Chester Heights and Rose Valley are two of Delaware County’s smallest boroughs, and their sale-time rules could not read more differently. Chester Heights sends an inspector through the living space with a fire-code checklist and a $120 application. Rose Valley skips the walk-through and points a camera down the sewer lateral instead. Neither is difficult if you know it is coming; both can cost a settlement date if you learn about them at contract.
Two small boroughs, two gates
Chester Heights sits on the Route 1 corridor in Garnet Valley schools, with enough new construction, including the Riviera 55+ community, to keep steady turnover. Rose Valley is a planned arts-and-crafts village of roughly a hundred homes beside Media, where listings are scarce and buyers wait. The common thread is that each borough has exactly one municipal requirement, and it is not the one you would guess from the other.
Chester Heights: the fire-code checklist
The borough’s U&O application carries a $120 fee, and the published requirements tell you what the inspector checks before you apply:
- Detectors, precisely: smoke alarms on every floor within ten feet of bedrooms, on the ceiling eighteen inches from walls, replaced at ten years old, and hard-wired units replaced with hard-wired. One CO detector per floor.
- House numbers: four inches tall, street side, readable from the road.
- Storage: no gasoline indoors, no propane tanks indoors, hazardous materials disposed of before sale.
- Doors and wiring: no double-cylinder deadbolts on exits, grounded electrical with no exposed wires or open boxes, GFI protection where required.
Rose Valley: the sewer camera
Rose Valley’s Ordinance 337 grew out of a DELCORA study on stormwater infiltrating the sewer system. Before the certificate of occupancy needed upon the sale of a house, the lateral must be tested for illegal stormwater connections, by video, air, or smoke, with repairs at the owner’s expense. Laterals more than 30 years old, which in this borough of early-1900s homes is most of them, must be televised the entire length, unless a satisfactory test was done within the previous five years.
The practical advice is the same as every lateral-inspection town: run the camera before you list, not at contract. A cracked terra cotta lateral is a repair you price and schedule on your own terms in March, or a five-figure surprise wired into someone else’s settlement deadline in June.
The Pennsylvania money
Both boroughs sit at the standard 2% total realty transfer tax, customarily split, so the seller’s half on a $650,000 sale is $6,500. Pennsylvania withholds nothing at settlement, and long-tenured Rose Valley owners in particular should run the federal exclusion math, $250,000 single, $500,000 married, in the home-sale tax guide. The rest of the ledger lives in the cost-to-sell guide.
Getting started
The order here: a free valuation, then the borough-specific gate handled early, the $120 application and detector audit in Chester Heights, the lateral camera in Rose Valley. Downsizers weighing where to land can start with the Delaware County downsizing guide, and the sequencing guide settles the buy-or-sell-first question. The complete downsizing guide covers everything else.