Home › Guides › Do You Have to Fix Anything Before Selling a House in Los Angeles?
Almost nothing, and people spend tens of thousands of dollars finding that out the hard way. But there is a short list of things that genuinely are required — and in the City of Los Angeles it is longer than the state's.
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding we run into. Somebody decides to sell a tired Valley house, an agent or a relative or a contractor tells them "you'll have to bring it up to code first," and they spend $40,000 on a roof and a panel before anyone has run the arithmetic on whether the money comes back.
It usually doesn't. And the premise is wrong to begin with.
California has no general requirement that you repair a house before selling it. There is no code-compliance inspection at transfer, no requirement that the property be habitable, no rule that the roof be sound or the foundation intact. You can sell a house with a red tag on the door. People do, every week, in this city.
What California has instead is a disclosure regime: you don't have to fix it, you have to say it. Those are very different obligations and conflating them costs Valley homeowners real money.
That said, there is a genuine list of point-of-sale requirements — four at the state level, three more if the property sits inside the City of Los Angeles, and a whole separate inspection if it sits in the City of San Fernando. All of them together are worth a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. None of them is a renovation. Here is the whole list, in the order that matters.
Four items get discussed as "California point-of-sale retrofits." Only two are genuinely install-before-you-sell duties. The other two are standing owner obligations that have nothing to do with the sale — which matters, because it changes who can make you do them and what happens if you don't.
The statute is blunt: on and after January 1, 1986, every single-family dwelling that is sold shall have an operable smoke alarm, approved and listed by the State Fire Marshal. On top of that, subdivision (b) requires the seller to deliver to the buyer a written statement that the seller is in compliance — which can live in the deposit receipt, an addendum, or a separate document, delivered as soon as practicable before transfer of title.
The myth worth killing: you do not have to rip out your existing alarms and install sealed ten-year-battery units. The ten-year sealed battery rule, Health & Safety Code § 13114, regulates who may market, distribute, or sell smoke alarms in California — it is a product rule aimed at manufacturers and retailers, effective July 1, 2014. The Office of the State Fire Marshal said so directly in Information Bulletin 14-006: existing installed smoke alarms that are operable and in working condition are not required to be replaced. Hardwired alarms are outside the sealed-battery rule entirely.
Nor does selling force you to bring alarm placement up to current building code — an alarm in every bedroom, hardwired and interconnected. That gets triggered by a permit, not a sale: § 13113.7(a)(2) attaches it to permits for alterations, repairs or additions over $1,000 issued after January 1, 2014. The sale trigger is only "an operable smoke alarm."
What it costs you: the price of batteries, or forty dollars at a hardware store. That is the entire compliance cost of the most-cited California point-of-sale retrofit.
All new, replacement, and existing residential water heaters have to be braced, anchored or strapped to resist falling or horizontal displacement in an earthquake, to California Plumbing Code standards. And subdivision (b) puts it on the seller directly: "The seller of any real property containing a water heater shall certify to the prospective purchaser that this section has been complied with." The certification can sit in the Homeowner's Guide to Earthquake Safety, the purchase contract, or the transfer disclosure statement.
Worth noticing how this one differs from the smoke alarm statute. Section 13113.8(g) says a transfer is not invalidated by non-compliance and caps the buyer's remedy at $100. Section 19211 contains no such cap and no such shield. Instead, subdivision (f) declares a violation a nuisance, correctable under Health & Safety Code § 17980. That is a meaningfully stronger posture, and it is the point-of-sale item most worth actually handling.
What it costs you: a strapping kit is under fifty dollars; a plumber will do it for a couple hundred. "Water heater" for this purpose means a standard unit not exceeding 120 gallons for which a pre-engineered strapping kit is available.
Here is a correction to something nearly every "California seller checklist" gets wrong. The Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Prevention Act requires the owner of a dwelling unit with a fossil-fuel-burning heater or appliance, a fireplace, or an attached garage to install an approved carbon monoxide device. For single-family units that deadline was July 1, 2011. It is not conditioned on a sale, and § 17926 contains no requirement that anything be delivered or certified to a buyer at transfer.
