Illegal Surrey builds still standing, despite order to tear them down

Despite orders from the city, some Surrey homeowners who built illegal extensions to their homes have yet to tear them down.

The City of Surrey took legal action against six property owners in October 2023 who illegally built structures without permits, and who in some cases lived in them.

The owners were slapped with hefty fines and ordered to demolish the structures. But demolition deadlines have since come and gone, with no changes on some of the properties.

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Don Luymes, Surrey’s general manager of planning and development, said the city has recently taken a more “coordinated” approach to targeting illegal builds, with the 2022 launch of an Illegal Construction Enforcement Team that includes its bylaw, building and legal divisions.

“It’s a big problem,” he said, adding that officials are dealing with a “substantial number” of homes that aren’t in compliance.

“We’ll identify what we call egregious examples where there are life-safety issues or significant breaches of our bylaw, those are the ones we will concentrate on,” he said.

“The building division will assemble information and forward it on after a whole process with the homeowner to try and gain voluntary compliance, but if we hit a dead end on those sorts of things we will advance them through the system to our legal department.”

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The six homes in question have already been through the legal process, Luymes said, and if they continue to defy the city officials have legal tools to compel them to take action.

“It’s super critical from a fire safety perspective, from a structural safety perspective,” he said.

“It takes some time, of course.”

Surrey is far from the only Lower Mainland jurisdiction facing illegal building problems.

Graeme Huguet, general manager of My House Design Build Team, described the issue as “an epidemic” across the region.

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Huguet said his company gets regular calls from various municipalities asking it to help homeowners who have been hit with stop-work orders because they had started construction without the right permits and inspections.

In many cases, he said, contractors are forced to tear out the non-compliant work in order to bring things up to minimum standards, before rebuilding again.

“Homeowners are either uneducated or they are allowing themselves to be talked into doing work without the proper permits in place — and this isn’t just for new construction but primarily for renovations,” he told Global News.

“But when you take on work that is not properly permitted, you put yourself in a liability situation. You could actually jeopardize your homeowners’ insurance.”

Homeowners, he said, need to do their due diligence to ensure the contractors they’re hiring are properly educated and certified, and don’t just have a flashy website.

Beyond potential legal headaches, he said, illegal work can result in renovation nightmares like water egress, wood rot and mold.