"Buying a California Home the Seller Bought Less Than 18 Months Ago: What Repair and Permit Disclosure Do They Owe You?"

The open house in Sacramento smells like new paint. The kitchen has quartz counters and a range hood still wearing a protective film, the primary bath has a glass shower, and the back bedroom is the room that the photos from the last sale show as a garage. You pull up the county record on your phone in the driveway, and the seller bought the home fourteen months ago.

If a California seller accepts your offer within 18 months of taking title to a single-family home, Civil Code section 1102.6h requires a written disclosure. The seller tells you about the room additions, structural changes, alterations and repairs a contractor they hired has done since they bought it, names the contractors and gives you copies of the permits they pulled.

I'm Jeff Moran, a mortgage broker in Bluffton, South Carolina, originating since 1996, licensed in fifteen states, including California, NMLS #483943, through C2 Financial Corporation. I finance California purchases, and a recently remodeled home is one of the places where a little paper early makes the inspection, the appraisal and the loan go a lot more smoothly.

Which California sellers owe the 18-month repair disclosure?

The rule came from AB 968, which the Legislature passed in 2023. The Department of Real Estate's summary of the new laws lists it as Chapter 95, Statutes of 2023, and describes it as a disclosure for the seller of a single-family home who took title within the previous 18 months.

The statute itself, Civil Code section 1102.6h, sets the trigger by two dates. The first is the date title transferred to the seller. The second is the date the seller accepts an offer. If the second date is within 18 months of the first, the disclosure applies. The text of the section as Justia reproduces it also says it covers offers accepted on or after July 1, 2024.

So the date you need is the seller's own purchase date. That date is on the recorded deed, which is a public record, and your agent can find it for you before you write.

The Senate Judiciary Committee's analysis of AB 968 describes the purpose as discouraging unpermitted renovation and unlicensed contracting on homes that are bought, remodeled and resold quickly. You do not have to think of the seller as a flipper for the rule to apply, though. It turns on the dates, so it reaches anyone who sells a single-family home inside that window.

The papers the seller has to hand you

Three parts of the statute put something in your hands.

A list of the work. Subdivision (a) covers room additions, structural modifications, other alterations and repairs made since the seller took title, where a contractor did the work under a contract with the seller. Subdivision (b) lets the seller meet that duty by giving you a list of the work the contractor performed.

The contractors' names. The seller also discloses the name of each contractor they hired for that work. The statute applies the name requirement to jobs above a small dollar threshold that it borrows from the Business and Professions Code, section 7027.2, so a handyman job for a few hundred dollars may not appear. I would still ask for every contractor's name and let the seller's agent say which ones the statute strictly reaches.

Copies of the permits. If the seller pulled a permit for the work, subdivision (c) requires them to give you a copy. If the seller hired someone else to manage the job and never received the permits, the statute lets the seller instead tell you that the permit information may be available from that third party, along with that party's contact information.

Two limits come straight from the wording. The disclosure covers work done since the seller took title, so a remodel by the owner before them is outside it. And it covers work a contractor did under contract with the seller, so a weekend project the seller did with their own hands is not on this list. Your other California disclosures and your inspection are where that work shows up.

Three things to ask for in writing

The disclosure is the seller's duty, and you can make it more useful by asking for it in a form your inspector and your lender can work from. Your agent puts these requests in writing with the offer or right after acceptance.

1. The complete contractor work list. Please ask for the full list of work done since the seller took title, with each contractor's name, the contractor's license number and contact information, and roughly when each job was done. A list with dates lets your inspector match each item to what they see.

2. Copies of every permit, with the final inspection. Please ask for copies of all permits pulled for that work, all pages, along with the city or county record showing each permit passed its final inspection. The statute requires the permit copies. The final inspection record shows whether each job was signed off, and an open permit is something you would want to sort out with the seller before closing.

3. A license you can check yourself. With the license numbers in hand, you can look each contractor up on the Contractors State License Board's Check A License page. The board's lookup shows the license status, bond and workers' compensation insurance information, and complaint disclosures.

The permit trail and your home inspection

Your inspector works for you. A work list with dates tells them exactly where to spend extra time: the new electrical panel, the plumbing behind the remodeled bath, the framing on the addition and the spot where its roof joins the original roof. What to do with your home inspection report covers turning the findings into a follow-up list, and the contractor list makes that list sharper.

If the permit record shows a job never passed its final inspection, your inspector and your agent can talk with you about whether to ask the seller to get it signed off before closing. Your agent handles it in the contract, and I would like to hear about it early so the loan side knows.

The permit trail, the appraisal and your loan

The appraiser works for the lender, and their job is to give the lender an opinion of the home's value. The difference between the appraiser and your home inspector explains why a clean appraisal tells you nothing about the roof, and how appraisals work covers how comparable sales set the number.

A remodel and an addition change what the appraiser is describing. The appraiser reports the square footage of the living space, which appraisers call gross living area. When the contractor list and the permit copies go with the appraisal order, the appraiser can see what was done and that it was permitted. The appraiser decides how to treat any particular piece of work, and I will not predict it before they have been through the home.

