rental inspection

In Minneapolis if you own a rental property, you pay up front for a rental license, which is required, and then at any time in the near or distant future you can be subject to a rental inspection. This inspection is a fairly straightforward list of requirements your unit(s) must meet above and beyond code compliance. Some of the things on the list are logical to ensure the safety of the tenants, like requiring working smoke alarms, others are unnecessary to provide a safe/ comfortable home, such as requiring all wooden fences to be either painted or stained.We had looked over the list before renting out our duplex, but had not crossed everything off as it could have been years before the city decided to inspect the property, and really not everything is necessary to attract and keep tenants. Unfortunately, it wasn't years, but just a few months before the city contacted us for our inspection. 

We got a letter in the mail in mid-January stating that our inspection would be on February 15th. Luckily we had a month's notice, and luckily we could do it late enough in the afternoon that David could meet the inspector (as these things make me incredibly nervous). We did very little to prepare for the inspection- just walked through checking the smoke detectors. There were a few other little things we could have easily fixed, but we left them in case she didn't notice, or in case writing down a small thing would satisfy her enough to not write down a big thing.

The inspection lasted 15 minutes (I was expecting it to be 45min- an hour). She (according to David) simply walked through each room with a clipboard, opened some blinds, tested some water and was done. We almost survived with a clean bill of health. When she left she informed David that we needed to scrape and paint over all peeling paint on the outside of the house by June 1st. Now this is actually a pretty big task. We knew we could get caught on this as the outside of the house does need to be painted, and no peeling paint is a requirement in the rental inspection list, but we were hoping it would be overlooked. We were however planning on painting the exterior this summer, so now we just have to expedite our plans and get it done by June 1st- a hard feat in MN. Luckily we literally just have to scrape and paint the peeling portions, the rest of the paint job can look like crap. So we can do a preliminary scrape/ paint job by June 1st and then have the rest of the summer to make our house look spic and span. She also informed David, by the way, that our basement bedroom might not be legal. And here is where things got/ get a little tricky.

 This picture probably makes the siding look better than it does in person, 

but you can see the paint job isn't terrible, not great either, 

but good enough where we had hope it would be overlooked.

She explained that our basement bedroom (which to us, and our personal home inspector appeared to meet all the requirements) must have had a permit pulled at one point in time, by any previous owner, for the egress window (which we did not install) as it was an "uninhabitable space being made habitable." She told David she would look into it when she got back to the office and inform us if a permit had never been pulled, and if not, and we wanted to make the room a legal bedroom, we would have to go ahead and have one pulled and have the room re-inspected. She called back a day or two later and left a message, with what we thought would have been good news- that a permit was pulled for the window- however she added in there that the room still wasn't a legal bedroom and if we want to make it legal we can go to the city with our plans and pull a permit- but did not say why it wasn't legal. We have left a message with her asking her to explain, but have not heard back.

 The picture doesn't do the room much justice, 

but just to give you an idea that the room does in fact look like a bedroom-

normal ceiling heights, spacious enough, closet, egress window, etc.

The room meets the size requirement, egress requirement, ceiling height requirement, window size ratio to room requirement, and heat requirement. We can not figure out why it is not legal. Our guess (because she commented on the heat source when in the room, according to David), is that they want to see more than pipes heating a bedroom, even though the pipes adequately heat the space to 69 degrees (the city's requirement). If this is true we would have to pull a permit and install electric baseboard heaters- after asking around, everything included, the cost would be around $500. So, not too bad, to be able to advertise the room legally as another bedroom. However, it is incredibly frustrating that this, or whatever the issue is, was not pointed out at the initial rental inspection, and that we have not heard back from her in over a week.

The really good news in all of this is that our tenants were not using that room as a bedroom. If they were we would have been fined for illegal occupancy and then had to deal with making the bedroom legal immediately. As it is, we can decide to take action on the issue now or wait until we go to rent it out again. Or we can do nothing and say it is a 2BR, 2BA apartment.We are incredibly thankful for getting/choosing these tenants right now as opposed to some of the larger groups that came through that would certainly have had beds in there.

So, all things considered, the rental inspection went well. The only real thing the city is making us do, we had plans to do anyways. And the other issue we can deal with at our leisure. We also now know our rental inspector, though not great at returning phone calls, isn't too much of a stickler (inspectors work an area of the city, so she will be ours on that property until she leaves her job). Another lesson in expecting the unexpected in home ownership/ property management, and another first crossed off our landlord experiences list!