Mortgage Discharge

A Mortgage Discharge service covers paying out a mortgage held by a bank or other institutional lender and getting it removed from the title to the land it charges. The client has paid off the loan, or is about to; the firm obtains the payout statement, delivers the payout, collects the lender’s executed discharge, and has it registered. You add it to a matter when the firm has been retained to see that through, whether the payoff stands on its own or is the discharge side of a refinance.

It is deliberately not a private mortgage discharge, where the firm prepares the discharge rather than requesting it, and not the sale or the new mortgage that may be driving the payout. Those are different jobs with different paper, and they will get their own services.

Adding it to a matter

Open a matter and choose Add service in the sidebar. The picker offers only the services that suit the matter’s workflow, so Mortgage Discharge appears on residential real estate matters.

Adding one asks exactly two things: the jurisdiction it is governed by, and an optional name. Everything else has a home inside the service’s own pages, which start empty and fill in as the file progresses. Alberta is the province available today.

The jurisdiction cannot be changed afterwards. If you pick the wrong one, remove the service and add it again; nothing is lost, because a service you have just added has nothing in it yet.

How it is named

Leave the name blank and Laminar names the service for you. It starts as Mortgage Discharge, and once a lender is recorded on the service’s Mortgagee page, the lender’s short name follows: Mortgage Discharge RBC. The short name is the nickname on the lender’s contact record when it has one, and the name as recorded otherwise. The name follows the lender, so change the mortgagee, or its nickname, and the service renames itself.

Two discharges added before either has a lender are told apart by a number, in the order you added them: Mortgage Discharge (1) and Mortgage Discharge (2). The numbers drop away as soon as the lenders do the job. Two charges from the same lender, say a mortgage and a line of credit both with RBC, stay numbered, Mortgage Discharge RBC (1) and Mortgage Discharge RBC (2), unless you name them.

Type a name instead, at any point, and it is yours: nothing will overwrite it. Clear the field again to hand naming back to Laminar. A name can be changed at any time with Rename on the service’s own page, and no two services on a matter can share one.

Naming matters more here than on most services, because the everyday case is two of them on one file. A client clearing both a mortgage and a line of credit against the same home needs two discharges, not one: two lenders, two payout statements, two instruments to register. Add the service twice. Both appear in the sidebar as Mortgage Discharge services, each with its own pages, its own parties and its own charge. Once each lender is recorded, the sidebar tells the two apart with no help from you:

• Mortgage Discharge CIBC
• Mortgage Discharge RBC

When both charges are with the same lender, name each one yourself, for example RBC mortgage and RBC line of credit.

The mortgagors are the matter’s clients. Every mortgagor on the service becomes a client of the matter, so a matter you leave without a typed title is named after them. Remove a mortgagor and they stop being a client, unless they are still on the client’s side of another service on the matter, such as a vendor on its sale.

The payout date

Every discharge has one governing date, its Payout Date: the day the payout goes to the lender. Set it from the service’s own page. It sits in the matter’s Events section beside the matter’s other dates, and the client portal shows it under that event type’s own visibility rules, like any other date on the file. The lender letters are calculated to it.

What you record inside it

The service has six pages, in the order a payoff file tends to be opened.

Payout Statement holds the lender’s statement and the mortgage it speaks to: the Mortgage Registration Number, the Lender Reference (the lender’s own number for the loan), the Statement Date, the Payout Amount, the date that amount is calculated to (Payout Amount As Of), the Per Diem (the interest that accrues each day after that date), and Statement Good Until, the last day the lender honours the statement. The payout amount is also the figure the service’s own page shows as its headline. Statements tend to arrive more than once, so upload each one here as an asset of kind Payout statement: the list shows them newest as-of first, so the current statement is always on top. Below them are the notes from the lender’s contact record, so the lender’s payout line and standing instructions sit where you are working.

Payment shows the money that pays the lender, read from the matter’s trust ledger. What it lists depends on how the service came to be on the matter; see the next section.

Discharge is where the registry’s answer goes: the Discharge Registration Number and the Discharge Registration Date. Once both are filled in, the titles are marked discharged (see the next section for how that works when the service is opened from an obligation).

Parcels is the land: each property the discharge concerns, with the parcels it covers underneath. Where those parcels come from also depends on how the service came to be on the matter; see the next section.

