This depends heavily on where you live. I bought a house in a city with a realtor who was fairly new and didn't realize the city mandated inspections upon sale. When I tried to sell the same house a few years later, the buyer's agent did know about it, and when the city came out, they required several updates to the electrical wiring in the garage and to replace an old-style gas valve that had fallen out of code.

What if the house isn't sold, just the company that owns it?

Neither I nor (to my knowledge) the previous owners were in any way penalized or even notified that the required inspection was missed when I bought the house and registered it as my primary residence at the city hall (for property tax purposes).

It mostly seemed like something to benefit buyers given that, and I would assume that a company changing hands would mean the the purchasing party has already done their due diligence.

Oh that's fascinating, what state was this in?

This was some years back in Minnesota. The particular town (a suburb of Minneapolis) was apparently infamous for nanny-state governance, and nothing of what I've heard since has me wanting to go back.

With that said, I've still got a few friends who enjoy living there, so to each their own I suppose.

Yeah that's pretty typical. Every city has at least a few of those rich suburbs full of jerks that run the town that way. I bet they probably have a bunch of police policies that amount to "harass the crap out of anyone who can't just pay for compliance with everyone" too.

Honestly, I wasn't even in one of the "rich" suburbs. Unfortunately, the whole area tends to want to mimic the worst of other metro policies.

The police were actually pretty decent, as was enforcement of other policies like "your grass is half an inch too long" type stuff that I'd heard of elsewhere. For the most part, if the house didn't look like a junkyard or have a lot of visible peeling paint, they didn't pester people overmuch.

I expect older homes are grandparented into code approval?

Some us counties* don't even have code enforcement departments.

It is for mortgages

It absolutely is not. I've purchased two (2) homes with catastrophic damage to their foundations and structural members, bad plumbing, and worse wiring. The mortgage company didn't make a peep. The insurance company did pitch a bitch about a brick porch attached to one of the homes, so I ended up spending a day and a half repointing it, but that's all.

I’m not sure where you live, but mortgage companies require inspection reports and if the inspection fails of structural condition, you’re not getting a mortgage where I live.