How to look up a building permit in Chippewa County, Michigan

BS&A lets you search building department records by address, parcel number or owner name, and will show the permit history for a parcel going back as far as the jurisdiction has digitised. This makes it one of the better tools for checking whether previous work on a house was permitted.

Using BS&A Online specifically

Chippewa County, Michigan publishes permit records through BS&A Online. BS&A is primarily a records system rather than an application system, so it is excellent for looking up what has been permitted on a property and less useful for filing something new.

BS&A record detail varies by what the jurisdiction chose to publish. A record with no inspection history shown is not proof that no inspections happened — it may simply not be exposed publicly.

Search by parcel number where you can

Street addresses are renumbered, re-suffixed and reassigned as areas develop, and a house standing for sixty years may have had three of them. Parcel numbers usually survive all of it, so a parcel search returns the complete history where an address search returns a partial one. Where address search is the only option, enter the house number and street name without the suffix — most systems match the string literally and fail on "Rd" against "Road".

Reading what comes back

• Issued — work is authorised and inspections are outstanding.
• Finaled or closed — passed final inspection. This is what you want to see on a property you are buying.
• Open — issued but never signed off. It transfers with the property.
• Expired — the validity window lapsed without inspection activity.
• Void or withdrawn — the application never became a permit.

If nothing comes back

Before concluding that work was unpermitted, rule out the likelier explanations. Records predating BS&A Online at this office are frequently not loaded. The work may sit with another agency — septic with the health department, driveways with public works, floodplain with the state. Or the property may be inside a city, in which case the municipality holds the record and Chippewa County will show nothing at all. Ask the office to check the paper file before you draw a conclusion.

Our guide to looking up permits covers the records-request route where no online search exists.