Carolinas Mobile Home Movement Report

Nobody publishes county-level numbers on manufactured-home movement in North and South Carolina — the permits live in dozens of separate county systems, the housing stock sits in a Census table few people open, and the disaster history is buried in a federal API. This report pulls those four public sources into one place. We move, set, and demo these homes for a living, so we built the dataset we wished existed; the figures below are presented as-is, aggregates only, with every source named in the methodology.

Where homes move: permit records by county

The table ranks the 20 busiest counties in our 73-county portal sweep by the number of manufactured-home permit records their public permitting systems returned. These are records classified by each county as manufactured-home work — placements, set-ups, and related permits — not a uniform annual rate: portals expose different time windows and some cap exports, so each figure is a floor for that county, comparable in scale but not as a per-year statistic. Full coverage: 73 counties queried, 56 reporting at least one record, 15,895 records in total.

Two patterns stand out. First, the volume is not a coastal story: the five heaviest counties — Cumberland, Gaston, Rowan, Jackson, and Iredell — run from the Sandhills through the Piedmont into the mountains. Second, the distribution is steep: 20 of 73 counties account for 82.7% of every record in the sweep, while 17 queried counties returned zero manufactured-home permit records at all, which usually reflects how a county classifies or exposes this permit type rather than a true absence of homes on the road.

The housing stock: 884,437 homes in two states

Movement volume rides on top of a very large installed base. Census Bureau table B25024 (units in structure, ACS 2024 5-year, covering all 100 NC and 46 SC counties) counts 537,028 mobile homes in North Carolina — 11.0% of the state's 4,895,668 housing units — and 347,409 in South Carolina, a higher 14.2% share of its 2,443,039 units. Combined, that is 884,437 homes, and in some counties the share runs far above the state averages.

South Carolina dominates the top of this list — seven of the ten largest county stocks — but the single most striking figure is North Carolina's Robeson County, where 18,408 mobile homes make up 37.5% of all housing units, more than three times the NC state share. Several of the largest stocks (Buncombe, Brunswick, Spartanburg, Aiken, Horry) also appear in the permit table above: big installed bases generate movement.

Disaster pressure: the counties homes move through

Manufactured housing concentrates in exactly the counties that federal disaster declarations visit most often. Across the 67 NC/SC counties in our OpenFEMA panel, every single county carries at least 16 federal major-disaster declarations, with a range of 16 to 35. Coastal counties lead — Brunswick, NC (35), Horry, SC (34), New Hanover, NC (32), Pender, NC (31) — but the mountain counties are not far behind: Buncombe County (Asheville) shows 21 declarations spanning seven incident types, and every one of the 67 panel counties lists both hurricane and winter-storm declarations in its history. All 67 also show a hurricane or tropical-storm declaration dated 2024 — the year Hurricane Helene crossed western North Carolina — among their five most recent events. We publish these as declaration counts only; this report makes no claim about how many households were displaced.

Disaster exposure also shapes how a relocated home must be anchored. Under HUD's basic wind-zone map at 24 CFR 3280.305, 16 North Carolina coastal counties and 9 South Carolina coastal counties are designated Wind Zone II, and three NC Outer Banks counties — Carteret, Dare, and Hyde — are Zone III, the strictest anchoring tier in the country outside Florida and the Gulf. The other 118 Carolina counties default to Zone I. A home moving from a Zone I county to a Zone II or III county must be tied down to the stricter destination standard, which is a routine but frequently missed cost line in coastal relocations.

The rules of the road

Every move counted above happened inside a two-permit legal framework that differs by state. In North Carolina, the haul runs on an NCDOT Publication MH-2 oversize trip permit plus a county tax-paid moving permit under NCGS Chapter 105, Article 18 — broken down in our North Carolina mobile home moving laws guide. South Carolina's equivalent, including the SC Code § 31-17-360 moving-permit requirement, is covered in the South Carolina guide, and the neighboring frameworks are mapped in our Georgia and Tennessee guides. What a compliant move actually costs — permits, escorts, set-up, and all — is itemized in how much does it cost to move a mobile home. And because the numbers above make one thing clear — moving is a significant, regulated undertaking — many owners weigh the alternative: selling the home where it sits. Our sell my mobile home guide walks that decision, and we buy mobile homes directly when the math favors a sale over a haul.

Methodology & sources

This report aggregates four classes of public data. All figures are county-level aggregates; no individual permit holders, names, or addresses were collected or are published.

• County permit portals (original data). Public online permitting systems of 73 NC/SC counties (49 NC, 24 SC), queried for manufactured-home-classified permit records; single-extract snapshot completed July 2026. Where a county exposes multiple portals or extracts, the largest single extract is used and extracts are never summed, to avoid double-counting. Portals expose different historical windows and some cap result sets, so per-county counts are floors and are not comparable as annual rates. 56 of 73 counties returned at least one record.
• OpenFEMA. FEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries (v2), county-level federal major-disaster declaration counts and incident types for a 67-county NC/SC panel, retrieved 2026.
• US Census Bureau. Table B25024, Units in Structure, American Community Survey 2024 5-year estimates (2020–2024), accessed via Census Reporter; mobile-home category, all 100 North Carolina and 46 South Carolina counties. ACS figures are survey estimates with published margins of error.
• HUD wind zones. Basic wind-zone designations under 24 CFR 3280.305(c) (Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards).
• Statutes and DOT publications. NCGS Chapter 105, Article 18; NCDOT Publication MH-2; SC Code § 31-17-360; and the state authorities cited in the four state law guides linked above.

Figures in this report are a fixed snapshot published July 17, 2026 and will not silently change; corrections, if any, will be noted on this page.