The second unit that shows up mid-quote
The listing calls it a guest house. The insured calls it the back unit, and mentions a tenant. The aerial shows a structure the application never described. Accessory dwelling units are now a routine feature of California homeowners submissions, because a wave of state legislation since 2017 has progressively streamlined their approval, and ADU permitting has grown severalfold statewide since.
For an insurance file, the questions are concrete. Is the unit a permitted dwelling, a converted garage that was never permitted as living space, or something in between? When was it built or converted? Is there a rental exposure? The answers drive how the risk is written - a second permitted dwelling is a different exposure than an unpermitted conversion with a stove in it.
This guide is about what the permit record can and cannot contribute to those answers. It is not legal or coverage advice; how a carrier treats an unpermitted unit is a question for the carrier.
What ADU permits look like when they exist
Modern ADU permits are usually easy to recognize: descriptions containing ADU, ACCESSORY DWELLING UNIT, JADU, or GARAGE CONVERSION TO ADU, often with square footage. The streamlined era means a legitimate recent conversion generally leaves a paper trail - plans, a building permit, inspections, a final. A finaled ADU permit with a date and square footage is about as good as a property record gets for this question.
Detached new-construction ADUs read like small dwelling permits: NEW 749 SF DETACHED ADU, with the associated electrical, plumbing, and mechanical records alongside. Junior ADUs - carved out of the existing house - appear as JADU or as an interior conversion description.
Older conversions are the hard case. A garage converted to living space in 1985 may show a permit for a room addition, a permit for something vague, or nothing at all. Absence of an ADU-shaped permit on a lot with an obvious second unit is a meaningful flag in a way that absence is not for, say, a water heater - a dwelling unit is hard to build invisibly. Once a careful search has ruled out the wrong authority, address variants, and portal coverage limits, a silent record points to unpermitted work, records that predate the portal, or a permit filed under a description you did not recognize.
Reading the sequence on a converted property
Pull the full permit list for the address, not just ADU hits. The story is often in the sequence: a 2003 patio cover, a 2010 water heater in the GARAGE, then silence - while the aerial shows the garage has windows and the driveway has no garage door. Records that reference a garage as a garage after the supposed conversion date are their own kind of evidence.
Electrical and plumbing permits are useful tracers. A conversion done properly needs them; a converted unit with no electrical permit in its era is another quiet flag. Conversely, a cluster of trade permits around a single year, even with a vaguely-described building permit, supports that a real, inspected project happened then.
Check the right authority while you are at it. ADUs on unincorporated parcels permit through the county, and a converted structure on a rural lot with a city mailing address is exactly the situation where people search the wrong government's portal and conclude, wrongly, that nothing was ever permitted.
Running the search, and the barriers you may hit
The mechanics are the standard California ones: confirm the permitting authority against the assessor or county GIS, search the official portal with the street number and first word of the street name, and try multiple formats before believing an empty result. Some portals index the ADU under its own situs address - 123 1/2 Main St, or a lettered unit - so search those variants too; a separate address for the unit is itself a signal that somebody formalized it.
Where the portal is not open, the usual fallbacks apply. Of the 539 California permitting authorities PermitProof has cataloged, 80 are recorded as requiring an account and sign-in before permit records can be searched, and 121 are recorded as not publishing permit records online - for those, a records request naming the address and asking for the full permit history is the path, and worth sending early because ADU questions rarely get less important as a file ages.
For pre-1990s conversions, be ready for the honest dead end: the work may predate anything the portal holds, and only the jurisdiction's microfiche or archived files would say. Write that limit into the file rather than over-reading the empty screen.
What to write down, whichever way it goes
With a permit: number, description, square footage if stated, issue and final dates, and the source link. A finaled 2021 detached ADU permit supports a permitted second dwelling completed around 2021 - and gives the underwriter a fact pattern instead of a listing adjective.
Without one: record the search itself - portal, formats tried, date - and the specific observation, such as no permit records located referencing an ADU or conversion, alongside what the property visibly has. Pair it with the questions that follow naturally: what the insured knows about when and how the unit was created, and whether anyone lives in it. Those are underwriting facts regardless of what the permit file says.
PermitProof handles the lookup half of this: enter the California address and it routes to the jurisdiction's official permit source, returns the records with their original descriptions and a source link where one is recorded, and reports honestly - its automated search will not say no permits found unless a certified negative test backs that answer, and a search that could not complete is reported as exactly that. On ADU questions, where the difference between no record and could not search is the whole ballgame, that distinction is the point.
Run this search in one place
PermitProof routes a California address to the jurisdiction's official permit source, searches it automatically where it can - and says plainly when it cannot - returning source-linked results. The free plan includes 3 property searches a month with no payment method to enter; PermitProof Access, the paid subscription, removes the limit.