Which does not mean skip it. You are the owner, so you owe the duty anyway; violation is an infraction with a $200 maximum, after a 30-day notice to correct. And like the smoke alarm statute, § 17926(d) provides that no transfer of title is invalidated by non-compliance and caps actual damages at $100. The carbon monoxide line you see on the standard forms is a contract convention, not a statutory transfer requirement.
This is the one people find most confusing, so take it in three pieces.
Who it applies to. Section 1101.2 limits the whole article to residential and commercial real property built and available for use on or before January 1, 1994. A house built in 1998 is outside it entirely. Most of the Valley's housing stock is not — Van Nuys, Reseda, Canoga Park and Pacoima are wall-to-wall pre-1994.
What counts as noncompliant. Section 1101.3(c) gives exact thresholds: a toilet manufactured to use more than 1.6 gallons per flush, a urinal over 1 gallon per flush, a showerhead with flow capacity over 2.5 gallons per minute, and any interior faucet that emits more than 2.2 gallons per minute. Note that last one — the statute has a single "interior faucet" category at 2.2 gpm. The 1.8 gpm kitchen and 1.2 gpm lavatory figures you will find online come from the Energy Commission's Title 20 appliance standards, which govern what may be sold in California by manufacture date. They are not the § 1101.3 test, and conflating them makes sellers think compliant fixtures are noncompliant.
What you owe at the sale. Section 1101.4(b) required owners of pre-1994 single-family homes to have replaced noncompliant fixtures by January 1, 2017 — that is a standing obligation that matured years ago, not something triggered by selling. What the sale triggers is § 1101.4(c): the seller must disclose in writing the requirement and whether the property includes any noncompliant fixtures. Civil Code § 1102.155 is where that lands on the transfer disclosure statement.
Nothing in the article affects title, blocks escrow, or carries a fine. There are narrow exemptions in § 1101.7 — registered historical sites, property where a licensed plumber certifies installation is not technically feasible given the age or configuration of the plumbing, and buildings with water service permanently disconnected.
And then there is § 1101.9, which matters enormously in Los Angeles: any city that adopted a retrofit ordinance before July 1, 2009 is exempt from the state article so long as its ordinance remains in effect. Los Angeles did. Which brings us to the part that catches people.
If your house is in Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Reseda, Canoga Park, Winnetka, Sun Valley, Pacoima, Sylmar, Panorama City, Arleta, Northridge, Sunland, Tujunga or anywhere else inside city limits, the state list is not the whole list.
Before residential property changes hands in the City of Los Angeles, the seller has to obtain a Report of Residential Property Records from LADBS and deliver it to the buyer — before entering into an agreement of sale, or before the close of escrow. It costs $70.85 and it is good for six months, so one report covers a deal that drags.
The important thing about the 9A is what it is not. It is a records printout, not an inspection. Nobody from the city walks your house. It states what the city's records say your building legally is — zoning, the authorized occupancy and use per permits and certificates of occupancy, certain demolition-related orders, and whether the property sits in the Rent Escrow Account Program. An ordinary Order to Comply is not on that list, and the report carries a printed disclaimer saying it does not cover illegal additions, improper construction, illegal uses, or existing corrective orders.
So a clean 9A does not mean a clean house. What it does mean, for a seller with an unpermitted garage conversion, is that the city's own document will say two bedrooms and a garage while the listing says four bedrooms — in writing, for any buyer who reads it. That is not a reason to skip the report. It is a reason to disclose the conversion before the report does it for you.
Section 96.309 provides that non-compliance does not invalidate the sale, and § 96.309.1 sets out grounds on which a buyer may rescind. Order it early; LADBS does not publish a turnaround time and you do not want it to be the thing holding escrow open.
This is the one out-of-town buyers, out-of-town agents and national "we buy houses" sites reliably miss, because it is the city ordinance that Civil Code § 1101.9 grandfathers in.
Section 122.03(e) requires, before the sale or exchange of a property, that water closets, showerheads and urinals meet the city's standards — and effective January 1, 1999, that residential water closets be low-consumption units, which in practice means the 1.6-gallon ultra-low-flush standard.