Mortgagors lists the borrowers, each with their name exactly as it appears on the registered mortgage. The name starts as the contact’s legal name and can be edited for this file without touching the contact, which is how a borrower whose name has changed since the mortgage was registered stays findable at the registry.

Mortgagee is the lender, recorded as an organization contact. It carries no extra facts: the letters take its name from its contact record and nothing else.

Two ways a Mortgage Discharge exists

Opened from a discharge obligation. When the matter has an obligation to clear a mortgage (or a line of credit secured by one) from named titles, you can open a Mortgage Discharge straight from that obligation. See Obligations. The service is then set up to work that obligation, and it behaves differently in four places:

• Parcels lists the parcels in the obligation’s scope, each with its status (still registered, discharged, or no longer on title). It has no link or unlink actions, because the obligation decides which parcels are covered; change the scope on the obligation.
• Payout Amount becomes the obligation’s amount. Record the figure from the lender’s statement and the obligation shows it, naming this service and the as-of date as its source, and any payment drafted for the obligation follows it.
• Discharge Registration Number and Discharge Registration Date mark the titles in scope as discharged once both are filled in. Correct either one and those titles are rewritten to match; clear either one and the titles go back to registered. Titles outside the obligation’s scope are never touched.
• Payment lists the payments sourced to the obligation, and offers Create the payment to draft the one that pays the lender.

Delivering the lender’s registered discharge is a promise of its own on the matter. Recording the registration here does not close it; you close that obligation separately.

Added directly as a service. Choose Add service on the matter, as described above. Nothing works an obligation here. The Parcels page is the one you manage yourself: Add property records new land with its first parcel and links it, Link parcel offers the parcels already on the matter, and Unlink from this service takes a parcel off this discharge and leaves it on the matter. Link every parcel the mortgage is registered against, one title each: a blanket mortgage charges several, and the discharge has to be registered against each of them. Nothing is recorded on the link itself, because what the discharge needs of a parcel is its identity, and the parcel already carries that. Land belongs to the matter, so the parcel the discharge links is the same parcel a sale on the file links: an edit made under either shows under both, and each parcel’s page says which other services use it with Also on. The Payment page says the service does not work an obligation, and payments are added in the matter’s Trust Transactions section as usual.

The registration fee

When the service is added, Laminar adds the Alberta discharge registration fee to the matter’s billing as a disbursement, recovered from the client at cost. It is a flat $25, the fee the Tariff of Fees Regulation sets for registering a discharge of mortgage, so it does not move as you record things. It stays until the service is removed or the invoice carrying it is finalised, after which it is history and stays where it is.

That amount applies to submissions Land Titles receives on or after October 1, 2026. Before that date the fee was $10, which is what a file submitted under the old tariff paid.

Three things Laminar does not add for you. Add each as a line item when it arises:

• Additional titles. The fee covers a discharge affecting one certificate of title. Where the mortgage was registered against more than one, Land Titles charges $10 for each further title the discharge is endorsed on. The covering letter to Land Titles states the fee for one title and reminds you.
• Re-examination. If a lawyer’s submission comes back with a notice of deficiency, Land Titles charges $25 to look at it again.
• A different amount. A derived charge cannot be edited by hand, because it is the service’s record of what the tariff says. If the office charges something else, record the difference as its own line item.

The letters it produces

Generate from the matter and you will find four letters ready to fill from what you have recorded:

• Payout statement request to lender, the first letter on the file: it cites the mortgage, names the borrowers and the land, and asks for a payout statement calculated to the payout date, with the discharge to follow on receipt of the payout.
• Discharge follow-up letter to lender, sent once the payout has gone and the discharge has not come back: it confirms the amount and the date, and asks for the registrable discharge.
• Covering letter to Land Titles, enclosing the lender’s executed discharge for registration against each title, with the fee.
• Reporting letter to client, once the discharge is registered: the payout, the registration particulars, and the title now free of the mortgage.

The lender is addressed by the name on its contact record. Contacts carry no address, so the address line is yours to add. When a matter holds two discharges, Laminar asks which one a letter is for before it produces it.

As always, every generated document is a draft you can edit before it is final.

Removing it

Remove a service from the service itself. Draft charges that never went anywhere disappear with it, and its history stays on the matter: what was added, what was renamed, what was removed, and any invoice already finalised.

If the derived charge has been invoiced and not yet settled, Laminar will say so rather than removing the service quietly. Finalise or write off the charge it names, and the removal goes through.