City Council Study Session On Home Inspections in South City

South San Francisco City Council will hold a Special Meeting on point of sale home inspections at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Municipal Services Building at 33 Arroyo Drive. 

The purpose of the session is to look at a proposed ordinance to require certain fire code inspections before a residence is sold in South San Francisco. 

One South City real estate agent and member of the San Mateo County Association of Realtors, Carole Fogelstrom, has recently been speaking out against the proposed ordinance. 

Fogelstrom says that the ordinance would allow fire department home inspectors to fine home sellers for home improvements that were unpermitted but done before the current resident moved in, or that were made up to several decades previous and had since fallen out of code.

Yet Fire Marshal Luis Da Silva told Patch earlier this fall that "if something was built 50 years ago and was right then, it's not a code violation. What we've customarily seen is violations where people move into the garage--where the garage is converted into a residence [without a permit] and stuff like that." 

A staff report states that the proposed ordinance is "an effort to formalize and specifically delineate what residential life safety issues should be inspected for compliance at the point of sale of a residential property."

Fogelstrom criticized the proposed ordinance, saying it is an attempt to justify ongoing abusive inspection practices of entering homes without warrants and requiring home sellers to spend thousands of dollars to make improvements they are not responsible for.

"Many of these so called violations were improvements made by a previous owner," she wrote in a post on her website. "So if a previous owner changed their kitchen countertops and even though no structural work was completed, the city decides that since it was not done with a permit, there is a penalty that has to be paid."

Da Silva said earlier this fall that the process of fire code inspections done before a homeowner can sell a house has not changed in recent history, other than a few additions to the Certificate of Inspection requirements, such as smoke detectors.

"This has been what we’ve been doing now since I think 1984," Da Silva said. 

Both Fogelstrom and Da Silva said that South San Francisco is likely the only city in the county that conducts this kind of point of sale code inspections. 

At the special meeting on Wednesday, the council will take public comments related to the topic.

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