Hello everyone and Welcome to another episode of Selling Greenville your favorite real estate podcast here in the upstate of South Carolina I'm your host as always Stan McCune realtor here in Greenville all my contact information is in the show notes if you need to reach me if you need to buy a house if you need to sell a house let me know and just a reminder as always if you are not subscribed to the show make sure that you do in fact subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes please leave a rating and a review if you have not already done so I don't know where it is on the other apps but I know in apple if you scroll down you'll see a place where you can just hit five stars where you can just write a short review and I would appreciate if you guys could do that to get the show out to as many people as possible all right today we're going to hop right into to a discussion about one of my favorite things you guys know that I like to complain about our local government because our local government often times causes more harm than good when it comes to the local real estate community and today we're going to be talking about permitting and codes and enforcement all of those different things because we have a lot of what I like to call clipboard Warriors here in Greenville that their entire life consists of simply trying to find people that are God forbid doing updates to their homes without permitting and this is one of the most frustrating things about home ownership is is the need to get permits on just about everything now I say just about everything because not every single item requires permitting but that being said the list is pretty extensive and and really the county or the city could basically call you for doing just about anything without getting it permitted aside from like painting something very basic like that now the the idea of requiring permits makes some sense I'm not going to pretend like it makes no sense it does make some sense when it comes to for instance is building new construction we saw a tragedy in Florida a few months ago when a an apartment building collapsed that obviously had W had some issues had obviously some problems when probably it was originally built maybe they hadn't kept up with it I I didn't read a ton about it so I don't know all the details but that is the value of Permitting is to ensure that things like that don't happen to ensure that homes are being built the right way that they are structurally sound that everything is done properly but the idea of Permitting it it has had a bit of a concept creep so to speak where it's now extended to to so many other things now you're required to have so many outlets everywhere and and all these different things that really the market should decide that and in my opinion I don't feel like the county or the city or the state or any government should decide how many outlets the room has but unfortunately that is a situation we find ourselves in and here's where it becomes tricky again I don't have a whole lot of problem with that with new construction but they apply the same standards of new construction to home remodels now it is a completely different thing to build a home from the ground up versus taking an old home and remodeling it and it it can be extremely difficult and extremely expensive in order to when you're doing a basic remodel of a home to then also have to retrofit that home or or basically bring it up to code which is what the county or the city is going to require because now they are involved they're going to come in there and say okay you need more outlets in here you need this type of wiring you need this type of of Breakers etc etc now you have to bring everything up to code that's frustrating that's expensive that's costly timec consuming nobody wants to have to do that but unfortunately that is what ends up happening when you have the city and or the county involved and yes I have referenced the city and the county multiple times because they both have their own permitting divisions and and this is again one of the strange and confusing things about it where I I understand that if a house Falls within City Limits then it's supposed to be a city permit basically rather than a County permit well I had a house recently that that I purchased that someone had started the work on it but had hadn't got gotten it finished so they had permitted some of it but they hadn't finished it and so I had to come in and I had to have my li My licensed contractor pull permits for us to then go do some work but the the the home was in city limits but it had County permits and my contractor was like oh that's good we we want that because the county typically is not as strict as the city but what happens then if the if the city clipboard Warrior comes around and sees oh they're doing a bunch of work on this house it's been permitted by the county but this is our jurisdiction I don't know it's it's very weird it's not it's not nearly as organized as it should be and it's not nearly as straightforward as it should be I've been in their office it's a mess the one in County Square very you know disorganized in a lot of different ways and so I they there's a lot of stuff that they in my opinion need to do in order to to to clean up their operations but at the end of the day here's the thing a lot of people get by without permitting work I mean a lot of people remodel kitchens without permitting a lot of people remodel bathrooms without permitting and and there's kind of this Unwritten rule that a lot of people follow and a lot of contractors will as well that if you aren't doing anything major on the exterior not making any major exterior changes to siding roofs Windows Etc you can probably get by without permitting