Selling a house with an open permit or unpermitted work in Maryland

Two versions of the same problem come up in Maryland sales all the time. In the first, a permit was pulled for a deck, a basement, a roof or an electrical service upgrade, the work got done, and nobody ever scheduled the final inspection. The county record still shows the permit as open. In the second, the work was done with no permit at all, sometimes by you, more often by an owner two deeds back. Both surface at the worst moment, usually when a buyer’s agent or lender pulls the county permit history a week before settlement. This is what each one means, what you are required to say about it, and how to sell the house without spending a season with an inspector.

An open permit is a record problem before it is a construction problem

Every Maryland county runs its own permit office and its own online lookup, and a buyer, an agent or a title company can search a house’s permit history by address in a few minutes. A permit that was issued but never closed stays in that record. The work may be finished and fine. From the county’s side the file is still waiting on a final inspection, and each county has its own rule for how long a permit stays valid without inspection activity before it lapses, which means a permit from years ago may now be expired rather than merely open. Closing it means scheduling the inspection that was skipped. Closing an expired one usually means reinstating or reapplying first, then inspecting, and if the work is now behind drywall the inspector may ask to see what is behind it.

Unpermitted work is a valuation problem

When the work was never permitted at all, the record shows nothing, and that is the problem. A finished basement, a converted garage or a third bathroom that the county has never seen cannot be counted as permitted living space. Appraisers working for a lender treat that space carefully, so on a financed sale the price a buyer can support may not include the room you paid for. And the county can require the work to be permitted after the fact, brought to current code, or removed, if it ever becomes aware of it. We cover the enforcement side on our code violations article. This page is about what happens when there is no citation yet, just a gap in the record.

What you have to disclose

Maryland’s disclosure law, Section 10-702 of the Real Property Article, requires a seller to give a buyer either a residential property condition disclosure statement or a disclaimer statement before a contract is signed. The disclosure statement asks about the systems of the house and about land use matters based on your actual knowledge. The disclaimer sells the house as is, but it does not excuse you from disclosing latent defects you know about, meaning material defects a buyer would not see on a careful visual inspection that would pose a direct threat to the health or safety of the buyer or an occupant. Wiring in an unpermitted basement that was never inspected can fall in that category. The clean move is the same either way: write down what you know about the permit history, put it in the contract, and let the buyer price it. A buyer who did not receive the statement before signing has an unconditional right to rescind within five days of receiving it, so the disclosure is not a formality you can leave for later.

Why retail buyers stall on this

A financed buyer brings a home inspector, an appraiser and an underwriter, and any of the three can turn an open permit into a condition. Common outcomes are a demand that you close the permit before settlement, a price reduction that assumes the worst about what the inspector will find, or a lender that declines to count the space. Closing a permit on a lender’s timeline means finding a contractor willing to sign for another contractor’s work, scheduling an inspection in whatever window the county has, and hoping the inspector does not ask you to open a wall. Sellers who go down this road often spend weeks and a few thousand dollars to keep a contract alive, and some lose the contract anyway.

Selling with the permit open

We buy Maryland houses with open permits and with unpermitted work, and we do not ask you to close anything first. You tell us what you know about the work and who did it, we look at the county record ourselves, and the offer is written with the math shown against a listing. There is no inspection contingency and no appraiser, so the finished basement is priced as what it is rather than as a lender’s exclusion. After closing we handle the permit on our side, whether that means scheduling the final inspection, reapplying for a lapsed permit, or bringing the work up to code as part of the renovation we were going to do anyway. Settlement runs through a licensed Maryland title company in two to three weeks. Our as-is page covers what we do and do not ask you to fix, and if the county has already written a citation, the code violations article picks up from there.

An open permit is a gap in a county file. Unpermitted work is a gap in the record and possibly the code. Neither one stops a sale in Maryland. What they stop is a lender, and a sale that does not depend on a lender does not have that problem.