16 unit apartment complex with two address and two APN #

[Noel Fajardo]

I am looking at an 18 unit apartment complex that has two address and two APN #.  My thoughts on this is that, the 16 unit or more rule does not apply base on these two factors. Please advise if anyone had a chance to review the law about this and where can I find it. Thank you

[Matt Devincenzo]

I'm not sure what law you're referring to, or what you think that might be?

I'm assuming you question is stemming from trying to figure out what # of properties you're actually buying.

So first addressing. Generally speaking, addressing has nothing to do with the "legal" number of properties. There's a lot of factors that play into the addressing, but essentially addresses are assigned by the municipality (city/county) to the property during the development or construction process. You could have 16 separate addresses for the 16 units and that would be completely normal. All of the addresses would just be assigned to that property. Case in point the duplex I rent has two addresses 4670 & 4672. But they can't be sold separately because they're on one lot. 

For the APN. Again are assigned by the municipality during the development of a property. They're used (among other things) for identifying a specific property, usually as it relates to taxes. 

Say you have a 10 acre parcel and you want to split it up and sell it as 10 separate 1 acre pieces. You'd go through the process of having it survey'ed and subdivided. Each one of those parcels might be given an APN. It's just a numeric identifier for the lot that is used. 

Now say that you bought two of those parcels and built a single 16 unit "development" on them. You would now have two APNs. Just because they were given separate APN's doesn't necessarily mean that they could be sold separately though. That again has to do with the development process. When the municipality approved the development of the two APN's they didn't necessarily approve them as separate properties. They could have approved the construction as a whole. 

So you may or may not have separate properties that can be titled as such, or they may not be able to do that without doing some additional subdivision of the lots.