Roanoke County, VA Building Safety: Building Inspections (2026)

When a citizen or county employee reports a building or structure as potentially unsafe, Sec. 7-65 requires the building official to inspect it and prepare a report for the building inspection department's records, covering the building's use and the nature and extent of any damage found. That inspection feeds directly into the notice-and-repair process at Sec. 7-66: if the report confirms an unsafe condition, the building official serves the owner with written notice specifying required repairs or a demolition deadline, and the whole article, including its inspection step, applies within the county and the Town of Vinton under Sec.

7-61. On the construction-permit side, Article V's fee schedule treats routine reinspections as a billable event: Sec. 7-73 sets a fifty-dollar charge for a reinspection on construction, but only once the same item has already been inspected twice and needs a third look, so a single missed item doesn't automatically trigger a fee on the first callback. That same Article V section also prices related inspection-driven approvals the building official issues once construction passes review, including a fifty-dollar commercial certificate of occupancy, a ten-dollar temporary certificate for a single-family home, a twenty-five-dollar temporary commercial certificate, a thirty-five-dollar certificate for an existing building, and a thirty-five-dollar periodic elevator inspection.

Reading the two provisions together, a Roanoke County inspection can arise either because a completed permit needs its scheduled construction checks and a certificate of occupancy, billed under Sec. 7-73, or because someone has reported an existing building as unsafe, triggering the Sec. 7-65 inspection-and-report duty that can lead to a formal repair-or-demolish notice.