VISTA – For real estate agents and brokers, investors and property owners, building an accessory dwelling unit isn’t as straightforward as it may sound.
“You can’t plop a sign in the dirt in front of an ADU and say, ‘this is for sale,’” said Lisa De Jesus, the broker and owner of Henry Wright Realty, Inc. in Vista. “It’s a lot more complex than that.”
With more than three decades of experience in real estate and land use, De Jesus has become something of an expert on the policies that allow for the construction and sale of ADUs – also known colloquially as granny flats, casitas and in-law suite – across California.
State legislators first established a set of guidelines legalizing ADUs in 2016 and construction of the units has exploded in the decade since, with ADUs accounting for roughly one in every five housing units built across the state as of 2022, according to California Yimby.
De Jesus herself is one of those ADU owners, having constructed her 749 square foot, one-bedroom unit in 2019.
Navigating Changing Legal Landscape for ADUs
However, De Jesus, also the chair of the Vista Planning Commission, said she began noticing a schism between state housing policy for ADUs and the real-world outcomes driven by those policies and often found herself educating realtors across the region.
“I saw that ADUs were being constructed all through the state, so I just evolved over time, and then the depth of my understanding of ADUs and construction and all of the permitting processes in all of the jurisdictions in the county were eye opening,” she said.
De Jesus launched ADU Gurus LLC in 2020, a building consultant firm specifically for homeowners and property investors to plan out their ADU design “from concept to keys.”
Most recently, De Jesus launched ADUrealestate.net, a website designed to provide information about navigating the legal and transactional issues with selling a property that includes an ADU.
Sales of properties including ADUs was made more complex in 2024 following the implementation of Assembly Bill 1033, which gave individual jurisdictions across the state permission to adopt their own ordinances allowing homeowners to sell an ADU separately from the primary residence on their property.
The law essentially treats properties with both a primary home and an ADU as a condominium complex, according to De Jesus, who is hoping the new website will help homeowners to put their ADU on the real estate market while maintaining compliance with local and state regulations.
“Speaking the language of local government, speaking the language of real estate, I would help a lot of my people in the community understand ADUs,” she said. “But ADUrealestate.net grew out of that realization: it’s focused on preparing ADU properties for market by addressing the legal, planning and transactional issues early so owners aren’t surprised later.”
Further complicating the sale process for property owners will be the variation in ordinances and regulations across jurisdictions, and how quickly each city or county government can codify a process of selling an ADU on its own.
The City of San Diego has already done so, and the San Diego County Planning Commission has recommended adoption of its own rules for ADU sales that would apply to unincorporated areas of the county, but not every city may share the same urgency.
California has largely figured out how to allow and regulate the construction of ADUs, De Jesus argued, but now the state and its individual jurisdictions must determine the way to sell them responsibly.
“Once that’s managed and figured out and all the paperwork is done, then you can stick the sign in the ground and have that transactional process,” she said. “But leading up to that, that’s where my expertise is going to come in, and that’s why ADUrealestate.net was formed, so that i can help investors, property owners prepare that property legally in order to stick the sign in to sell it.
ADU Gurus LLC
FOUNDED: 2020
CEO: Lisa De Jesus
HEADQUARTERS: Vista
BUSINESS: Building consultant firm focused on accessory dwelling units
WEBSITE: adugurus.com
CONTACT: [email protected]
NOTABLE: De Jesus is a former planning commissioner in the city of La Mesa and is the current chair of the Vista Planning Commission.
Eli is an award-winning reporter primarily covering the tech and life sciences industries. He previously worked as the San Diego City Hall reporter for the regional wire City News Service. He has also covered public health, transportation and state and local politics in the San Francisco Bay Area for Local News Matters, the nonprofit arm of the regional wire Bay City News Service, where he also oversaw the development and daily content management of the outlet’s public health and COVID-19 news and resource webpage. He is also a contributing writer covering Minor League Baseball for the analysis and commentary website Baseball Prospectus. Eli is a graduate of San Francisco State University and a native of Northern California.
