January 25th, 2016 at 11:30 pm
Answer: No. You can advise the sellers in writing that non-owner occupied sellers of a residential property up to 4 units are not exempt from the TDS, NHD, and other disclosure requirements. You can attach? for their review the TDS exemptions set forth in section 1102.2 of the California Civil Code and/or C.A.R.’s legal article on TDS exemptions, available at http://www.car.org/legal/disclosure-folder/tds-exemptions/ (password protected for C.A.R. members only). You can also point out that, even if they don’t know certain things about the property because they haven’t lived there, writing “Not Applicable” across the form is unlikely to satisfy the TDS law’s specific requirement to act in good faith in completing the form (Civil Code section 1102.7). The sellers should simply complete the TDS based on their actual knowledge. Under the comment section at the bottom of page 2 of the TDS, they can explain that they have never lived in the house to alert the buyers of that fact.
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