotechnical engineering report. The soil column in the table is the county-wide USDA rating from the foundation data section.

The two columns do not agree. Johnson County pairs the highest manufactured home share of the seven with 59.6% of its rated soil in the high or very high shrink-swell classes. Parker County has 14% manufactured homes and only 9.3% soil in those classes. A home in Parker County is not safe from movement because of that, and a county rating never describes a lot, but it explains why the same letter can involve very different site conditions from one county to the next. Our county pages for Johnson and Parker show the soil and drought detail behind each figure.

What Does HUD's Guide Say About How a Foundation Gets Approved?

The introductory pages, saved in the repository as data/public/hud/pfgmh-introductory-comments-2026-10-16.pdf, describe two acceptable routes for owners and developers who want HUD approval of a permanent foundation. In the first, a licensed professional furnishes sealed foundation drawings and design calculations. In the second, a licensed professional furnishes the Design Worksheet in Appendix F, and no calculations are required. Both need the owner's site worksheet and the manufacturer's worksheet from Appendix E. The guide describes three basic foundation types and six alternatives.

A lender's certification is a related but separate document. It is the engineer's statement, for one home at one address, that the foundation complies with the guide. The same guide governs it, which is why a site visit has to happen first.

Where in the Service Area Are the Homes?

Counties hide a lot. Inside the eleven cities the firm lists as places it serves, the count runs from 6,183 in Fort Worth down to 96 in Weatherford, and the share runs from 3.3% in Mansfield to 0.5% in Plano. The table gives the figure for each place from the same Census table.

A city count leaves out the unincorporated land where many manufactured homes sit, so the county table above is the better guide to the size of the pool.

What Does the Engineer See Under the Home?

The photo on the HUD certification page is Heath Salmon's own. It was taken under a manufactured home and shows concrete block piers, wood shims and anchor straps beneath a steel frame. A visit begins there. What does each pier stand on? Is each strap really fastened to something? After those two questions come the skirting, the drainage after rain and any porch or room added later. The letter carries the address, the seal and the signature of whoever crawled under the house.

The firm sells no repairs, so the written findings can be taken to any contractor. Fees are quoted on request through the request form, which is the way the firm takes requests, by email. Start with the HUD certification page if the lender has already asked for the letter.

How Were These Numbers Made?

Method: scripts/county-mobile-homes.py reads table B25024, units in structure, from the Census Bureau ACS 2019-2023 summary files for the seven counties and Texas. Mobile homes are line 10 and share is line 10 divided by line 1. The raw rows are committed as data/public/census/acs5-2023-b25024-counties-2026-10-16.json. City rows come from the committed city file, and soil shares are the USDA figures on the county pages. Before each build a gate reruns the script and fails on any mismatch.