The square footage on the appraisal also reaches the payment on a VA loan. VA's Lenders Handbook, Chapter 4, tells the lender to base maintenance and utility costs on "the gross living area as per the appraisal," at a set amount per square foot. A converted garage the appraiser counts as living space raises that figure, so I build it into your numbers from the appraisal itself.

If you are using an FHA loan, the seller's purchase date matters for a second reason. FHA has its own rule about resales that come soon after the seller bought the property, measured by days rather than months, and buying a recently flipped home with an FHA loan walks through those day counts. You will already have the seller's title date for the California disclosure, so you can check both at once.

The steps, in order, for a California purchase

1. Before you write the offer, please ask your agent for the date the seller took title. If it is within the last 18 months, the 1102.6h disclosure is part of this purchase.
2. Please ask, in writing, for the contractor work list, the license numbers, and copies of every permit with its final inspection record.
3. Please share the work list with your home inspector before the inspection, so they know where to look.
4. Once the disclosure and permits arrive, please provide complete copies of them to me, all pages, so they travel with the appraisal order.
5. Please check each contractor on the State License Board's site and note anything that does not match the paperwork.
6. Once you have chosen a rate option, that selection can change, so please tell me if the inspection or the permit record changes the plan during escrow.

Mistakes that cost time on a recently remodeled home

Relying on the listing description. A listing's description is the seller's summary of the home, and the work list and the permits show what was actually done.

Waiting until after the appraisal. If the appraiser walks a home with an addition and has nothing to work from, the questions come after the report instead of before it. Getting the permits to me early keeps the appraisal and the underwriting on the same page.

Reading the disclosure as the whole story. The statute covers contractor work since the seller took title. Work done by the seller personally, or by the owner before them, comes through your other disclosures and your inspection, so you will want all three read together.

An illustration, so the timeline is clear

Figures and names below are made up to show the mechanism. This is not a real file.

A couple is buying a single-family home in Sacramento County. The county record shows the seller took title on March 3, 2025, and the seller accepts their offer on May 20, 2026. That is about 14 and a half months, inside the 18-month window, so the seller owes the disclosure.

The seller's agent delivers a two-page list: a kitchen remodel and an electrical panel upgrade by one licensed contractor, and a garage converted to a bedroom by a second. Permits come with the list for the kitchen and the panel. For the garage conversion, the seller says a project manager handled the permits and gives the project manager's contact information, which the statute allows.

The couple's agent asks for the garage permit and its final inspection from the project manager, and the inspector spends extra time on the converted room. Both contractors show active licenses on the State License Board's site. The couple sends me the full packet, it goes with the appraisal order, and the appraiser has the permit history in hand on the day of the visit. The couple chooses a rate option knowing exactly what they are buying.

Your next steps

If you are buying in California, the California mortgage page covers escrow, transfer tax and who handles the closing, and pre-approval in California explains why the letter should be built around the actual home. If you would like to see pricing with your own numbers, the rate tool is here, with California closing costs built in, no credit pull and no account. You can choose the option that works best for you and change it later.

Nothing here is a loan approval, a denial, a commitment to lend, or legal advice. The disclosure duty belongs to the statute cited above, and questions about a particular seller's obligations or a specific permit belong with your agent, a California real estate attorney or the local building department.

Common questions

What does a California seller have to disclose if they owned the home less than 18 months?

Civil Code section 1102.6h applies to a seller of a single-family home who accepts an offer within 18 months of taking title. That seller must disclose room additions, structural modifications, other alterations and repairs a contractor did under contract with the seller since they took title. The seller also discloses the contractors' names and gives copies of permits they pulled. The section covers offers accepted on or after July 1, 2024.

Can the seller just give me a list instead of a full disclosure?

Yes. Subdivision (b) of Civil Code section 1102.6h lets the seller meet the duty by giving you a list of the work the contractor performed. Asking for the contractor's name, license number and the date of each job on that list makes it far more useful to your inspector and your lender.

Does the seller have to give me copies of the permits?

If the seller pulled a permit for the work, yes, the seller must give you a copy. If the seller hired a third party to manage the work and never received the permits, the statute lets the seller instead tell you the permit information may be available from that third party and give you that party's contact information.

Does the 18-month disclosure cover work the seller did themselves?

The statute reaches work a contractor did under a contract with the seller, so a project the seller did personally is not part of this particular disclosure. Work by an earlier owner is also outside it, because the duty covers work since the seller took title. Your other California disclosures and your home inspection are where that work comes up.

How does unpermitted work affect my mortgage appraisal?

The appraiser works for the lender and reports the home's value and its gross living area. The appraiser decides how to treat any particular piece of work. Getting the contractor list and the permit copies to your lender before the appraisal means the appraiser has the permit history in hand. On a VA loan, the appraisal's gross living area also feeds the maintenance and utility figure in the payment.