The Offer:
Once you have found a home, the first step you will need to do is to present an Offer. This document is normally prepared by your Real Estate Agent. Your real estate agent may suggest putting a number of conditons into your Offer, eg. a condition non you being approved for a mortgage, or a condition requiring you to be satisfied with a home inspection.
A “Firm” Offer:
Once any conditions in the Offer have been met, and it is a “firm deal”, we can start to investigate the title to your property for you.
Title Search:
We must conduct several searches in order to determine who is in fact the registered legal owner of the property, and what encumbrances, if any, are registered against it. (Eg. Mortgages, liens, easements)
If there are any problems, we will requistion them to make sure you do not take over the Vendor’s problems.
Requisitions:
Once we have completed the inital searches, we will draft what is called a “Requisition Letter” that essentially requires the vendor’s lawyers to deal before closing with certain matters revealed by the searches and to provide satisfactory proof that matters have in fact been dealt with.
Time is of the Essence:
We must begin our searches as soon as possible and time is of the essence in this respect. It would be very detrimental to your transaction should the requisition date be missed. Have your Real Estate Agent forward a copy of your agreement to us and we will get to work right away so that no crucial deadlines are missed.
Before the Closing Day:
The closing day will be the day that the change of ownership of the property will change. If is usually a good idea for this not to be the last day of the month or the last Friday of the month, especially during summer months, since these are the busiest days of the year and many problems can arise.
Closing Day:
We will need to meet with you to sign all of the documents during the last week prior to the closing. Sometimes, depending on the arrival of documents from the other lawyers, we will meet with you the day before closing.
It is important for you and anyone else going on title to be in town during this crucial time.
We will tell you what you need to bring in before meeting with us. If you are bringing funds in, they must be in the form of Certified Cheque or Bank Draft, and you must provide us with two pieces of Identification. One piece must be a Government issued ID.
After Closing:
When buying a property, upon moving in you should check to ensure that all items listed in your offer are left on the property, and that the property has not been damaged.
You should also change the locks on the home as soon as possible, since there is always a chance that there are several copies of the key to your home floating around.
After the closing we will provide you with a reporting letter, along with copies of various documents that you have signed.