Planning on Building or Remodelling a Sonoma County home? Check out PRMD
This is a building you or your contractor will become very familiar with if you plan to remodel or build a home in Sonoma County. You should also visit and investigate any property you are thinking of buying. Your realtor should be able to show you around. There is a lot to see and do here.
But why don’t you just start with looking at the county planning department’s website? There is a lot of useful information here and it is a good place to start.
Some of my favorite links:
Online Permit History Here you can see the online records for a property, which is a start, but you really need to go in to the office and have them pull the microfiche of the records to get at the detail. And CAUTION, you may not get all that there is to know about a property. Some of the records were destroyed in a big fire a number of years ago. Some may not have been scanned in. (TIP: other records with conflcting information may be contained at the County Tax Assessor’s office. These are only available to the owner of a property. This little point can be important with a country property where there might be some confusion about how many bedrooms might be officially allowed with that particular septic system.)
Sonoma County Zoning Regulations
This is an important place to look to notice just how many horses or chickens you might be allowed to have. Or whether you can have a home business, or a guest house or granny unit. Agricultural working housing? This is the place to go once you know a property’s zoning.
FAQ’as about septics, code enforcement, you name it.
This is where you start.
Want to know what the permit fees will be for that new home you want to build? or what it costs to have an on-site inspection?
Look at the Fees page here.
There is a lot more to find at Sonoma County’s PRMD website. What is your favorite page?
