How to verify ADU in Saint Petersburg is legal

[Claire D.]

Hi BP community. I'm currently seeking a property to house hack in St Pete and one thing that is unclear to me is how to verify if a property that has an existing mother in law / ADU is legal and up to code. I ran into one situation where the seller told us up front the work was not permitted to convert their mother in law unit so now I am wary of this.

How do you go about verifying if an ADU/ mother in law/ garage apartment etc is legal and up to code before offering? Tried reading through the codes site but it was pretty dense so hoping someone can break it down for me in a more digestible way. Thanks for the advice!

[Zach Kidd]

Hi Claire! ADUs can be great, but you are right - there is risk there too.

For the sake of this discussion, we will use the City of St Petersburg proper. 

Homework: You'll want to use the Pinellas County Property Appraiser ( https://www.pcpao.org/ ) to start. On the left menu, Search By / Address and step through that until you find the correct matching property and open that page.

Near the top you will see the Parcel ID (29-30-16-00072-xxx-xxxx). 

Directly beneath that is the Compact Property Record Card, which opens as a PDF.

On the left hand side of that, you'll see the officially-official Building Characteristics and Total Living Units.

If you see "Total Living Units 2" at the bottom of that section, that's what you want.

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With the homework side done, call the municipality (City of St Petersburg Building Department) to confirm it is a conforming structure that you would be able use in that capacity. You'll have all of the information, which will make them happy.

You will also want to check out this  from the City of St Petersburg. 

On page 2 they cover ADUs, and provide the phone numbers to contact.

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If a property is in another municipality (Pinellas Park, Tarpon Springs, etc.), you'll have to check with them instead, but the Homework is still the same.

Cheers!