I have taught our advisor programme on coastal permitting since 2021, which sounds like the dullest subject in this business until a sale collapses over it. On the Malibu coast, the permitted status of a beach stair, a seawall or a deck is regularly the single largest variable in a transaction.
The problem is that the structure exists whether or not the permission does. Plenty of stairs were built decades ago, in good faith, under rules that have since changed or by owners who never sought approval at all. The house sells, the buyer’s counsel asks for the permit history, and something that everyone assumed was an asset becomes an unquantified liability.
There are three outcomes. The permit exists and is clean, in which case the frontage is worth what people think. It does not exist but the structure is capable of being regularised, which costs time and money that should come off the price. Or it cannot be regularised, in which case a buyer is purchasing a house with a stair that may have to be removed.
The remedy is early and unglamorous. We pull the permit history before a property is listed, not after an offer. Where something is missing we say so in the particulars. It occasionally costs a vendor an over-optimistic asking price. It has never yet cost one a completed sale, which is the trade I would make every time.
