California<\/a> lawmakers have passed a series of state and local laws in recent years to streamline ADU construction to address a chronic housing shortage. Legislation overrode local ordinances that limited backyard units, cutting parking requirements, waiving impact fees on smaller units and suspending the requirement that an owner live on the property. Critically, a state law went into effect at the start of this year that sped up the permitting process.\u00a0<\/p>\nBefore the changes in ADU laws, the process to get approval could take as many as four years to get it through various hoops, from review boards to homeowner\u2019s associations, said Bryan Henson, the founder and CEO of Bevyhouse, a California firm that builds custom homes and ADUs in a factory and assembles them on site.\u00a0<\/p>\n
An ADU by West End Construction, a Los Angeles-based general contractor.West End Construction<\/p>\n
\u201cIt basically cuts that time down by a lot,\u201d Henson said about permitting speed. \u201cIn some cases down to 90 days.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a result, homeowners are now building to ADU requirements regardless of whether they plan to use the extra space as a mother-in-law suite, an art studio or a pool house.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you wanted to build a pool house and you called it a pool house, it might actually take twice as long to permit as if you called it an ADU,\u201d Henson said. \u201cSomeone might have just wanted a pool house, but they\u2019re building an ADU because it\u2019s a lot faster.\u201d<\/p>\n
In one example, Bevyhouse built an 800-square-foot unit in Montecito alongside a 1920s house undergoing renovation. \u201cWe designed the ADU to match, so it looks like it was part of the original compound, but it wasn\u2019t,\u201d Henson said.<\/p>\n
Single-family homeowners are permitted to build a maximum of one detached ADU plus one junior ADU attached to the house, said Trent Klatte, the CEO and co-founder of West End Construction Corp., where ADUs make up about half his business across L.A.<\/p>\n
Certainly not all ADU construction is sitting as unoccupied gyms and home theaters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The bigger recent changes apply to apartment buildings. \u201cI would say SB 1211 has been, most recently, the biggest change, and that allows up to eight ADUs for an existing multifamily building,\u201d Klatte said. The previous limit was two detached units. The new law matches ADUs, one for one, against existing units, so an eight-unit building can add eight. \u201cThat\u2019s really been the biggest legislative change that has helped investors because it is essentially allowing them to double their density,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Another law may reshape what gets sold. \u201cADUs are allowed to be sold off individually as condos,\u201d Klatte said of another law, AB 1033. A four-unit building could add four ADUs, map them as condominiums and sell them to individual buyers. \u201cI think that\u2019s actually the future of ADUs coming shortly,\u201d he said, in a market where the entry price for a house is out of reach for many first-time buyers.<\/p>\n
ADUs, regardless of their end use or size, require all the elements of a home, such as a kitchen, a bathroom, a water heater and a sprinkler system.West End Construction<\/p>\n
The cost to build an ADU runs from roughly $250 per square foot for an investor rental to $500 per square foot for an owner-occupied unit, Klatte said. Bevyhouse has priced custom work as high as $2,000 per square foot since an ADU requires all the trappings of a home. A 400-square-foot unit still needs a kitchen, a bathroom, a water heater and a sprinkler system. \u201cThe smaller the project is, the higher the price per square foot,\u201d Henson said.<\/p>\n
An ADU project can take about a year, Klatte said: two months of design, three or four in permitting and roughly six in construction.<\/p>\n
So how much does an ADU add to a home\u2019s eventual listing price?\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it\u2019s permanent square footage, it\u2019s considered additional square footage to the home,\u201d White said. He recently sold a property in Santa Monica totaling 3,200 square feet: 2,600 in the main house and 600 in a unit behind it. \u201cSo we based our price per square foot off 3,200, not 2,600,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Klatte is more cautious about the arithmetic. \u201cIt definitely increases the overall property\u2019s value,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s tough to put a dollar on it because ADUs are newer, there\u2019s not tons of comps that go along with them.\u201d A buyer weighing a 3,200-square-foot house against a 2,600-square-foot house with a 600-square-foot ADU is likely to prefer the larger single structure, he added.<\/p>\n
A gym space is part of a Santa Barbara property by Bevyhouse, a California firm that builds custom homes and ADUs in a factory and assembles them on site.David Dewing<\/p>\n
The unit does other work in a listing, however. \u201cIt gives you a little bit of an extended story,\u201d White said. For example, a buyer who wants an extra bedroom for a home office can find it in an ADU. \u201cI think people are looking at the ADUs like, \u2018I need additional space for X,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The ADU boom also helps satisfy a growing desire for multigenerational living.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of parents are saying, \u2018I\u2019m going to move into that, so my kids can move into this house,\u2019\u201d Henson said. He has several such projects running.\u00a0<\/p>\n
White described an owner in Glendale who is building a unit behind her house. She\u2019ll hand the main residence to a newly married daughter who couldn\u2019t otherwise afford one.<\/p>\n
Klatte has designed around new and growing families. On two of his projects, a home office moved to the ADU so a bedroom could become a nursery. Their cheap mortgages, combined with their love for their locations, held these owners in place.<\/p>\n
With California in the early stages of the ADU boom, Klatte, White and Henson all expect development to grow and the state to continue adjusting its requirements.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were to think back to 10 years ago, none of this stuff was possible, and people weren\u2019t even thinking about any of this kind of stuff,\u201d Klatte said. \u201cWe\u2019ll see what\u2019s going to happen in the future with ADUs, but I think there\u2019s going to be more and more potential for ADUs to be developed and built.\u201d<\/p>\n
Discover more stories. Read the latest luxury real estate news at Mansion Global<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Los Angeles homeowners are building accessory dwelling units on their land at a pace the city hasn\u2019t seen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,153973,150583,5050],"class_list":["post-485174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-mansion-global","tag-syndication","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}