Selling a Home in Parkside, Chester Township, or Darby Township, PA: Where the Inspections Have Teeth

A use and occupancy inspection at $200 for an occupied home or $120 for an unoccupied one, with $75 reinspections, requested at least fifteen days before settlement. The borough is candid that its published checklist is not all-inclusive, and the process has a feature almost no neighboring town shares: a conditional certificate, the kind that lets a sale close with repairs finished afterward, is granted only through the borough solicitor, not the code office. That means a failed item discovered a week before settlement cannot be papered over with a routine conditional; it goes through a lawyer, on the borough’s timeline. Sellers who fix the obvious items before the first inspection avoid the whole mechanism.

The steepest resale fee in Delaware County: $250 for the certificate of compliance inspection, $100 for reinspection, with requests due twenty days before settlement. Since April 2012 the township has also required a sewer lateral inspection at residential resale. The checklist covers sidewalks and curbs, handrails, house numbers, smoke alarms, and GFCI protection, and non-permitted decks, finished basements, sheds, and fences must be permitted or removed. Chester Township is a separate municipality from the City of Chester, with its own process; the two are routinely confused, and the confusion costs sellers time.

A $125 inspection with a $75 reinspection and a $100 fee for missed appointments, requested seven to ten days out. Since 2011, Ordinance 691 has required a sewer lateral inspection at sale, performed by a licensed plumber with a township representative witnessing the test. The township also wants a tax certification, deed registration after closing, and two recycling containers conveying with the property. One caution from the Suburban Realtors Alliance: in 2023 the township was reported demanding escrow for incomplete lateral repairs as a condition of closing, a practice Pennsylvania’s Act 133 does not permit. Sellers facing an escrow demand should raise Act 133 with their agent and the township before agreeing to terms.

Entry-level price points with steady demand and a buyer pool that leans on financing. Parkside is a compact borough of twins and singles in Penn-Delco schools, the strongest district of the three, and trades at a premium to its neighbors for that reason. Chester Township and Darby Township, in Chester Upland and Southeast Delco schools respectively, draw first-time buyers and investors hunting the county’s lowest entry prices near I-95 and the airport. In all three, the municipal file decides the closing date: the inspections here have real teeth, and a seller who walks the checklist and scopes the lateral before listing turns the toughest processes in the county into a non-event.