All Forum Posts by: Ernie K.

@Mark S. Thank you, I appreciate your feedback.

Thanks again to all responders. Sounds like this might not be as big of an issue to resolve as what I had assumed.

Thanks for helping me understand septic systems a little better. Had not paid much attention to them until now.

@Ron K. @Stanley Crawford

Thank you, everyone, for your responses.  We greatly appreciate the BP community sharing their expertise and experiences to give advice to those of us that are new to real estate investing.  I realize more detail is needed to further explain our situation.  

The house is currently a 5 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms, with a finished basement.  One of the reasons we were interested is this house specifically was because there are three rooms in the basement that can be converted for 2 more legal bedrooms (once we add egresses and closets) and 1 additional bathroom.  This brings the house to a total of seven bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms.  We have a decent sized yard of 0.5 acre.    

As we are  working with contractors to add 1 additional basement bathroom, we contacted the state to get the drawings details of the septic system to give our contractor for planning to connect to it.  This is when we learned the current septic permit is only for 3 bedrooms.   

We just bought this house earlier this year.  The seller was one of the original developers/owner, so we believe he should have been much more knowledgeable about septic system sizing that a normal house owner.  Totally agree that a typical home owner may not know details about septic sizing unless they have specifically researched the topic. 

SC requires a signed Seller disclosure document, which actually made us feel a little more comfortable buying the house.  In hindsight, we think the developer/owner did know about this septic system undersizing situation, but did not disclosure it the SC Seller disclosure.  We are trying to figure out if this situation warrants us talking to a real estate lawyer, which we know would be very expensive...or if we just chalk this up to an expensive lessons learned and just do what we need to do to get the property legally permitted for the size of the house.

Thanks again for your advice.

We recently purchased a 5-bedroom house in Seneca,SC as our first investment house. Our intent is to use the house hack strategy. Our son will live there when he attends Clemson University and we will rent the other 4 bedrooms to his friends.

During due diligence for the purchase of the house, we had a house inspection and a specific check for the septic system, which had no issues identified. After buying the house, however, we learned too late that the septic system is only sized for a 3 bedrooms house, instead of for 5 bedrooms. These are all 5 legal bedrooms with closets and egress, as listed.

This was a hard lesson learned for us. We were worried about the function of the septic and did not think to even ask if the sizing was appropriate for the house size. We need advice, please. Is there any legal course of action we should pursue? In the required SC disclosure, the Sellers did not list this issue. Thanks for any advice anyone can offer.