June 15 FOLA Real Estate Update
Thank you to FOLA for sharing this update with us. Teraview has lots of news to share with Ontarian lawyers. Plus, there are updates about the Planning Act amendments.
One of the recent Teraview updates is that their document registration process is entirely paperless now! They’ve posted a helpful how-to on submitting “Paper Documents” through their site.
This update is available on their website or read it below. At the end of the update, they have an email from Sidney Troister about the latest news on Bill 276. This bill received Royal Assent on June 3, 2021 and once enacted will make amendments to section 50 of the Planning Act.
LRO Updates
The Director of Titles has recently posted 3 articles that real estate lawyers should review:
June 1, 2021 - Registering “Paper Documents” in Teraview - available here
June 8, 2021 - Teraview Experiencing Record Volumes - available here
June 10, 2021 - Data Retention Reports for Registry Non-Convert PINs - available here
Planning Act Update
Sid Troister recently circulated commentary on the amendments to s. 50 of the Planning Act, which received Royal Assent on June 3, 2021 but have not yet been proclaimed, so are not yet in force. With his permission, his email is attached. Every lawyer practicing real estate in Ontario should be aware of these impending changes.
We are grateful to Sid for all his efforts in proposing these amendments and encouraging their enactment, as well as to Ray Leclair from LawPRO who pressed the government for these amendments and, of course, to the Ontario Attorney General Doug Downey who first brought the amendments to the legislature as a private members bill and encouraged his fellow MPPs to see the amendments become law.
If you have not signed up for Sid’s period email updates, we encourage you to do so.
Standard Closing Documents
At the May 2017 Plenary, a unanimous resolution was passed approving and endorsing the use of the standard closing documents prepared by the Working Group on Lawyers and Real Estate.
The Standard Closing Documents are available in French and English on the Working Group’s website.
We strongly believe that the real estate bar benefits greatly from working with a set of standardized closing documents for residential real estate transactions.
The idea is to end the repetitions in the old forms and to eliminate any statements, warranties or declarations that were not required to be provided in the agreement of purchase and sale. Vendors, and their lawyers, should not be delivering anything that is not required under the agreement of purchase and sale, as doing so creates liabilities that are not required under the agreement. In addition, the use of standard closing documents can reduce the time a lawyer spends reviewing, revising and negotiating closing documents.
The following additional benefits are noted by the Working Group in the Rationale Document for the standard closing documents:
Less paper, no repetition and more efficiencies, as the content of the documents can easily be confirmed as being either unamended or modified;
Less time needed to negotiate the content of closing documents;
Adherence to province-wide standards;
Client’s rights and obligations are protected based on the agreement of purchase and sale;
Either party can easily prepare the documents for the other side; and
No need to delete inapplicable paragraphs as they are worded conditionally.
Notwithstanding their clear utility to the lawyer and the clients, the standard closing documents have not been fully adopted across the province, and FOLA has agreed to promote their use by all counties and districts in the province.
Letters of Support for this initiative from LawPRO and the Director of Titles for the Province can be found at these links.
We are calling on the local real estate representatives of each county and district to encourage the use of the standard closing documents within their association and to notify us once their association has adopted the documents for use.
If and when we receive further information of interest to the real estate bar, we will pass it along.
Stay up to date with FOLA’s real estate information at https://fola.ca/real-estate-law.
