Someone I know had a house sale fall through because they couldn’t get insurance due to what was effectively an unconsented granny flat.
I’m both intrigued whether insurance will continue to be a problem and curious if buildings built prior to this change will retroactively be exempt.
Hard to say.
Insurance is an issue constantly; and there is a lot of unconsented work out there.
We looked at a nice place last year; the original plans had two toilets, the current house has 4, one in an unconsented ensuite added sometime in the last 15 years.
We noted this to the agents and they didn’t (or acted like they didn’t) know anything about it.
The agent is not going to go out of their way to find issues, so they probably didn’t know. The owners are supposed to declare it, though, the agent would have asked about any known things.
If the owners didn’t do rhe change they might not have even known it wasn’t consented. We tend to overestimate people’s knowledge in such things but for most people they only learn about issues when they come up against it for some reason (insurance, selling, etc).
