mikesh,
You talk about contractors finishing off basements etc without permits, lately the Realtor look for permits for finished rooms and they come to the town hall to make sure that a permit was taken out. If they don't the next seller of the house is responsible for the finished area. They will have to pay the back taxes on it, and the building permit and the fines for occupying an area with out a certificate. When my town finds a room finished with out permit, we go out a look at the job, the job will always fail until the owner gets permits, pays the fine, then they have to get licensed people in there to check out all of the hidden wires, connections etc. Then we will come back to the job and see if it then makes code. We look for missing outlets, GFI protection, etc.
Looks better than what we do. No political will to persue a lot of these un-permitted jobs. Usually wait for a complaint or unavoidable discovery or catch them in the act.
A problem with a property does go to the new owner but if the vendor delared the truth about the property IE the suite was build without a permit (pretty common answer too) then the purchaser also buys the risk of getting caught and having to return the building to legal use or converting to the desired and already built room, suite, accessory building or what ever was done without a permit.
It gets very messy and every case is a custom job regardless of all the policies and laws we might have.
