The back-row sites are hooked up to a shared septic that was permitted for 18 sites, and the park now runs 31.

The broker's silence on page 14 is itself a document. Three weeks without a response to a specific inspection finding, on a permitted infrastructure question, tells you the seller's side has already talked to counsel. That changes what your own due diligence needs to look like, because the disclosure clock is running and you need to know what the seller knew and when they knew it. Pull the original 2009 permit application, the site plan attached to it, and any correspondence between the owner and the county health department since then. If the county's online portal shows nothing after 2009, file a public records request in writing and get the response timestamped. That timestamp matters if this ends up in front of a judge, because it establishes that the county had no record of a capacity amendment at the exact moment you were making your acquisition decision.

The liability question you are asking is the right one, and the short answer is that a corrective order in most jurisdictions does travel with the property, so close with 31 sites on an 18-site permitted system and you own the violation outright. Before you go any further, get a licensed septic engineer out to do an independent capacity evaluation, not a home inspector, an engineer who will put their stamp on a report the county will actually read. That number is your negotiating floor. If full system replacement to serve 31 sites runs $180,000 to $220,000, that cost comes off the purchase price or the seller funds it in escrow before close, because you are not buying speculative remediation risk at a price that assumed a fully operating 31-site park. The revenue haircut from a forced reduction to 18 sites is the larger exposure though. If the offering was underwritten at 31 sites and the county forces you back to 18, you need to remodel the deal at 18 sites and see what price that

The assumption doing the most work in your underwriting is that the 31-site revenue figure is real and acquirable. It is not, at least not until the septic question resolves. Everything downstream of that, your cap rate, your debt service coverage, your exit multiple, rests on a number that may be structurally unavailable.

On the liability question: you have the mechanism right. Environmental and health code violations tied to infrastructure typically run with the land in most jurisdictions, and a retroactive corrective order from the county health department would attach to you as the successor owner. Whether the seller's prior collection of rent on unpermitted capacity creates any indemnification claim against them is a question for a real estate attorney licensed in that state, not something to resolve in a forum.

The seller's broker going silent for three weeks on a page-14 item this material is itself information. It suggests either the seller does not have a clean answer or is hoping you close before you push hard enough. Neither is a posture that improves after you wire the money.

A few things worth confirming before this goes further. First, whether the county health department has any active review or complaint file open on this parcel already. That changes the timeline from "risk of future order" to "order is already in process." Second, whether your lender has seen page 14, because most commercial lenders will require septic capacity to match permitted use before they fund, and some will require an engineered report. Confirm that with your lender directly. Third, what a full system replacement or expansion permit would actually cost in that specific county, since the $200,000 figure is a reasonable estimate but jurisdiction matters a lot for both cost and timeline.

The site-count reduction scenario is the one that restructures the deal entirely. If 18 is the real number, what does the seller's asking price look like against 18-site comps in that market?

Three weeks of silence from a broker on a specific line in an inspection report is not a negotiating tactic, it's an answer.

What state is this in? Because in Texas the county health department can issue a cease-and-desist on the whole park, not just the back row, and the remediation timeline runs on their schedule, not yours, which means you could be sitting on a closed deal with zero hookup revenue while you wait eighteen months for a permit amendment that may never come.

What did your attorney say about whether the seller's disclosure obligations under that state's code cover a known permit deficiency?

Walk away and let the broker's silence be the answer.