Published September 8, 2026
Research question
Can local building permit totals be compared directly with manufactured-home shipment estimates?
This brief focuses on privately owned housing units authorized by permits compared with new manufactured-home shipments. The unit of analysis is permit-authorized housing units in permit-issuing places versus manufactured homes in a shipment-based survey. Those two statements set the boundary for every comparison that follows.
Finding
The two programs answer different questions. Permit data do not form a complete local count of manufactured-home placements, and shipment data do not show permits, installations, occupancy, or additions to a community.
That finding is deliberately narrow. Public datasets are useful when the question matches the collection program. They become misleading when a national or regional estimate is treated as a property record, or when a screening value is written as though it were a verified condition.
Method
The review used this procedure: document each program's universe, geography, reference month, revision status and unit, present the series separately, and avoid subtraction or market-share calculations unless the denominators are demonstrably compatible. We opened the publisher's program page, data page, and technical material on September 8, 2026. We recorded the publisher, page title, URL, unit, geography, reference period, update status, and any warning attached to the measure.
| Method field | What the reviewer records | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Universe | Population the program intends to cover | Defines who or what an estimate represents |
| Unit | Home, shipment, household, loan, place, or record | Prevents unlike counts from being combined |
| Period | Survey year, month, fiscal year, or release date | Keeps time comparisons consistent |
| Geography | National, region, state, county, tract, or place | Shows whether a local inference is supportable |
| Status | Preliminary, revised, final, suppressed, or unavailable | Preserves the publisher's qualification |
| Extraction | Table, filter, variable, weight, and calculation | Lets a second reviewer repeat the work |
We did not estimate a new national total, rank communities, or infer an individual outcome. No property files, resident records, lender files, or site observations were used. The result is a reading guide for the published sources, not a substitute for an analysis built around a specific business question.
How to reproduce the review
Start at the first source below and write down the dataset or program name exactly as the publisher gives it. Open the technical documentation before choosing a variable. If the publisher supplies a codebook, data dictionary, sample weight, standard error, or revision note, keep it with the extract.
Next, make a one-row source log for every value. Include the direct URL and access date. Save the filter selections in words; a screenshot alone may hide them. A second reviewer should be able to reach the same table and explain why the selected unit answers the research question.
For comparisons, put both definitions side by side. Stop if the universes, units, periods, or geographies differ. A comparison may still be useful, but it must be presented as two separate measures rather than a single rate or gap. Do not convert missing, suppressed, or not-applicable values to zero.