Most home improvement advice on the internet is written for site-built houses. If you own a manufactured or mobile home, you have already discovered what that means in practice: the door you bought doesn’t fit the jamb, the water heater at the hardware store isn’t legal to install inside your home, and the tub that replaced yours is six inches too long.
Mobile Home Handbook exists to fix that. Every guide on this site is written specifically for homes built to the federal HUD Code, and for the older mobile homes that came before it.
Who runs this site
My name is Sergio Cobos Juan. I run this site from Alicante, Spain.
I want to be straightforward about that, because you should know who is telling you what size furnace filter to buy. I am not a licensed installer, I am not a contractor, and I do not own a manufactured home in the United States.
What I do is research. This site is a compilation-and-verification project: the technical and regulatory information that manufactured home owners need already exists, but it is scattered across federal regulations, state agency documents, manufacturer installation manuals and parts catalogs, in formats that were never written for homeowners to read.
The work here is finding it, checking it, cross-referencing it, and putting it in plain English with the numbers intact.
How every guide is researched
This is the part that matters, so here it is in detail.
1. Primary sources first. Where a fact comes from a regulation, we go to the regulation. The federal Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards (24 CFR 3280) and the Model Manufactured Home Installation Standards (24 CFR 3285) are public documents, as are the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s own homeowner resources and the manufactured housing programs run by individual states.
2. Manufacturer documentation for anything model-specific. Installation manuals and parts catalogs from the companies that actually built these homes are the authority on what fits what. Retailer product listings are used only to confirm what is currently available to buy, never as a source for a specification.
3. Every number gets a source. If a guide tells you a dimension, a code requirement or a price range, the guide says where that figure came from and when it was checked. Figures that go stale, costs especially, are dated so you can see how current they are.
4. We say when something varies. Manufactured housing is regulated federally for construction and by the states for installation, titling, taxation and tenancy. When the honest answer is “it depends on your state,” the guide says so and tells you who to ask, rather than giving you a national average that is wrong where you live.
5. We say when we don’t know. A guide that hedges is more useful than one that is confidently wrong about the clearance around your water heater.
What this site is not
It is not a substitute for a professional. Nothing here replaces a licensed installer, a home inspector, a licensed electrician or plumber, an insurance agent or an attorney in your state. Work involving gas, electrical systems, structural members or anchoring should be done by someone qualified and, where required, permitted.
It is not legal, financial or insurance advice. Guides covering titles, loans, insurance, lot rent and park tenancy explain how these things generally work. They cannot tell you what your specific lease, policy or state statute says.
It is not affiliated with HUD, with any manufacturer, dealer, park operator, lender or insurer. No company pays for coverage on this site, and no company reviews our guides before publication.
When we get it wrong
We will, eventually. Manufactured housing is a field where specifications changed year to year, manufacturers merged and disappeared, and state rules move.
If you find an error, write to admin@mobilehomehandbook.com and tell us what is wrong and, if you can, where the correct information comes from. Corrections are made to the article itself, not buried in a comment, and substantive corrections are noted at the bottom of the guide with the date.
We would rather be corrected than be wrong for another year.
How this site is paid for
Mobile Home Handbook is free to read and is funded by advertising and, on some pages, affiliate links. What that means in practice, and what it does not change about the content, is set out in our Affiliate Disclosure and Privacy Policy.
Advertisers have no influence over what we publish or how we rate anything.
Contact
Questions, corrections and requests for guides we haven’t written yet: admin@mobilehomehandbook.com, or use the contact form.
Sergio Cobos Juan, Alicante, Spain