NR Building Solutions

Structural & site

Leveling, piers and tie-downs for manufactured homes

Re-level a home that has settled and bring the anchoring back to the wind zone spec — before the movement becomes a drywall, door and plumbing problem.

Request a bid(713) 923-0835
How it is priced
Per home, by pier count and access
Timeline
Set in your written estimate, after the walk-through
Who performs it
NRBS crews, self-performed

Settlement is a structural problem that presents as a finish problem

Almost nobody calls about leveling. They call about a door that will not latch, a crack above a window, a floor that feels wrong, or a gap at the marriage line of a double-wide.

Every one of those is settlement, arriving in a finish. And every one of them will come back if the finish is repaired and the home is left where it is.

This is worth understanding at portfolio level, because it changes what a walk sheet means. Repeated drywall repair on the same home is not a drywall problem. It is a leveling problem being paid for annually in the wrong budget line.

What actually moves a home

Soil. Expansive clay soils move seasonally with moisture content, and much of the southern United States sits on them. The movement is real, cyclical, and it does not stop.

Water. Drainage that runs toward the home rather than away from it accelerates everything, and it is extremely common — a lot regraded for a drive, a downspout that discharges beside a pier, an irrigation line that has been leaking for two years. Where the grade is the cause, lot prep and site work is the actual fix and re-leveling alone is a repair with a known expiry date.

Piers on inadequate bearing. A pier set on fill, or on soil disturbed during installation, will keep moving no matter what happens above it. This is why we reset rather than shim: shimming a crushed or leaning pier is transferring the load back onto the thing that failed.

Anchoring, and the zone that specifies it

Tie-downs are a wind-load system. They are specified to the HUD Wind Zone at the home's location under 24 CFR § 3280.305 — Wind Zone II at a 100 mph design wind speed, Wind Zone III at 110 mph.

[U.S. Government Publishing Office, current eCFR]
Corroded strapsExtremely common on homes over fifteen years old, and a corroded strap is not an anchoring system
Slack strapsAlmost as common. A strap that is not in tension is doing nothing at all.
Missing anchorsFound on most older communities. Often removed during past work underneath and never reinstated.
Wrong specificationAnchoring installed to habit rather than to the zone — a real issue where homes were moved between states

None of these announce themselves. A home with no functioning anchoring looks exactly like a home with functioning anchoring, every day, until the weather the system exists for arrives.

Put it on the community walk

Leveling and anchoring belong in a scheduled inspection rather than in a work order, because by the time it is a work order the finishes have already been damaged.

We include a pier and anchor inspection in every community walk we perform under CapEx planning, and it is one of the few items where the inspection routinely finds problems the operator did not know about — because unlike a roof or a floor, nobody ever sees it.

Also in structural & site

Specification

What we install, and to what standard.

Full specification
Leveling
Home brought back to level across the frame, not shimmed at the symptom
Piers
Replaced or reset where crushed, leaning, or bearing on disturbed soil
Anchors
Specified to the HUD Wind Zone — I, II (100 mph) or III (110 mph)
Straps
Replaced where corroded, slack, or missing entirely

Not in the scope

  • Anything not written in the scope. Extra work found on site is raised as a written change order before it is done.

How the job runs

  1. Walk-through

    We walk the units or the roof, or work from the walk sheet you already have.

  2. Written scope

    A written scope and price before any work starts, priced as shown above.

  3. The work

    Our own crews do it, to the written scope. Anything extra is a written change order first.

  4. Final walk-through

    We walk it again with you and close out anything on the punch list.

Step one is your scope, as it already exists.

Request a bid

Pricing a whole community? Request a park-wide quote.

Common questions

The home tells you before anyone measures it. Doors that will not latch or swing open on their own, cracks appearing at the corners of door and window openings, a floor with a perceptible slope, and gaps opening at the marriage line of a double-wide. Each of those is settlement showing up in a finish, and repairing the finish without re-leveling means repairing it again.

Soil movement, water, and piers that were never on adequate bearing. Expansive clay soils move seasonally with moisture. Drainage that runs toward the home rather than away from it accelerates everything. And a pier set on fill or on disturbed soil at installation will keep moving regardless of what is done above it.

Because they are for the day it would. Anchoring is a wind-load system, specified for the design wind speed of the zone the home sits in. Corroded straps, slack straps and missing anchors are common on older homes and none of them announce themselves until the weather that they exist for arrives.

The leveling work is underneath, yes. But the reason for the work is usually visible inside, and the finishes that settlement damaged — drywall cracks, doors out of square, a gapped marriage line — do not correct themselves when the home comes back to level. Those are a separate scope and they belong in the same conversation.

W-9, written safety programme and certificates of insurance (GL and workers’ comp): being prepared. What is published so far is on vendor credentials.

Usually specified alongside

Where we perform leveling, piers & tie-downs

Self-performed crews based in Houston. Each city page carries local housing context.

Houston-area city pages