Akron Life November 2022

There were so many great homes in my price range, but I knew I could not consider homes in cities with a point of-sale escrow. Student loans made it very challenging for me to save money for a down payment and other expenses like paying for an appraisal, private inspection, etc. I would have had to wait years longer before having enough savings to cover escrow in addition to everything else. I like my home in Akron, but my options were limited to cities in my price range without that policy. — JL ,Akron

Boera replace the entire window. A kitchen door had some gouges and scratches on the corners, and a replacement was required rather than a fix. “It held up the sale of the property, and then it also cut into my profit on the house because there were unexpected costs we didn’t plan for,” Boera says. Lack of consistency is Boera’s problem with the system. Inspectors interpret viola tions differently. Municipal inspectors are not required to be licensed or accredited like independent, general home inspectors. Not all cities require a point-of-sale inspec tion, and requirements vary depending on where you live. And to be clear, a point-of-sale inspec tion is not a general home inspection. “Point-of-sale inspections are city man dated and must occur before a property can transfer, and they are conducted by cities,” explains Jamie McMillen, vice president of government affairs for the Akron Cleveland Association of REALTORS® (ACAR). “The cities are doing them under the guise of health and safety for the public, but what we see is that they can become a barrier to home ownership.”

A HOMEOWNERSHIP OBSTACLE As a real estate investor, Kevin Stewart has purchased single and multifamily homes in several states, mostly California — and now in the Cleveland market. Point of sale inspections exist in small pockets across the United States. However, some of the most onerous exist in Northeast Ohio. “I wasn’t expecting it,” he says. Stewart works with Realtor Seth Task of The Task Team, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Professional Reality, who is also a member of the Board of Directors of the National Associations of REALTORS®.

“I’ve never seen this before,” Stewart says, relating that he chose the Cleveland area because there were opportunities to invest in more properties to expand his portfolio. But there were some barriers because of point-of-sale inspections. “The cities think they are doing residents a favor because they are making sure the outsides of buildings are taken care of, but we don’t have that problem here [in the San Francisco Bay Area],” he says. “We saw some violations on listings that added up to $25,000 or $30,000, and we didn’t even look at those. “And each city is different, so you never know which inspector you are going to get.” Stewart says, “We had to do some ma neuvering, trying to find properties without the extra cost from the inspections, and that became tricky.” Task points out that communities’ in tention to protect housing stock quality by implementing the point-of-sale inspections just doesn’t play out in real life. “If you ask the municipality, they will say it’s a way of maintaining a vibrant housing stock in good condition without blight,” he says. “That was disproven during the mortgage meltdown because a point-of-sale inspection is no way to prevent blight if you are not maintaining the integrity of the entire community and only those that are selling. What about the person living next door who has owned the house for 30 years and does not maintain it and rarely does their landscaping?” Again, not all municipalities have these inspections in place, and they are largely im plemented in communities in the inner-ring and eastern suburbs of Cleveland, with some into Summit County. “Mayfield Heights,

I S T O C K

Akron Cleveland Association of REALTORS 3