The mechanics are the interesting part. Under § 122.06(c), an owner of a one- or two-family dwelling normally files an owner-certified notice of compliance — you sign it yourself. At the time of sale, the requirement steps up to a Certificate of Compliance signed by the buyer or buyer's agent and the seller or seller's agent, plus one of: a licensed California contractor in the proper classification, a holder of a Maintenance Certificate of Registration, a certified Water Conservation Retrofitter, or a licensed California real estate broker or agent. That last option is why, in practice, the listing agent signs it. The form comes from LADWP and is filed with LADWP within 15 days after compliance.
One exception worth knowing, in § 122.06(e): the requirements do not apply if a valid Certificate of Compliance was submitted to LADWP within one year of the date you acquired title. If you bought the house recently, check before you buy toilets.
What it costs you: nothing if the fixtures already comply, which in a house re-plumbed any time this century they generally do. If they don't, it is a toilet and a showerhead, not a renovation.
Two things about this one. First, the citation moved: what everyone still calls LAMC 94.1217 was renumbered to § 94.1216.0 by Ordinance 188,797, effective December 31, 2025. Both numbers are still circulating, including on some city pages, so don't be thrown if you see the old one.
Second, and more importantly: most people believe this is triggered only by construction work over a dollar threshold. It is both. Section 94.1216.2.2 does have the alteration trigger — work valued at more than $10,000 on a residential permit first issued on or after January 10, 1998. But § 94.1216.2.3 is separate and unconditional: prior to entering into an agreement of sale, or prior to the close of escrow, buildings containing fuel gas piping shall have a seismic gas shutoff valve or excess flow shutoff valve installed.
So if your Valley house has gas — and it does — there needs to be an approved valve on it before you close. There is an exception for valves installed before September 1, 1995 that remain installed and maintained. The valve must be installed by a licensed California contractor (with a narrow exception for an owner-occupant installing on their own single-family dwelling), be certified by the Office of the State Architect, be approved by the LADBS Mechanical Testing Laboratory, and carry a 30-year warranty. The gas utility may allow installation upstream of the meter.
What it costs you: a contractor's visit and a permit. It is the most substantial of the point-of-sale items in dollar terms and still nowhere near a repair project.
LADBS's own selling requirements also flag impact-resistant glazing for sliding glass doors under LAMC §§ 91.6101 and 96.302, along with the city's smoke and carbon monoxide detector sections. If your house still has an original 1950s slider with annealed glass in it, that is worth checking before it becomes a last-week-of-escrow problem.
Two Los Angeles retrofit programs get brought up constantly to single-family sellers and neither one applies:
If somebody tells you your Van Nuys three-bedroom needs a soft-story retrofit before it can sell, they are wrong, and it is worth wondering what else they are wrong about.
"The Valley" is not one jurisdiction, and this is the single most practical thing on this page.
City of Los Angeles. Everything in part two applies. The city's pre-sale requirement is a records check plus a few certificates — nobody inspects the house.
City of San Fernando (91340). A separate incorporated city entirely surrounded by Los Angeles, and the rules are materially different. San Fernando runs a Residential Property Pre-Sale Inspection and Report Program: sellers must submit an application and obtain the resulting pre-sale inspection report before selling any residential property, with hotels, motels, mobile homes and mobile home parks excepted. The city's stated purpose is to protect purchasers who may be unaware of unpermitted construction or other unlawful conditions.
Read that again, because it is the opposite of Los Angeles: the city actually sends someone to walk the property, and the report identifies what they find, including work nobody permitted. The current application (form CDD-044.3, revised July 2026) states a fee of $345, and it must be completed in person at City Hall, Community Development Department, 117 Macneil Street. The department's number is (818) 898-1227.
The city does not publish a municipal code citation for the program on its program page or on the application, and we are not going to print a section number we could not verify — so if you need the code reference, ask them on the phone. Same for turnaround time and how long the report stays valid; neither is published, and both are worth asking before you set a closing date.
If you own a house in San Fernando with an addition of uncertain provenance, this is the single most important paragraph on this page. In the City of Los Angeles an unpermitted conversion surfaces as a discrepancy on a records printout. Four blocks north, it surfaces because an inspector looked at it.
Unincorporated Los Angeles County. The pockets around the Valley's edges — Universal City, Kagel Canyon, Lopez Canyon, Oat Mountain, Sylmar Island, Twin Lakes, Deerlake, West Chatsworth — have no pre-sale report and no pre-sale inspection program at all. Which means the entire burden sits on your disclosures, and there is no city document to surface anything for you. (Note that the unincorporated "Westhills" area is a distinct thing from the City of LA neighborhood of West Hills; confirm from the parcel record.)
