You can sell a home with unpermitted work, but it should be pre-inspected.
The question that I want to tackle today is: Can you sell a home with unpermitted work? Sometimes homeowners choose not to pull an actual permit from the city and just do work on their own homes. Now, I am not here to judge those choices, but the reality is, in the end, when you want to sell your home, you will have to check a box in Tennessee that says there is work that was done on this home that was unpermitted.
Now, the good news is you can absolutely sell a home that has had unpermitted work done. There is no requirement from the government that homes be brought up to codes, which means there's no problem with unpermitted work.
"You can absolutely sell a home that has had unpermitted work done."
Now, the reality is your buyers are still going to do a home inspection right now in this market. They are going to be asking for repairs. The one thing you don't know unless you are an electrician or a plumber is, “is there something I did that an inspector is going to flag?” So my recommendation is if you're going to sell your home and you did a major project that didn't get permitted and wasn't inspected by the city, you might just want to get a pre-inspection on the home, so you know what an inspector is going to say. They may say it looks great, or they may say, “Oh, you actually reversed the cold water and the hot water under these sinks,” or something like that. That might be easy to fix and would be concerning for the buyer if it didn't show up. Then you have to worry about concerning the buyer with that repair.
So that's my advice if you've got work that wasn't permitted—go ahead and get a pre-inspection. Regardless, you can absolutely sell a home without permits for all the work. If you have any questions about any of this, or if you have any real-estate-related needs that I can help with, please reach out to me. I would love to help you.
