Before You Buy
Between an accepted offer and the keys, a real estate lawyer does work you will never watch: searching the title, finding liens nobody mentioned, and arranging title insurance. What title insurance covers for its one-time premium, the exclusions that matter — including renovations done without permits — and why it is not a substitute for a survey.
Most buyers meet their lawyer once, sign a pile of documents they do not read, and collect the keys. The work that justifies the fee happened in the weeks before that meeting, and none of it is visible — which is why the lawyer is the easiest part of a purchase to choose on price alone.
What follows is what actually happens in that gap, and what the insurance you will be offered does and does not cover.
In broad terms, four things. They run a title search to establish that the seller can actually convey what they are selling, and that nothing is registered against the property that should not be. They review the agreement, the condominium status certificate where there is one, and the searches that come back from the municipality and the utilities. They arrange the money — receiving your funds and the mortgage advance, paying out the seller's mortgage, calculating the adjustments so that taxes and utilities land on the right side of the closing date. And they register the transfer so that you are the owner of record.
The searches are where the surprises live: unpaid property taxes, a lien registered by a contractor the seller never paid, an easement across the back of the lot, a discrepancy between what is registered and what is standing. Most purchases produce none of these. The ones that do are the reason the work exists.
Closing legal fees are the one cost in the whole transaction that does not scale with the price of the house, which is set out alongside the rest in Ottawa closing costs explained — and the incentive that follows from it is covered in who works for you when you buy.
Title is your legal ownership of the property. Title insurance protects that ownership against a specific family of problems — and, unlike almost every other insurance you will buy, it is paid for once.
FSRA lists what the premium may protect against: unknown title defects that affect your ownership; existing liens on a property, such as debts secured against the title by a previous owner — unpaid utility bills, mortgages, property taxes, condominium charges; encroachment issues, such as a structure on your property that encroaches on a neighbour's; errors in surveys and public records; other title-related problems that could affect your ability to sell, mortgage or lease in future; and title fraud.
That list is worth reading slowly, because the common thread is that almost every item is somebody else's problem that would otherwise become yours by the accident of ownership.
The exclusions are where buyers get their expectations wrong, and one of them connects directly to the rest of this site.
Read that sixth item again if you are buying a house with a basement apartment, a converted garage or an addition. A unit built without permits is a zoning and building-code problem, not a title problem, and this policy will not rescue you from it. That is precisely why the permits matter at the offer stage — see secondary dwelling units and coach houses and Ottawa zoning.
The fourth item is the other one to sit with. Title insurance is not a substitute for knowing where your boundaries actually are — it explicitly excludes what a new survey would have revealed.
A survey is a measured drawing of the property showing the boundaries and where the buildings sit within them. It answers a different question from the one title insurance answers: the survey tells you what is where, and the insurance protects you against problems with the ownership record.
Because title insurance can cover certain survey-related risks, many transactions proceed without a new survey being commissioned, and that is normally fine. It stops being fine when the boundary itself matters — a fence you intend to move, a garage close to the line, an addition you plan to build, a lot you intend to sever. In those cases you want to know where the line actually is, and an old survey in the seller's file is a starting point rather than an answer.
Title fraud is somebody dealing with your property as though it were theirs — most commonly by impersonating an owner to place a mortgage against a home, or to sell it outright. The owner finds out when the payments they never agreed to stop being made.
It is explicitly one of the things a title insurance policy may protect against, and because residential coverage lasts as long as you own the property, the protection is still there decades after the one-time premium was paid. For a policy bought once at closing, that is the strongest argument for it.
The through-line is the same one that runs through the offer itself: the cheap moment to ask a question is before you are committed, and the expensive moment is after the keys have changed hands. Making an offer is where that starts.
An accepted offer is a binding contract, and most of what decides whether it goes well is settled before you sign it. Whether to make a conditional offer or a firm one, what an irrevocable date commits you to, where your deposit goes and the honest answer to can I get my deposit back, and exactly what you are entitled to be told when there are competing offers.
What do I pay on closing? The purchase price is only the headline number. Between the accepted offer and closing day, a cluster of hidden costs comes due — land transfer tax, lawyer fees and disbursements, title insurance, adjustments and the repair buffer nobody budgets for.
Does the realtor work for me? Every person in a purchase is paid by someone, and it is rarely the person they are standing next to. How real estate commission flows, what buyer representation and multiple representation actually mean, who the open house agent works for, how a mortgage broker is paid, and why the appraisal is for the lender.
Zoning decides what a property may be used for and what may be built on it — and in Ottawa there is a complication most people have not caught up with: two zoning by-laws are in effect at once, and the most restrictive provision of the two applies. How to check what your property is zoned, what the codes control, and what to do when your plan does not comply.
