Horry County Mobile Home Permits: The Full Checklist

If you are setting, moving, or replacing a manufactured home in unincorporated Horry County, this is the list Code Enforcement wants. We publish it because the county’s own handout is a scanned PDF that most people never find, and because the single most common reason a permit takes a week is that someone arrived with seven of the eight documents.

None of this applies to routine releveling. Leveling a home that is already sited and connected is maintenance. This page is about installation: setting a home, moving one, or replacing one.

The eight documents Horry County requires

Horry County Code Enforcement lists the following for a mobile home permit, with a stated minimum two-day review once everything is in:

1. Completed mobile home permit application.
2. Address verification form, from Horry County Planning & Zoning.
3. Tax sticker, from the Tax Assessor’s Office.
4. Site plan drawn to an engineer’s scale, showing all property lines, the proposed structure, and any existing structures.
5. Detailed sewer receipt, or final septic tank approval from DHEC. If you are connecting to an existing septic system rather than a new one, there is a separate Existing Septic Tank affidavit to fill out, and signing it means agreeing to expose the system and the connection for county inspection.
6. Property Owner Authorization Form, or a signed lease agreement, if you are not the property owner or the mobile home owner applying for the permit. Notarized or third-party witnessed.
7. Contractor Authorization Form signed by the qualifier. The contractor must hold a manufactured housing installer or contractor license. Notarized or third-party witnessed.
8. Wind Zone II verification. Not required if the home is being moved within Horry County, in which case a copy of the moving permit serves as proof.

The application itself also captures the setbacks, flood zone and base flood elevation, panel number, the MBH sticker number, manufacture date, subdivision or park and lot number, and the SC license number and Horry County business license number of the installer or contractor on the job.

The fee everybody forgets

The impact fee is $1,236.00, due at permitting, and it does not include the mobile home permit fee.

There is an exemption that saves a lot of people that money: if you are replacing an existing home within one year, you may be exempt on production of one of the following:

• a demolition permit for the old home,
• a moving permit, or
• an electric bill or a letter from the electric provider.

Building permit fees are not transferable and not refundable, so it is worth confirming the exemption before you pay rather than after.

A licensed installer has to be on the permit

This is the requirement with the most teeth, and it is worth understanding why it exists rather than treating it as paperwork.

Horry County states plainly that all mobile home setup permits must have either a licensed MBH installer or MBH contractor listed on the permit. That license comes from the South Carolina Manufactured Housing Board, under the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation. Getting one requires a $5,000 surety bond made payable to the Board, a SLED background check, proof of completed training, and business documentation. The bond exists so that a homeowner who gets hurt by bad work has somewhere to go.

The practical consequence: a handyman with a bottle jack cannot legally be the installer of record on your permit, no matter how good his price is. If someone quoting your setup cannot give you an SC license number to put on the application, they are not the person doing this job.

You can reach the Manufactured Housing Board at (803) 896-4682 to verify a license before you sign anything. It takes two minutes and it is the cheapest due diligence in this entire process.

Flood zones change the answer

Horry County floods, and the paperwork reflects it. The permit application has fields for flood zone, base flood elevation, panel number, and elevation certificate, and Code Enforcement will require additional information for anything inside a mapped 100-year floodplain, with the county Floodplain Manager involved.

This is not a formality here. Florence in 2018 put the Waccamaw River at a record 21.16 feet at Conway and flooded roughly 2,000 Horry County homes, many of them outside mapped flood zones. If you are setting a home on ground you do not know the history of, the flood questions on the application are the cheapest research you will ever do.

Where to go

Horry County Code Enforcement Horry County Government & Justice Center, 1301 Second Avenue, Conway, SC 29526 Phone 843-915-5090

Applications can be submitted in person, and some are eligible for the county’s online permit portal. The county also runs an online portal for scheduling inspections and paying permit invoices.

What we handle, and what we do not

We arrange transport and setup and utility hookups through independent local manufactured home installers, and the county still requires a licensed installer on your permit, so check that name against the state licence lookup.

What we do not do is pretend the permit is optional or offer to work around it. In South Carolina the installer’s license is the whole basis of your recourse if something goes wrong, and a home is fifteen thousand-plus pounds of steel and lumber sitting on jacks during a lift.

If your job is releveling, pier repair, tie-downs, or belly work on a home already in place, none of this applies to you and you can just call.

Requirements and fees are Horry County’s, sourced from Code Enforcement’s published mobile home permit packet. Verify current figures with the county before relying on them; we update this page when we notice changes, but the county is the authority, not us.