Columbia is decreasing the required time between inspections for residential rental properties, starting on Janurary 1, 2025.
Homeowners and rental operators will now be required to pass inspections every five years. The previous inspection cycle was once every six years, with permit renewals every three years.
Inspections cost between $50 and $195, depending on the type of housing unit, and payment is the responsibility of the homeowner or rental operator.
While the Columbia City Council approved this change in August of this year, the city’s Department of Housing and Neighborhood Services provided additional information about the inspection process to the council last night.
The department’s report compares the cost and frequency of inspections in Columbia to the ten largest cities in Missouri.
“You'll notice in this report that there's a lot of communities that have, usually shorter, but a variety of different lengths for compliance,” said Leigh Kottwitz, Columbia’s Neighborhood Services Manager.
But the report states that while other cities typically conduct inspections more frequently than every five years, the inspectors in Columbia do not have the capacity to conduct inspections more often without imposing greater fees on homeowners.
Kottwitz said that inspectors typically look for violations of the International Property Maintenance Code, along with a few requirements from local amendments.
“Some of the real common violations that our folks find are either missing or non-working or expired smoke alarms,” Kottwitz said. “It’s sometimes difficult to know what our inspectors might see, because we’re generally looking to make sure the property’s maintained.”
This is the first time Columbia’s Rental Unit Conservation Law has been updated since the 1970s.
