It’s a single family dwelling built in 2001 and is owned by Myself and my wife.

Great guy, super knowledgeable, and when he saw the kitchen in the garden unit he said “Yeah, we’d have to rip all of this out because the ceiling height is too low meaning there’s no way it’s a legal unit.”The zoning is also RS-3 (2 units only, but apt. is in the Accessory Dwelling Unit zone) so to my knowledge we’d need to change the zoning.

I just can't wait to see what WAMU does with this one in REO...the property has been RED TAGGED by the city of Portland as illegal to occupy dwelling...i mean, have fun with that.The problem is the Loss Mitigation deptartment are run by uneducated hourly employees who get hammered with calls and emails every day and handle at least 100 files at a time.

Typically, land appreciates over time and dwellings depreciate. 

Property taxes are assessed only on the dwelling unit.In my case, I  declare the land value as zero and use the purchase price of the condo as the depreciation basis for the dwelling structure.

We call it ADU here (accessory dwelling unit).

If it is listed as a single-family dwelling, just make it 'legal' again.These numbers appear to be awesome!  

Develop a property, convert SRO's to a standard dwelling or syndicate a deal.

well that depends on your house: you should be insured for somewhere between $150 and $250/square foot for your dwelling value (using really broad numbers here, but whatever it would cost to rebuild is the goal).  

It has a dwelling insurance policy meant for rentals, but is tagged for a mailing address set to my primary residence (although the insurance property address is correct & out of state).