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I had the exact same thing happen to a house I owned in Utah. I had purchased a house that had a mother-in-law apartment in it, which I could offer my parents to live in, as my Dad was in bad health waiting for a transplant. At one point, after about 5 years of me living there, there had been a leak under the sink in the bathroom and at the same time the stove also went out (within the same month). We were doing better financially so we decided to take this as an opportunity to renovate the mother-in-law suite as it was starting to show its' age. We wanted to improve the bathroom significantly (remove the tub and add a walk-in shower), update the very dated materials, and add a gas-line to the stove (since the main kitchen upstairs had a gas stove already, and the gas water heater was on the opposite side of a wall where the mother-in-law stove goes). Anyway, we had a plumber come out and quote the work and he wanted to get a permit for the work. That was fine, I wasn't intending to do anything shady, so we requested a build permit and the inspector came out and told us we weren't supposed to have anything in the basement at all. No kitchen, no side entry doorway, no bathroom, no two bedrooms, no kitchen. The entire mother-in-law suite was around 1,000 sqft, it wasn't insignificant, and he was saying the previous owner never permitted it. We basically got notice from the city that our house was illegal and could be condemned if we didn't first pay permitting and get inspections on the current home, before we do any new work. Keep in mind, I had owned this home for over 5 years when this was happening, I never did the original work, and the original work was now so old it needed to be replaced and updated. The plumber estimated by the plumbing work and code it was built to that it had to have been built at least 20 years prior. Based on the materials and designs of things like vanities, tilework, trim, kitchen finishes, etc I would have estimated that it was also about 20 years old. So yeah we basically got extorted to pay the permitting for work that was so old it was now being replaced. Then we had to do the same thing again for the replacement work. Then on top of that, then next year our house was assessed at $180k more money, increasing property taxes significantly. This was in ~2016. |
No guarantee of course that there would be something similar in your area, let alone accessible anonymously. Not to mention that maybe it wasn't obvious that the in-law was an addition, and that it's civilized to assume that the previous owners didn't cheat.
[1] https://sfplanninggis.org/pim/