but if you get caught you can get in big trouble okay now what does that mean well I I'll tell you a couple of stories I I'm mentioned this one a little while back but I I bought a a property last year that was it was actually a couple of properties that were together on the same lot two duplexes and they were not in good condition at all when I purchased them that was why the seller was selling them and I tried to be a good landlord where I try to make sure that the properties are that my tenants are in are in good condition and so I immediately knew there was water coming into one of the units through the roof we needed to replace that roof the windows were awful the windows need to be replaced my insurance would wouldn't even insure it with the windows that were currently there so we had to do all this stuff and it fell through the cracks that that did not get permitted and I I kid you not the day after the roof started the roof job started the county was posting stickers all over the property telling me that it needed to be permitted if it was not permitted within a certain number of days that the work would be shut down etc etc and here it is we're just trying to make this property livable I I and I mean calm down like we'll pay you your 45 bucks for the permit but you know let's just kind of chill out a little bit here let us get the work done so these people have a place that that isn't leaking water all over their heads right and so again in an effort to do quote unquote good the county ends up up hurting the very people is trying to help there was a in an effort to ensure that we put that we installed a roof correctly they were dragging out a job that had that was trying to keep them from having a leaky roof over their head so it's just kind of a joke I know someone else recently I just spoke to someone else recently that he flipped a lot of houses and apparently it became known by the county that he was flipping all these houses without getting the work permitted he was doing under the radar now why do why do people want to do that it's not so much trying to avoid the the county or the city from having their fingers over everything although that's certainly a part of it but more a a lot of the the cheapest contractors around here handymen women whatever typically are not licensed because that costs a lot more money than to just you know be a handy person so a lot of people that flip houses they have their own crew and their crew is not run by a licensed contractor and so here's the thing in order to get permits it has to be with a licensed contractor but the county and the city require that well that obviously is a problem if you don't have a licensed contractor being the point person there are sometimes contractors that are willing to pull a permit for someone else using their own crew but they usually charge a substantial amount of money for that because that's risky for them they don't most contractors don't want to take on that risk they don't know who these Subs are they don't you know they don't want to get sued for something and and so that's where the rubber meets the road but the county found out that this that this guy had been doing this had been using his own crew to do a lot of work that hadn't been permitted on a lot of houses and so they started going through Zillow and and finding all the properties that that he had owned and sold that he had done work to and they finded this person $225,000 and then made him write letters to every single person he had sold a house to telling him telling those people that the work that had been done to the house had not been permitted and it may not be safe something to that effect and so yeah they they can be out for blood and let me tell you those clipboard Warriors they don't joke around they are ready to pounce they're like sharks in the water when they smell blood they start circling and so you have to you have to be aware of that another story I told a while back this was one of the the most frustrating ones for me personally I was the listing agent for a house that had permitted everything they had done everything by the book finished the renovation we were all good to go listed the house and we went under contract and after being under contract a clipboard Warrior from I think it was the county came by and said no I'm sorry in this area your driveway can only be 10 ft 10 ft wide and you installed a 15t wide driveway here well down the street are multiple homes with bigger driveways circular driveways all sorts of different driveways but they have been grandfathered in because this house was a recent remodel they were not allowed to have the 15ft driveway well cut they they had to cut it down and cutting it down from 15 to 10 ft turns it from a two-car driveway to a onear that was a big deal for the people that were now under contract to purchase the home and so we ended up losing that contract because of the county and and the the part the infuriates me the most out of all of that is people are always going to have people over to their homes right and this is a a short single car driveway now that it had been had to be cut down to 10 ft anytime anyone came over to visit that house or anytime someone does come over to visit that house they have to park on the street and so and and it's a narrow Street and so literally the county was forcing more clutter and traffic on the street over 5T of concrete it it was a joke frustrating but the worst part about it was that they had actually attempted to permit everything and had attempted to go buy the book and still ran into problems with with the county they had additional expense that hurt their home value they were not able to sell the home for as much after they cut it down and lost their first contract