About Gregg County Foundation Repair

Why a referral service instead of a contractor listing

Foundation work is one of the few home repairs where the homeowner cannot easily check the work afterward. The piers are underground. The soil report, if there is one, is a page of numbers. Most people in Longview call whichever company shows up first in a search and hope for the best.

The purpose of this service is narrower and more useful than a directory: you describe the problem once, and the request goes to a company that works your specific part of East Texas and handles the kind of foundation you actually have. A crew that does mostly slab work in a newer Spring Hill subdivision is not the same crew you want under a 1938 pier-and-beam house near downtown Kilgore.

We do not publish contractor rankings, star ratings or best-of lists, because we have no way to verify those honestly and we are not going to invent them.

What we will not tell you

• We will not make any claims about a contractor's coverage, surety status or credentials. We are not in a position to verify any of that for you. Ask the company directly, and ask to see the paperwork issued by whoever provides it rather than a summary printed on a brochure.
• We will not quote a price. Foundation pricing in Gregg County depends on pier count, depth to bearing, access, whether the house is slab or raised, and whether drainage work is part of the fix. Anyone quoting you a number before seeing the property is guessing.
• We will not diagnose your foundation over the phone. A written structural evaluation is engineering work in Texas and has to come from an engineer licensed by the Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors.
• We will not push you toward the most expensive option. Some of the houses that come through here need piers. Others need a downspout moved and a swale cut, which is a fraction of the cost.

How contractors are regulated in Texas — the actual rules

This trips people up constantly, so here is the real picture as it stands.

There is no statewide license for foundation repair

Texas does not issue a general contractor license at the state level, and it does not issue a license specific to foundation repair. There is no state exam, no state board for the trade, and no statewide bond requirement. That is deliberate state policy, not an oversight. If a company in East Texas tells you it is "state licensed" for foundation repair, ask what license they mean, because no such license exists.

What Texas does license

The state regulates specific trades. Electricians and air conditioning and refrigeration contractors are licensed through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Plumbers are licensed through the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners. Engineers are licensed through the Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors. If a foundation job involves rerouting a sewer line under the slab, the plumbing portion of that work does require a licensed plumber.

What Longview requires

Because the state steps back, regulation happens at the city level. The City of Longview runs an online permit portal through its Development Services department, and that portal is where general contractors, licensed trade contractors and design professionals register, apply for construction permits, upload plans and request inspections. Foundation work on a house inside the Longview city limits goes through that system. Requirements in Kilgore, White Oak, Gladewater and the unincorporated parts of the county are set separately by those jurisdictions, so a contractor working the whole county deals with several sets of rules.

The area we cover

Gregg County is one of the smaller counties in Texas by land area, which makes it unusually dense for East Texas. Longview and Kilgore anchor it, with White Oak, Gladewater, Liberty City, Lakeport, Clarksville City, Warren City and Judson filling in around them. Because the county is compact, contractors who work here routinely cross into Harrison, Rusk, Upshur and Smith counties in the same week, so we route requests from Hallsville, Marshall, Henderson, Big Sandy and Overton as well.

The shared thread across all of it is soil and rainfall. Whether the house is in a Longview subdivision or on five acres outside Gladewater, it is sitting on sand over clay in a place that gets close to fifty inches of rain a year with most of it arriving in a three-month window.