Some municipalities like Dekalb County and Decatur require the homeowner to live on the property.ADUs should be at most 40% of the main residence's floor space, with a maximum size of 800 square feet in some areas.

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All the county told me is that I'll have to do some landscaping work, add extra parking spaces, but I don't know anything about the stormwater plan. 

If Planning does determine the existence of your ground floor unit, it will require you to legalize the unit through the existing Planning code process assuming zoning supports the third unit OR using the new ADU program making your fast track condo conversion a passing dream.With regards, to some of your latter comments and questions:1) Any un-permitted work (including corrections) is not a good idea as a quick compliant from a neighbor can bring an inspector knocking on your door with a NOV especially in the current environment where everyone is SIP.2) Legalizing existing constructed spaces can be hit and miss based on the inspector you get.

Now, however, we no longer need that much space.

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Thinking of converting this loft space into a functional bedroom to make it a 5 bed 2 bath house for equity. 

You can use neighbor dot com to rent space on existing land with very little hassle, but you do want to do your due diligence on what is needed in the area.

It is one reason JADUs are often pulled for the RE sale- JADU must come from existing permitted space.  

Chad Littell from CoStar notes that while institutional investors adjusted their strategies early in response to rate hikes, individual investors have only recently begun scaling back.July Sales ReportAccording to CoStar’s July Commercial Repeat-Sale Indices (CCRSI), the equal-weighted U.S. composite index, tracking smaller market sales, showed only a 0.2% price increase from June, with prices down 0.7% year-over-year, marking the first annual decline since 2012.