Cleveland Real Estate News

Sound odd? It’s one of the fascinating/frustrating, educational, frustrating things that can slow the closing of a house sale down uh, to a frustrating crawl?

Here is the deal. I have a listing with an accepted offer. The building is a four plex.  Four, one bedroom living spaces. Current zoning laws divide property use like this: residential (can be attached condo or single family).  multi-family (two to four unit living, like the fourplex I mentioned, or a duplex).  Every residential unit that houses more than four people/families is considered a commercial structure.  (there are other kids of commercial property zoning but we will stick with housing issues here).

Back to my listed four plex. Buyer and my seller come to agreement on contract terms, we have the inspection, terms met there, loan application moving along. When the lender says Houston, we have a problem.

Seems structure on whatever records FHA is reading, is supposed to be zoned for a two family property. FHA and everyone else agrees, this is something that came up prior to my seller owning the property, because he has had the appropriate city certificates of occupancy from day one. So I call a few people at the city and am told by two separate departments that all my seller needs to do is get a copy of his latest certificate of occupancy to the FHA lender and things will be hunky dory.

FHA says nope, we don’t care that it says four unit building on this certificate, because the ZONING says two family.  This all relates, they say, to the possibility of fire and having to rebuild. Meaning if it’s zoned two family, only a two family structure could be rebuilt. See the problem?

Now both the buyer’s Realtor® and myself are confused because there is no ‘two family’ zoning in Cleveland. Does this mean it’s just an error on the paperwork and someone at City hall can change it?  Does it have to go through a zoning variance application to complete the selling process?

Well so far, I don’t have an answer, So this will be the continuing story of will this fourplex be able to be sold in a timely fashion or not?  Stay tuned.

Maybe there used to be zoning that differentiated two family from four?  No one at City Hall seems to have the historical knowledge to answer that question.

My job is never dull ! If any of you own a multi-family home in the City of Cleveland, or maybe it’s an older building in another township or city.  You might want to check the zoning.  Because if it’s not matching the usage, you just might not ever be able to sell it if you want to.

And yes, it sure seems to have taken quite a few decades for someone to find this out.  Peace Out – 3C