Building a Modular Home on Family Land: What to Discuss Before You Get Started

If you’re lucky enough to have family land owned by parents, grandparents, or other relatives in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, or West Virginia, you may be considering building a new home on the property. Have you considered building a modular home on your family land? With modular construction, you can own the home you’ve always dreamed of at an affordable price.However, family land isn’t automatically buildable. Before choosing your floor plan or getting too far into financing, there are some important questions to answer:

• Who actually owns the lot, you or another family member?

• Does the property have legal road access?

• Where will the driveway go?

• Can the site support a private well and septic system if it’s not already served by a municipal utility?

  
  

At Corey’s Construction, we can help you answer these questions, starting by evaluating your family’s property as part of our modular construction process. This includes assessing the property’s access, slope, utilities, well and septic needs, foundation requirements, setbacks, drainage, and crane access. 

If you’re considering building a modular home on family property, here are a few questions to answer to get started.

Who Will Own the Land Where You Plan to Build?

When a family member says, “You can build a house behind ours,” it’s an exciting opportunity!

But before spending money on house plans, permits, or site improvements, you need to determine how the land will be handled. Will you be gifted or buy a portion of the existing parcel? Will it remain part of the larger family property? Will a new deed be recorded?

Answering these questions will help you determine whether the lot is legally ready to build your new home. And this information can affect your new home’s financing, depending on whether you already hold a legal title to your lot or if you’ll be acquiring the lot as part of the construction transaction.

Pro tip: Talk with your lender, title professional, and, where appropriate, a real estate attorney early in the process. Resolving any ownership questions early can avoid financing or permitting problems later.

Does the Family Property Need to Be Subdivided?

If you’re building a new home on a portion of a larger tract of your family’s land, you may need to create a separate legal lot first. Researching local rules for land development can help you determine if the property needs to be subdivided.

Local Rules

In Pennsylvania, local governments (counties and municipalities) usually administer land-development requirements. The state’s website offers guidance for planning and land development through the Department of Community & Economic Development. This includes local ordinances that regulate new lots, access, utilities, and development standards. 

Maryland has a similar process. Local governments oversee the procedures for dividing land into individual building lots and determine what information must appear on the subdivision plat. You can find this information on the state website.

State Rules

If you live in Virginia or West Virginia, you should know about state-specific family-land provisions. In Virginia, certain property divisions for sale or gifts to immediate family members are subject to state and local requirements, including access provisions. In West Virginia, transfers between immediate family members are subject to “land development” or “minor subdivision” rules. Each state has different rules and different processes. 

Not sure where to start? Check with your county, municipality, or local planning office to see which rules and regulations apply to your property, so you can decide exactly where your new home will go.

Where are the Property Lines and Are There Easements?

Once you’ve confirmed who owns the property and which local and state ordinances govern construction, it's time to look at the land itself.

Corey’s Construction can work with a land surveyor and/or real estate agent to identify your property lines/boundaries, road access, easements, rights-of-way, and other conditions that can affect your new home’s construction. This is common for long-held family properties, where everyone may casually “know” the boundaries, but the legal survey or deed may not clearly define them.

What does a land survey involve? The National Association of Home Builders provides a land-development checklist on its website that recommends evaluating property frontage, access routes, utilities, wells, septic feasibility, soil conditions, stormwater, and environmental considerations. Realtor.com also provides guidance on easements and street access, and recommends researching local ordinances that may affect what type of home you can build on the property.

What Type of Access Is Available for Building and Living in Your New Home?

If your future home will sit behind another family residence or deep inside a large rural parcel, you’ll need to confirm road and driveway access for building your new home and for you to access it once construction is complete.

Access is especially important if you are building a modular home. In modular construction, your home is built in a climate-controlled factory with the same quality materials and craftsmanship as a site-built home. Then your new home is delivered to your homesite.

Before your new modular home can be delivered, street and/or driveway access needs to be confirmed. At Corey’s Construction, access planning is part of our construction and delivery process. This is because completed modules must move from the factory to the jobsite in a way that accounts for each module’s size, route conditions, and coordination between all parties involved. This planning may require answering questions such as:

• Will your driveway connect directly to a public road or cross another part of the family property?

• Will you share a driveway with relatives?

• If access crosses land you don’t own, will you need a recorded easement?

• Can delivery trucks and construction equipment safely reach the homesite?

• Is there enough space for the modular-home delivery and crane set?

  
  

If a new entrance has to be built on a state-maintained road, this may require permitting, depending on your state’s requirements. For example:

• In Pennsylvania, you may need a Highway Occupancy Permit for a new or altered driveway connection to a state highway.

• Maryland requires residential entrance permits for access to state highways.

• And Virginia and West Virginia each have their own state-road entrance permit processes.

  
  

Does the Land Fall Under a Public Utility or Will It Require a Private Well and Septic System?

If you have family already living on the land, it’s easy to assume you can automatically access the same utilities for water, sewage, etc.But your new home needs its own approved utility path. Depending on the property, that may mean public water and sewer connections or a new private well and septic system. See our blog on Understanding Septic and Well Systems for Your New Modular Home to learn what’s involved. At Corey’s Construction, we can coordinate with local jurisdictions during planning and pre-construction to determine how to move forward. 

We build turnkey modular homes within a 75-minute drive of our office at 4760 Zane A Miller Drive, Waynesboro, PA, 17268, excluding Montgomery County, Maryland. We complete all necessary septic and well work. We do ask our homeowners to provide a Well Completion Report or Public Water Approval Letter and a Septic Design or Public Sewer Approval Letter, depending on the project.

Does the Land Work for the Modular Home You Want?

Once you have a clearer picture of your lot, access, and utility requirements, you can focus on the fun part: building your dream home on your family land.

At Corey’s Construction, we offer hundreds of customizable modular floor plans, but every home needs to work with the specific property. Slope can affect excavation and foundation options. Septic placement may determine where the home can sit. Trees and overhead obstructions may influence delivery and crane placement. Setbacks can affect where you can place garages and porches.

That’s why we conduct a preliminary site visit during the planning phase of your new home’s construction. This includes reviewing your property before the project moves into final design, permitting, and construction. 

We also coordinate many of the pieces that families would otherwise have to manage separately: permitting, site preparation, foundation work, well and septic coordination, modular-home delivery and set, utility connections, inspections, and final completion.

Building on Family Land? Consider a New Modular Home

Building on your family’s land lets you build close to the people who matter most and maybe preserve a piece of property that's been in the family for generations. It’s also a great opportunity to create a brand-new home without settling for an existing house that doesn’t live up to your new home vision.

At Corey’s Construction, we’ve spent 25 years building modular homes throughout Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. We help homeowners work through the permitting and logistics that must happen before a beautiful new home can take shape. 

If your family has property and you’re wondering whether it could become the homesite for your new home, you don’t have to figure it out alone.

Contact us to discuss your family land and next steps, or call our sales team at (717) 844-6589. We’ll help you understand what to ask, which approvals to consider, and whether your property and home plans fit our turnkey construction process.