Documentation
Solar Agreements and Missing Documentation: Who Actually Holds What
The five documents that hold up closings, and where each one really lives.
Almost none of the documents you need are in the seller's drawer. The agreement sits with the finance company, the payoff figure with the lender, Permission to Operate with the utility, and the workmanship warranty with an installer who may no longer exist. Knowing which party to ask is most of the work.
The five documents
The original agreement. Purchase, loan, lease or PPA. Decides what transfers and on what terms. Held by the seller in theory; in practice, by the finance company or lessor.
Payoff or assumption terms. Held by the lender or finance company. Not something the seller can produce from memory, and often slow to obtain.
Permission to Operate. Held by the utility. Establishes the system was legitimately interconnected and fixes the date that determines which net metering regime applies.
Workmanship warranty. Issued by the installer. Frequently missing, and sometimes never issued at all.
Equipment documentation. Module and inverter manufacturers, model numbers and serials. Recoverable from the equipment itself during an inspection, which is often the fastest route.
When a document genuinely doesn’t exist
This is a finding, not a dead end. “No workmanship warranty was ever issued” is a different problem from “the seller has misplaced it”, and both are different from “the installer is out of business”. Each leads somewhere different in a negotiation.
What matters is that the parties know which of the three they’re dealing with, early enough to price it or resolve it.
What an inspection recovers
More than people expect. Equipment make, model and serials come off the labels. Interconnection evidence often appears at the service panel. The monitoring platform identifies itself and shows who holds the account. Firmware and error history come out of the inverter. On systems where the paperwork has vanished entirely, the hardware is the record.
Solar Transaction Support is the separate paid service for the rest — contacting the parties who hold the documents and establishing what exists. It is not included in the $399 inspection, and we don’t complete disclosures or give legal advice.
Sources
Need this settled on a live deal
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