City Code Inspectors

[Nathan Harden]

Hello my fellow Canton investors!

I have owned some rentals in Canton for about a year now and am slowly getting tired of the Canton code inspectors. By no means am I trying to slumlord my rentals in anyway. I just got done with a 2 month, $55,000 rehab on a SH property then the Code inspector went in and pointed out the most pointless stuff that I have ever seen. 3 pages worth of repairs is what I received in the mail. CRAZY! This is not the only time that I have dealt with this but what really opened my eyes is I just asked my insurance rep for a quote for an off market 6plex that was brought to me and she pretty much warned me that a lot of her clients are steering away from investing in the Canton City jurisdiction strictly because of the code inspectors.

Have any of you ran in to this problem? In a way it feels like the City is making it more difficult for landlords to hang around because yearly inspections with a laundry list of repairs makes it real difficult to cash flow when my cash flow is just being held for the future, inevitable inspection.

My opinion/thoughts. Would love some insight from others!

[Jack Smith]

Hi Nathan, yes, I'm hearing things are stepping up in Canton as well, but I haven't had any inspections this year.  Can your GC address the list - as a punch list?  Especially if any of the findings were in scope.  Three pages sounds too heavy for a rehab of that size... I mean, that's about half the value of a better Canton house! 

There's no annual inspections, just once after a sale to a non-owner occupant.  So it's a one and done, at least right now.  But they just voted in August to adapt the 2021 IBC to go into effect in March; haven't reviewed for differences yet.  

Agree with your insurance agent, many investors have been backing out of Canton for the last  number of years because of antics like this.  Are you having your GC or RE Agent represent you at an inspection?  Always have an advocate representing you that can discuss & diffuse things with the inspector.  The ones I dealt with usually just tell me to call when I was done as they didn't want to write up all the issues that I was going to address anyways.

We have a new Mayoral election coming up this fall (incumbent is finally retiring - yippee!) and one of the candidates just called me about speaking at our next SCREIA meeting.  If you'd be willing to share, I'd love to get a copy of your inspection - this is exactly the kind of thing we could talk with him about.