as they originally were so it just it's frustrating and and yes I do like to vent about this and here's the thing at the end of the day the permits are not that expensive some of the permits are like 15 25 50 bucks I mean the permits themselves are relatively cheap but the whole problem is that then the county and then the city are involved and then you have to have a licensed South Carolina contractor which many of us don't want to don't want to use particularly you know if if it's just a simple a simple job you shouldn't need to have a licensed contractor come in there and do it just to say that there is a licensed contractor involved it's it's just a ridiculous thing because they don't even do the work that's the thing they will just sub it out to one of their subs why can't you just go to the sub directly and go about it that way well no the the county the city they won't allow that now there is one exception though and this is a very important exception there is one exception and that is that if you are an owner occupant you own the house you live in the house you may pull your own permits you're allowed to do that in that one situation I I think the thinking there is that it's your your home and so if you hire people to do the work and they completely Jack it up you're going to be more invested in making sure that the home that that the work is done properly so that the home that you're living in is not falling apart so I I believe that's the thinking there but even then you know it's not clear-cut on multif family properties for instance so when it comes to both property taxes in in South Carolina and also when it comes to getting loans a duplex Triplex or quadruplex can be owner occupied and if you owner occup occupy one unit of those which of course you can't own or occupy multiple of the units well I guess in theory you could but it wouldn't make sense but if you owner occupy for instance one unit of a quadruplex that is considered an owner occupied quad for the purposes of everything except permitting and this is not clear I I could not find anything about this on the county or the city's websites but I personally witnessed someone in the county office at one point trying to get permits on a duplex that that they were doing work on that was not livable and they were planning to move into it but they couldn't move into it yet because it wasn't livable and they needed to to get the work permitted and the county wouldn't allow it because the county said well a duplex is a rental property and this person was like well I'm owner occupying it though no a duplex is inherently a rental a rental property you have to have a licensed contractor come and pull this permit and so again it's kind of like you know cutting off your nose to sput your face that is what I feel like so frequently is is what code enforcement and permit office what they're doing the clipboard Warriors that are forcing people to go through all this red tape just to do simple things and just to make properties livable and and this is it's for the best of all of us that we update our homes and that we make sure that properties are livable and that we replace roofs and and all of these different things but the county the city they they keep doing things to not make it simple and of course we've talked about this before all of this also impacts housing affordability in a lot of different ways none of them good none of them good so beware the clipboard warriors know what you are getting into when you permit a house or when you choose to not permit work that is being done be careful if you're flipping houses and trying to do it without a permit because I had one recently where it showed up on an inspection report had the work for this home been permitted we would see XYZ there was something electrical in the house that wasn't broken but it just wasn't up to code and the inspector on the inspection report I felt like it was kind of a silly thing to put on an inspection report but said but kind of threw shade at the seller saying if this had been permitted this work would have been done so and and as I already said my story from earlier someone got a very Hefty fine and could potentially have been sued by the people that he had to write letters to based on the county interv intervening and and getting upset with him for not permitting work so be careful out there this is just something that we have to deal with it's something we have to figure out and and work with and unfortunately it's not going away the county the City they keep getting stricter they're only getting stricter they're forcing a lot more things and and now in subdivisions need to have all this green space and all these different requirements as well they keep making it more and more difficult they're trying to to push more costs onto developers it it it's not going to have a long-term positive impact in my opinion but it's something that we have to be aware of and that we have to deal with regardless and so make sure at the end of the day I have to tell you make sure that you get your work permitted the county and the city both have websites that are confusing but that you can go to and and look at the list of things that need to be permitted and the things that they are okay with not permitting and so go ahead and look at that before you do a bunch of work make sure that you're in compliance and that's it for today's episode nice short one hope you guys enjoyed it hope it made you angry at the at the county and the city but but that you understand the importance of of Permitting and how and the potential pitfalls there if you have any questions let me know all of my contact information is in the show notes rate review subscribe to the show and have a great rest of the week [Music]