Egress from BR to garag = not a bedroom

[Mike Garrett RAA]

 

[BarbaraNJ]

John:

I have been doing appraisals since the only requirement was a clipboard (no license, no E&O, no continuing ed, etc)

At no time did any association (IFA, SREA, ETC) give any classes on construction, building codes, blueprints, etc. In fact, these type of classes have only been offered in the past three years or so. This lack of construction education always bothered me, and I expressed my disappointment to several organizations.

The problem is liability and accountablility. We are supposed to recognize illegal or non conforming uses. While we typically interpret that to mean zoning, by saying "none known" or "none observed", we are inferring that we did the research.

The situation you refer to does indeed have its basis in the building codes. Most of the states are currently changing to "IBC"; International Building Code. Other codes, such as CABO, BOCA and others mentioned above are very similar.

Building codes, primarily for fire safety, do not allow direct ingress from a garage to a bedroom. I won't bore you with citing the various codes and conditions, but the room may be called a den, computer room, walk in closet, etc.

If you appraise the home as "4 BR" because thats the way it was listed by a realtor and the buyer gets the mortgage based on "4 BR" and buys the home based on having 4 bedrooms to use, and finds out later on that the building inspector will not allow one room for sleeping use, the purchaser and /or the lender may come after you.

Trouble is, no one told me that until after I was appraising for about five years. I'm certain that I counted more bedrooms than I should have. Fortunately, those loans never went bad, because I never got any calls on them.

You may want to get friendly with a local fire or building inspector just to get some additional insight as to permitted uses.