How do I find out if renting the bedrooms separately is even legal before I offer

If the deed itself is silent you're usually fine on the private side, right? My understanding was the deed is the document that binds you and the HOA rules are more like guidelines the board hands out.

bramble, that's the thing I would have been too embarrassed to ask about a year ago, so I'll just say it plainly. The CC&Rs are recorded against the property and they run with the land, and they typically give the board authority to adopt rules. So a board-adopted rule you never saw at closing can absolutely bind you, and fines can attach as a lien depending on your state. The deed being silent means nothing.

Working through licensing material, the part that stuck with me is how differently states handle occupancy standards. Some have a state building code with a per-occupant floor area figure that cities can't go below, others leave it entirely local. So the answer genuinely changes by address and anyone telling you the general rule is describing their own county.

Pull the permit history while you're at it. On a four-bedroom that started life as a three-bedroom, the fourth room is often a converted den or garage with no permit, no egress window, and a ceiling an inch too low. That's the difference between four rentable rooms and three, and it changes your pro forma more than the HOA question does.

Email the planner, not the front counter. I get faster and more useful answers when I write two sentences with the parcel number and the exact proposed use and ask for a written response. Phone answers evaporate.

Add the HOA's meeting minutes for the last couple of years to your document request. That's where you find out the board has been discussing a leasing amendment, which tells you the rules you're reading may not be the rules you operate under. Boards that are annoyed about shared houses usually leave a paper trail before they act.

I'm still stuck a step earlier. Does writing four separate leases instead of one change anything legally, or is the city only counting heads in the house? Those feel like two different questions and I can't tell which one the ordinance cares about.

vellum, from what I've read the occupancy cap counts people, so four leases or one lease with four names doesn't change the head count. The leases matter for your own risk, since with separate leases one person leaving doesn't obligate the others to cover the rent, and with one joint lease it does.

Definitions of family have been fought over in court in a number of states, and some state courts have struck down or narrowed unrelated-adult caps while others have upheld them. That's exactly why an ordinance you can read in ten minutes still needs a local attorney to interpret. Don't take the text as the final word in either direction.

I'd extend the diligence period rather than rush this. A week isn't enough if the HOA manager takes ten days to produce the resale package, which is normal.

The order I've settled on for my own list: zoning district and family definition, then permit history and bedroom legality, then rental registration, then HOA docs and minutes, then an insurance quote with the occupancy described accurately. Any one of those coming back wrong ends it, so I try to sequence the cheap and fast ones first. Zoning is a phone call and a PDF. The HOA package costs money and takes time.

Honestly I came into this thread thinking the HOA was the hard part and now I'm more worried about the fourth bedroom being a den with no window! Going to reread the whole thing and start with the permit file.