Inspections

Hire an inspector with specific manufactured-housing experience. A competent general home inspector will assess the roof, plumbing, and electrics perfectly well, and may know nothing about marriage-line sealing, chassis condition, pier and anchor systems, or what correct levelling looks like on a steel frame. Those are precisely the areas where expensive problems hide.

Insist the inspection includes the underside. Someone needs to get into the crawl space and look at the frame, the piers, the anchors and straps, the insulation and belly wrap, the ductwork, and the plumbing runs. Signs of standing water, rodent activity, torn belly wrap, or rusted anchors all matter, and none of them are visible from inside the home.

Have the home checked for level. An unlevel home is the root cause of a long list of symptoms, doors that stick, windows that will not close, cracked drywall at corners, sloping floors, plumbing that drains slowly, and it is caused by pier settlement or inadequate setup. Re-levelling is routine and not especially expensive; the damage from years of being unlevel is neither.

On a multi-section home, the marriage line deserves specific attention: the roof ridge where the sections meet, the seal along the walls, and the floor joint. A poorly sealed marriage line produces leaks, drafts, and uneven floors, and correcting it properly is costly.

For any home more than a few years old, also have the anchoring assessed against the current requirement for its wind zone. Older installations often no longer comply, and insurers increasingly ask.