How do I check permit history on a house?

Ask the city or county building department for the address. Permit history is a public record, and most will tell you what permits were pulled, when, and whether the work passed final inspection.

The useful part is the timing: you can do this before you write an offer. It costs nothing, it takes a phone call or a form, and it tells you something no tour and no listing will.

How to actually do it

If you are on the selling side of this, how lockbox access works is the other piece of housekeeping worth doing once.

Find the right jurisdiction. City if the address is inside city limits, county if it is unincorporated. If you are not sure, the county parcel record tells you.

Look for an online portal first. Many Utah cities publish permit lookups by address. Searching the city name with “building permit search” usually finds it.

If there is no portal, call or email the building department with the full address and ask for the permit history. Some jurisdictions treat it as a routine counter request; some want a records request form.

Ask three specific things rather than just “the history”:

• What permits have been issued for this address
• Whether each one reached final inspection and was closed out
• Whether there are any open permits or outstanding violations

That third one matters most and is the one people forget to ask.

What you are looking for

An open permit. Work that was started under a permit and never finalized. This is the one that lands on a new owner, because the obligation attaches to the property. An open permit can block a future permit, and you can inherit the job of getting work you did not do signed off.

A finished basement with no permit. Extremely common. Also a safety question rather than only a paperwork one, because egress windows, ceiling height, smoke detection and electrical are exactly what the inspection would have covered.

An addition, deck, garage conversion or ADU with nothing on file. Square footage that is not permitted may not count as finished square footage, which affects appraisal and resale.

Electrical and plumbing work with no record. The highest-stakes category and the least visible.

A roof, furnace or water heater replacement where the permit tells you the date — genuinely useful, because finding out how old the roof and furnace are is otherwise guesswork.

What unpermitted work actually costs a buyer

Not usually a demolition order. The realistic costs are these.

Getting it legalized. Sometimes possible retroactively, through an inspection and fees, and sometimes it requires opening walls so an inspector can see what is behind them.

Insurance. An insurer can decline a claim connected to unpermitted work. This is the risk people underweight because it only surfaces after something has already gone wrong.

Appraisal and financing. An appraiser may not credit unpermitted square footage, which can create a gap between the price and the valuation.

Resale. You inherit the disclosure obligation. What a seller has to disclose in Utah covers it. The short version: a problem you knew about and did not disclose is the expensive version.

Safety. Last on the list and first in importance. The code exists because of things that have gone wrong in houses.

This is not the same as a home inspection

Two different checks and people conflate them.

An inspector tells you the condition of what is there. The permit record tells you whether what is there was ever approved. A finished basement can pass an inspection comfortably and still be unpermitted.

What happens during a home inspection in Utah covers the first. Ask for both.

If you are remodeling rather than buying

Same record, different reason. Before you plan work, find out what is on file, because an open permit or unpermitted prior work can complicate your application.

Whether you need a permit to remodel in Herriman is the local version of what triggers a requirement, and the answer catches people — the threshold is lower than most assume.

What to do with the answer

Finding unpermitted work is not a reason to walk away. It is a reason to negotiate with information, and there are four honest paths.

Ask the seller to legalize it before closing. Cleanest outcome and the slowest. The seller applies, the inspector comes, the work is either approved or corrected. Worth asking for when the work is substantial — a bedroom, an added bathroom, a garage conversion.

Take a credit and handle it yourself. Faster, and you control the contractor. You are accepting the risk that opening it up reveals more.

Price it in and leave it. Appropriate for minor work where the realistic cost is a disclosure on your eventual sale rather than a repair. Plenty of houses have a deck somebody built in 1998. Know about it, pay accordingly, move on.

Walk. The right answer when the unpermitted work is structural, electrical behind finished walls, or an addition whose foundation nobody can see.

Which of those fits depends on what the work is, and that is the conversation to have with your agent and your inspector together rather than separately.

One thing I would not do: accept a seller’s assurance that it was “done to code” without a record. Done to code and inspected are different claims, and only one of them has evidence behind it.

What I actually see

Buyers who find out about the basement at the appraisal.

The sequence is always the same. Lovely finished basement, no mention of permits, nobody asks. Then the appraiser does not count the square footage, or the insurer asks a question, or it surfaces years later when they try to sell. Every version is more expensive than the phone call would have been.

The other pattern is sellers who genuinely do not know. They bought it finished, assumed it was permitted, and are not hiding anything. That is the common case rather than the exception, which is why asking the city beats asking the seller — not because sellers lie, but because they frequently do not know either.

What to do next

Before you write an offer on anything with a finished basement, an addition, a deck or an ADU, call the building department and ask the three questions above. It is free and it takes one call.

If the answer is that work was done without a permit, that is information rather than a reason to walk. Price it, ask what legalizing it involves, and decide with the facts.

I am Kelsey Earl, a Realtor with Keller Williams South Valley, and I make this call before an offer rather than during due diligence, because the answer sometimes changes the offer. Send me an address and I will find out what is on file.