In every case, confirm your jurisdiction from the parcel record rather than the mailing address. Plenty of mail reads "Los Angeles, CA" for property the City of Los Angeles does not govern.
This reaches a lot of Sylmar, Shadow Hills, Tujunga, Sunland, Lake View Terrace and the hillside edges of Sun Valley — and the 2025 update to CAL FIRE's local responsibility area maps expanded the footprint, so a property that wasn't in a designated zone a few years ago may be now.
Civil Code § 1102.19 is the closest thing to a second real "go do something" requirement. For property in a high or very high fire hazard severity zone, the seller must deliver documentation of compliance with Public Resources Code § 4291 — defensible space — or with the local vegetation management ordinance, from an inspection in the six months preceding the transaction. Where there is no local ordinance and inspection services are available, the alternative is a written agreement that the buyer obtains compliance documentation within one year of close of escrow. That alternative is the practical route on a property where the brush hasn't been touched in years, and it is worth raising early rather than at signing.
Civil Code § 1102.6f adds a fire-hardening disclosure for homes constructed before January 1, 2010 in those zones — eave vents with openings over 1/8 inch, wood shake or shingle roof, combustible landscaping within five feet, single-pane or non-tempered windows, loose or missing roof flashing, gutters without noncombustible covers. Since July 1, 2025 the seller must also provide the list of low-cost retrofits developed under Government Code § 51189 and state which of them the seller has completed. Note the shape of that: you disclose what you have done. You are not required to do any of them.
On "Zone 0," the ember-resistant five-foot zone: as of late September 2026 those regulations are not in effect. The Board of Forestry approved rule text in August 2026 and submitted it to the Office of Administrative Law as an emergency rulemaking, and that filing was withdrawn on September 8, 2026. A fair amount of published commentary still describes the rules as adopted. Even on the optimistic path once they are adopted, the statutory scheme delays application to existing structures by three years after the effective date for new construction. Nobody selling a Sylmar house this autumn owes a Zone 0 clearance. This one is moving, though, so confirm it rather than relying on a blog post — including this one.
Everything above is the "do something" list, and it is short. The rest of your obligation is disclosure, and it is broad.
The cleanest way to hold it: as-is governs who pays for repairs. It does not govern what you have to say.
An as-is clause means the buyer takes the property in the condition visible to or observable by them, and you have no obligation to repair anything. That is real and it is worth having. What it does not do is waive a disclosure. Civil Code § 1102.1(a) states the Legislature's intent expressly: delivery of a transfer disclosure statement may not be waived in an as-is sale. And the common law runs underneath all of it — where a seller knows facts materially affecting the value or desirability of the property that are not within the buyer's reach, the seller has a duty to disclose them.
The main pieces:
Civil Code § 1102.2 exempts a list of transfers from the TDS — court-ordered sales including probate administration, foreclosure and trustee's sales, bank-owned resales, transfers between co-owners, interspousal transfers, and sales by a fiduciary administering a trust, guardianship, conservatorship or decedent's estate.
Read the last one carefully, because it has a carve-out written directly into it. The fiduciary exemption does not apply where the trustee is a natural person who is a trustee of a revocable trust and is a former owner of the property, or was an occupant in possession within the preceding year.
That is an extremely common Valley fact pattern: a parent puts the house in a living trust, an adult child is the successor trustee and has been living there, and everyone assumes "trust sale means no disclosures." It doesn't. A corporate trustee, an irrevocable trust, or a trustee who never occupied the property stays exempt. The child who lived there does not.
And even a genuinely exempt seller — an executor who never set foot in the house — is exempt from the form, not from the duty. Civil Code § 1102.8 says the article does not limit any disclosure obligation created by other law or existing to avoid fraud, misrepresentation or deceit. If you know the back bedroom floods, say so, whether or not anybody hands you a TDS.
Civil Code § 1102.13 provides that no transfer is invalidated solely by a failure to comply, but a person who willfully or negligently violates a duty under the article is liable for the buyer's actual damages. The larger exposure is the common-law fraud or negligent misrepresentation claim layered on top, where rescission and punitive damages live.
