July 2008 home sales

Click here for a PDF. Listings courtesy of Petworth realtor Lesley Aranha.

Comments

[mona]

Good point, the roommate lease will eliminate the problem. But I don't know if the city will assist you if they decide not to pay rent. I suspect as long as the lease says "roommate" then your good to go. Although the advantage of having a certificate of occupancy will add tons of value to your home if you can't afford the 6k that is necessary to get it then this is certainly an option

[Jones]

...or you can just rent it out as an english basement and have them sign a lease that says "roommate".

Seriously, good post but there are ways around it if you made a mistake and did not check the permit (which I'm willing to bet have happened to a lot of people)

[mona]

I am posting this as an informational comment on real estate. Beware the rental unit when buying a new home. There are several properties available now on the market that have rental units in the basement. There is a great appeal to having one of this in this economic market,but it turns out you must be really careful before you purchase a home. Now you maybe thinking I am speaking of the certificate of occupancy that you need to obtain, well yes and no. You need to get a C of O and that is fairly easy to get with a trip down to DCRA and some inspections you can have it done in less then 30 days. Here is the problem. There is a builder in the petworth area that has been building homes with basement apts. They are completely legal apts. Ceiling ht, front and back door, seperately meterd all the things that the city requires. The only problem is this build pulls the original building permit as "new roof, plaster repair, painting etc". This sounds like its a simple renovation and it is a cheap way to pull a building permit. After this permit is pulled he turns around and does way more then the permit allows. Digs out the basement and seperates the electirc,heating ,plumbing and more. Now here is where the problem comes, if you try to obtain a C of O they look at the original building permit to make sure it was pulled to convert the status of the house to multi-unit dwelling. The permit that is pulled won't reflect this and now you can't get a C of O unless you have architecural drawings done, pull another permit, get a bunch of inspections. This could amount to well over 6K to do this. So the moral of this story is that if you buy a house with a basement apt, check the building permit to make sure the builder changed the status on the house or your going to be out a lot of money trying to remedy the situation.