Curmudgeon wrote:
Back to the OP's question: I know zilch about Nevada's laws on this. But the fact that the non permitted stuff is in the ad tells me 1)THEY think there's an issue and 2) that means yes it can be leverage to bring the price down.
1) is pretty much what I suspected but I'm still new at the US real estate game so I needed to figure out if that is really an issue.
Curmudgeon wrote:
Do your due diligence.
If it's possible to maybe pay cash for the house up front, then complete the repairs and have them inspected for code (or even remove them and do it your way), I would think this would make it a lot more palatable for the bank come mortgage time.
Think of it this way: in the event there's a default, do they want to be standing there holding the bag on a piece of property that's very hard to sell because there is no way to prove the additions/repairs are to code?
Unfortunately I don't have a 1/4 mil down the back of the sofa so I would have to buy with a mortgage.
Sounds like I need advice from an attorney, an experienced realtor and possibly the local building department to figure out if it's even worth my time pursuing this. At the moment it doesn't look like the house is cheap enough but if this is more than a CYA exercise, but I have a suspicion that waiting this out for another couple of months and then throwing in a real lowball offer might work.
A $250k house that needs work? I hope it's the cheapest house in the n'hood. Seriously. The last thing you want is the most expensive house in the neighborhood. That would include buying said house for $250k and then having to drop, say, $50k in it when everything around is going for $300k. That makes it real difficult for you to come out ahead in the event of a sale being necessary.
Now, if everything around it is going for, say, $350-$375k now you are in a much better position, equity wise.
If you are prepared to sit tight and wait for the market to recover and you won't get all beat up by holding, then it might make sense to pay close to the going rate in the n'hood.
Case in point: the house I am in now peaked at ~$146k at the height of the market, and is now worth ~$138-$140k. The previous owners had combined mortgages on the property of $171k. 
They were in bad shape; they would have had to pay someone to take over and I think that's why, after the wife died ~ 4 1/2 years ago, the husband just quit making payments and waited till the bank came to change the locks.
In the Lake Tahoe basin restrictions could be VERY intense, watershed and all that. I Have a friend that was a realtor in the area. PM me if you want me to see if he is still in the biz.
Curmudgeon wrote:
A $250k house that needs work? I hope it's the cheapest house in the n'hood. Seriously. The last thing you want is the most expensive house in the neighborhood. That would include buying said house for $250k and then having to drop, say, $50k in it when everything around is going for $300k. That makes it real difficult for you to come out ahead in the event of a sale being necessary.
Let's just put it this way - it's extremely hard to find a house with a double garage in that particular area for less than $300k, but it's comparatively easy to spend between $500k and a couple of million.
My brother modified a cabin and was caught. They told him to get it back engineered and permitted. But he couldn't get the engineering sign off because he had cheaped out on a couple structural items (mainly he didn't have the required foundation frost protection) and no one would sign off on that. So he was faced with either not complying or tearing down the cabin. He chose non-compliance and the city registered a notice on the title that effectively prevents him from selling to anyone who needs bank financing. So he's kind of berkeleyed.
The trouble is that if you do something without permits and then want to obtain a permit for another project down the road, you will need to bring the old reno up to code. So if you never want to build or add on again you might be OK.
Or if no pissed off neighbors report you you might be OK.
And the other thing they do here is compare sat images with historical data, and if your property looks different from the air, and no permit is found, they come knocking.....
The smart thing to do is call that towns zoning administrator and find out what the deal is. Get the straight poop directly from them.
It may not be a big deal, it may be a huge deal, no way to know. A lot of good advice here, but it ultimately comes down to the zoning person who deals with this house.
