Retrofitting will likely not only pertain to Los Angeles City

[Tim Chen]

Today i met with a client and he shared something with me. With Chase's rates on a quick rise to the neighborhood of 4.29% for multi-family lending, he wanted to explore his options with other lenders and settled with East West Bank. As luck would have it, East West Bank is now requiring a hold back of funds for retrofitting. This does not only refer to the city of Los Angeles mandate, where soft story retrofitting is already required and owners have 7 years to remedy, this was a multi family unit in San Gabriel with tuck under parking. Again, this was a lender requirement and not one put forth by the city. The 3 conditions that the lender had required before closing were as followed.

1)get an engineer out to estimate costs 2) bank will hold back 1.25x the cost of fixing it and it will not be released until fixed 3)6-9 months after close have the retrofit work completed.

If the loan was $1m and the estimated costs for retrofitting is $100k, then they would only give you $875k and hold the $125k, not to be released until work is complete. Be careful when investing in multi family units with Soft story structures because, even if it is not required now, it will likely become something you have to fix in the future

[Jeff R.]

It is really interesting that they are requiring this outside of the City of Los Angeles. I am a structural engineer here in Los Angeles and have some experience with the Soft Story ordinance. It is less common for multi-family buildings, but there is also an ordinance for concrete building built before 1980. Also the City of West Hollywood and Santa Monica recently passed soft story ordinance and neighboring cities are looking into following in the same direction.