Reston Association to Conduct Inspections Next Fall

Later this year, Reston Association, rather than SCS, will be performing inspections of Lakeport homes. Note that anything identified in this inspection would likely be caught during the required RA inspection when your home is sold, but passing this inspection now will not guarantee no additional issues will be identified at sale.

There will be several differences in the approach taken by RA and SCS:

• Focus: We have requested that the primary focus of the RA inspection be on maintenance issues (which was the case with SCS), but RA will also be looking for conformance to Lakeport and RA design standards. In addition, RA-trained inspectors may notice things SCS wouldn’t notice and vice versa.
• Timing: Inspections will take place in September and owners will have six months to remediate any issues that are identified prior to a re-inspection by RA the following spring. They use this timeline so owners can line up contractors over the winter months and schedule the work in the spring. 
• Enforcement and extensions: Owners will be dealing with RA instead of the Board (we will not receive a list of violations and cannot give extensions, as we have done with SCS inspections). 

Because this will be a somewhat different process from the past, we recommend you take the following steps to avoid receiving a violation letter from Reston:

1. Review the nine Lakeport Cluster standards at http://www.lakeportcluster.org/p/cluster-standards.html and make sure you are in compliance. Many of the changes to Lakeport Standards that have been made in the last two years mean that homes that otherwise would have been in violation (e.g., for missing house numbers, window replacements, or colors of garage doors, decks, or gutters) will now be compliant, but some Lakeport homes are still in violation of some of the revised standards. Note that gutters and downspouts will no longer need to be an exact match to the trim color, a recent change to avoid having a number of Lakeport homes non-compliant.
2. We anticipate that the main non-compliance issue will be color; so be sure to check all of your colors to make sure they meet the requirements of the various standards. Lakeport’s Color Summary (available on the standards web page) is a helpful reference, but you’ll also need to check the roof, deck, window, and recently proposed garage-door standards separately for those colors. If you aren’t sure of the name of a paint color used on your home, compare the colors on the exterior of your home with the colors used on the other homes in your building. If they’re the same, you probably should be all right since the color palettes are set up so that all the homes in a given building are the same. 
3. We have requested a copy of the checklist the RA inspectors will use to identify maintenance issues and will pass that on once we receive it so you can proactively fix what they will be looking for. 

If you have any questions about whether you are in compliance, please contact Lakeport’s Standards Committee Chair, Kelly Driscoll, at kmdriscoll@outlook.com or a Board member, realizing that you’ll receive a good faith opinion but the RA inspector may interpret things differently. Fortunately repairs in response to the SCS inspections over the last three years mean that a number of issues have been taken care of. And this year’s inspection will do even more to improve the appearance of Lakeport and our home values.