And the clock is long. Code of Civil Procedure § 338(d) gives three years for fraud or mistake, and the claim does not accrue until discovery of the facts constituting it. That discovery rule is exactly why nondisclosure claims surface two and three years after a closing that felt finished.
Now we're at the real question, which is economic rather than legal.
Fix it if you are listing to a retail buyer and the house is otherwise sound. A financed buyer's lender has requirements that have nothing to do with the state's. FHA and conventional underwriting balk at an active roof leak, exposed wiring, a non-functioning heating system, or unpermitted living space with plumbing in it. If the house is two repairs away from being financeable, those two repairs can be worth several times what they cost, because they open the property to the entire retail market instead of the cash-buyer market.
Don't fix it if you are selling as-is for cash. Money spent on permits, roofs and panels immediately before a cash sale almost never comes back at the closing table. We are underwriting the property on what it will cost us to bring it to resale condition, and a partial repair you did at retail pricing rarely reduces that number by what you paid for it. A new roof on a house that also needs a foundation and a panel does not make it a finished house; it makes it an unfinished house with a new roof.
Never start a repair you cannot finish. This is the one we see most and it is the most expensive mistake on the list. A half-demolished bathroom, a permit pulled and never finaled, an insurance claim where the work stopped when the money ran out — those properties are harder to sell than the ones nobody touched, because a buyer now has to price both the repair and the uncertainty about what is behind the opened wall.
And never start curing a code case on a house you intend to sell as-is. Same logic, higher stakes.
We buy houses that need everything, and none of the retrofits on this page changes our number in any meaningful way — they are a few hundred dollars against a repair budget in the tens of thousands. Where they do matter is escrow mechanics: the 9A, the water conservation certificate, the gas shutoff valve and, in San Fernando, the pre-sale inspection all have to get done before a sale closes, and they are worth starting early rather than discovering in the final week.
What we would rather you didn't do is spend money on the house first. Call, get a number for the property exactly as it sits, and then go get a listing opinion from a local agent — what it would list for repaired, what the repairs would cost, minus commission and three months of carrying costs. Compare the two net figures. If the listing wins, list it. We would genuinely rather tell you that on the first call than take thirty minutes of your afternoon pretending otherwise.
And tell us what you know about the house. Disclosure works in your favor with a cash buyer in a way it never does with a retail one: a problem we hear about on the walkthrough is a number. A problem we find in escrow is a renegotiation.
Takes about a minute. We usually call back the same day.
Yes. There is no general legal requirement to repair a property before selling it, and no code-compliance inspection at transfer. What exists is a short list of point-of-sale items — smoke alarms, water heater bracing, and in the City of Los Angeles a records report, a water conservation certificate and a seismic gas shutoff valve — plus broad disclosure obligations. None of that is a renovation.
No. A buyer's inspection report creates a negotiation, not an obligation. The buyer can ask for repairs or a credit and you can decline, subject to whatever your contract says about their right to cancel. What you cannot do is conceal something you already knew about, whether or not the inspector catches it.
Partly. Court-ordered probate sales and sales by a fiduciary administering a decedent's estate are generally exempt from the transfer disclosure statement, and the smoke alarm statute has parallel transfer-type exemptions. But local point-of-sale requirements and the common-law duty to disclose known material facts do not vanish. And watch the trust carve-out: a natural-person trustee of a revocable trust who lived in the house within the past year is not exempt. Ask the estate's attorney about your specific transfer.
It protects you from having to repair things, and from repair-request renegotiation. It does not waive the transfer disclosure statement — Civil Code section 1102.1 says that expressly — and it does not protect you at all against failing to disclose a known material defect the buyer couldn't have seen. As-is governs who pays for repairs, not what you have to say.
It depends entirely on which buyer you're aiming at. If the house is otherwise sound and two repairs away from being financeable by a retail buyer, doing them can be worth several times their cost. If you're selling as-is for cash, it almost never comes back to you — a cash buyer is pricing the whole scope of work, and a retail-priced partial repair rarely moves that number by what you paid. Get a number as-is first, then decide.
Send us the address. No fee, no obligation, and we'll tell you straight if selling to us isn't your best move.