If you list a home in Los Gatos this fall, no ordinance requires anyone to run a camera down your sewer lateral before the sale closes. No compliance certificate. No line item on a town checklist. Look up the Peninsula to Hillsborough, and a seller cannot close without one. Same state, same general property values, same era of aging pipe under the ground. One town built a mandate around it. The other never did.
That gap is not an oversight. It is a structural fact about who actually owns the pipes under Los Gatos streets, and it matters more to sellers of older homes than most closing checklists let on.
The pattern, city by city
A widely used compliance chart maintained by a sewer inspection company and cited by the Silicon Valley Association of REALTORS shows the divide clearly. As of a July 2025 update, cities like Hillsborough, Larkspur, Hercules, and Kensington require a point-of-sale sewer lateral inspection before a residential transfer can close. San Jose, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Los Altos, and Los Altos Hills do not.
| City | Point-of-sale inspection required |
|---|---|
| Hillsborough | Yes |
| Larkspur | Yes |
| Hercules | Yes |
| Kensington | Yes |
| Los Gatos | No |
| San Jose | No |
| Saratoga | No |
| Los Altos | No |
There is no clean geographic or economic logic to the split. Hillsborough is one of the wealthiest towns on the Peninsula and still built a mandate. Los Gatos, with comparable home values and a downtown core older than most of the cities on the "yes" side, never did.
The real answer sits in who runs the pipes.
Why Los Gatos can't just pass its own ordinance
A single city with its own sewer utility can pass this kind of ordinance with one council vote, fund the enforcement out of its own public works budget, and own the outcome end to end.
Los Gatos doesn't have that lever. The West Valley Sanitation District, not Town Hall, holds operational and maintenance responsibility for the sewer lines running under Los Gatos streets. That district also serves Campbell, Monte Sereno, and most of Saratoga. A point-of-sale inspection mandate covering Los Gatos would mean coordinating policy across a special district that answers to four different city governments, not one. That is a much harder thing to build consensus around than a single council resolution, and nobody has done it.
The district's own reporting notes that Los Gatos carries some of the oldest sanitary sewer infrastructure anywhere in its service area. The town has the pipe age that would justify a mandate. It simply lacks the single point of political control that makes one easy to pass.
The part the missing ordinance doesn't fix
None of this changes what's actually in the ground. Los Gatos's Old Town and Almond Grove neighborhoods carry cast iron sewer laterals dating to the 1920s through 1940s, now 85 to 100 years old. The town's hillside streets climbing toward the Santa Cruz Mountains add a second complication: longer lateral runs on steep grades, with root intrusion from the oak and redwood canopy that gives those blocks their character.
A failed lateral of that age is not a minor repair. Repair costs on a lateral this age typically fall in the $8,000 to $16,000 range, and the work often calls for trenchless methods rather than open trenching, specifically to avoid tearing up mature landscaping that took decades to establish. That cost range doesn't show up on a listing sheet. It shows up in escrow, usually after a buyer's inspector finds it, at the exact moment a seller has the least leverage to negotiate calmly.
What a missing mandate means for a listing
Because no town department checks this before closing, the entire burden sits on whichever party decides to look. Buyers in cities with a mandate get a passing inspection handed to them automatically. Buyers in Los Gatos get whatever the seller chooses to disclose, and sellers who never ordered an inspection often have nothing specific to disclose because they genuinely don't know what's down there.
California's Transfer Disclosure Statement still requires sellers to disclose known material defects, sewer issues included. But "known" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A seller who has lived in a home for twenty years without a backup has no legal obligation to go looking for a problem the town never asked them to find.
A pre-listing camera inspection changes that dynamic entirely. It typically costs a few hundred dollars, takes under an hour for a home with an accessible cleanout, and gives a seller one of two outcomes before a buyer's inspector ever shows up: a clean line that becomes a selling point, or a known issue that can be priced into the listing, repaired ahead of time, or negotiated on the seller's terms instead of a buyer's.
That is the same logic behind before-and-after listing preparation more broadly. The homes that show well are the ones where the seller controlled the story before a buyer's inspector wrote it for them. A sewer lateral is just the version of that story nobody can see from the curb.
A short checklist before you list
- Locate your cleanout and confirm whether the lateral has ever been camera inspected. If there's no record, treat it as unknown, not fine.
- If your home sits in Old Town, Almond Grove, or another neighborhood with pre-1950s construction, budget time for a camera inspection as part of listing prep, not as a reaction to a buyer's request.
- Ask any contractor quoting repair work whether trenchless methods are an option before agreeing to open-cut excavation, especially near mature trees.
- Disclose whatever the inspection finds. A documented, already-priced issue is a negotiation point. An undisclosed one discovered mid-escrow is a delay, or worse, a dispute.
A few questions worth asking directly
Does the town of Los Gatos have any plans to adopt a point-of-sale requirement? There's no public indication of that in current town or district reporting. Given that sewer operations sit with a multi-city special district rather than the town alone, any future mandate would likely need to be coordinated across Campbell, Monte Sereno, and Saratoga as well, not decided by Los Gatos on its own.
Does this affect homes on septic in the hillside neighborhoods? No. Septic systems are a separate category entirely, governed by different inspection and disclosure rules than a sewer lateral connected to the municipal system. A property on septic should be evaluated on its own terms, not folded into a sewer lateral conversation.
If a buyer's inspector finds a lateral issue during escrow, who typically pays? There's no fixed rule. It's a negotiation between buyer and seller, same as any other inspection finding, though sellers who catch the issue before listing tend to have more room to negotiate calmly than sellers who find out mid-escrow.
Selling an older Los Gatos home means understanding exactly which protections the town provides and which ones only exist if you build them yourself. The sewer lateral is one of the clearest examples of the second kind. Rob Godar works with Los Gatos sellers on exactly this kind of pre-listing preparation, the parts of a sale that never show up on a flyer but shape how smoothly escrow actually goes. If you're weighing when to list an older home in town, a conversation before you do is worth more than one after a buyer's inspector gets there first.
