Residential Purchase

A Residential Purchase service covers acting for the purchasers on the resale of a home: recording the agreement and the land, how each purchaser will take title, deciding what happens to every interest registered on the titles, checking the vendor’s lawyer’s statement of adjustments against your own, paying the balance due on closing, the signing, and registering the transfer.

It is the other side of the Residential Sale, and most of it works the same way. This page explains what is different. If you have worked a sale in Laminar, you already know where everything else is.

It is deliberately not the purchasers’ new mortgage. The lender, the amount borrowed, the advance and the lender’s instructions belong to a separate service on the same matter, the Mortgage (Borrowing). Nothing on the purchase asks who the lender is, and nothing on it works out what the purchasers must bring to close: those amounts are ordinary rows in the matter’s Trust Transactions section.

Adding it to a matter

Open a matter and choose Add service in the sidebar. Residential Purchase appears wherever Residential Sale does, on residential real estate matters. Adding one asks for the jurisdiction and an optional name; Alberta is the province available today. A matter can hold more than one purchase, and it can hold a purchase and a sale at the same time, for a client who is selling one home and buying the next. The two services do not know about each other: each has its own land, parties, statement of adjustments, decisions and closing date.

Leave the name blank and the purchase is named after the land it buys: Residential Purchase 83 Elm Street.

The purchasers are the clients

On a sale the vendors are the firm’s clients. On a purchase it is the other way round: every purchaser becomes a client of the matter, and the vendors do not. A matter you leave without a typed title names itself after them: Chen/Okafor Purchase.

Each purchaser’s row on the Purchasers page records what the transfer will say about them:

Name They Will Take Title In, filled in from the contact’s full legal name. Change it on the row without changing the contact.
Tenancy and Share, recorded for each purchaser rather than once for the whole purchase. That lets you record any holding the law allows: all of them as joint tenants, each as a tenant in common with a stated share, or a share held by two of them as joint tenants while a third holds the rest in common. A purchaser whose tenancy nobody has recorded stays blank: Laminar does not assume one.
Address for Service, as the transfer recites it.
Citizenship or Residency: Canadian citizen, permanent resident, or neither. This one fact answers the first question of both the declaration that goes with a transfer of controlled land and the federal rules on purchases by non-Canadians.

The Purchasers page also holds Also on Our Side (a spokesperson, an interpreter), Our Brokerage and Agent, Signing (the purchasers are preselected as attendees) and Our Team.

The Vendors page holds the vendors with their names as registered, the Vendor’s Lawyer tab, and the Listing Brokerage and Agent. The vendor’s lawyer and the vendor’s lawyer’s firm are two separate rows: the firm is the one you pay, and its standing payment methods show beneath it.

There is no commission and no settlement with a brokerage on a purchase. The Agreement page has a Deposit tab with the initial and additional deposit and who holds them, because the deposit is credited to the purchasers on the statement of adjustments.

Must be cleared means the vendor’s lawyer owes it

The Obligations page has three tabs: Title, They Give and We Give. You decide every interest on title once, as on a sale: permitted to stay, must be cleared, or assumed by the purchasers.

The difference is what must be cleared records. On a sale it is your own promise. On a purchase it is the vendor’s lawyer’s undertaking to discharge the interest, so Laminar records it on the They Give tab:

titled to say who owes it, for example “The vendor’s lawyer is to discharge the RBC mortgage 192 334 222 from Lot 12 and Lot 13 and deliver the registered discharge”;
covering the parcels the purchase links on which the interest is registered;
with the vendor’s lawyer as counterparty;
due sixty days after the closing date. Sixty days is only a starting point for following it up. Alberta’s Conveyancing Protocol asks for the discharge “within a reasonable period”, so change the date on the undertaking when the trust letter names a different one.

An undertaking the other side owes offers no payment and no Mortgage Discharge: paying out the vendors’ lender is their lawyer’s work, not yours. It is followed up and closed. Once its due date passes it is flagged as overdue. When the registered discharge comes back, record it on the interest’s own page against the undertaking, and every title it covers is marked discharged. Then attach the registered discharge to the undertaking and mark it satisfied.

Assumed by the purchasers records the decision and nothing more. Type the adjustment for it onto the statement of adjustments if the parties agreed one.

Conditions of the agreement, such as financing and inspection, are on the Agreement page, not here. A financing condition is an ordinary condition whose title says what it is; it carries no lender and no amount.

Your statement of adjustments and theirs

The Closing page’s Statement of Adjustments tab shows the purchase’s own statement of adjustments, derived exactly as on a sale: the same lines, the same Alberta arithmetic, the same rounding. Given the same price, deposits, closing date and property facts, a sale and a purchase show the same statement of adjustments to the cent, so the firm acting for the vendors and your firm reach the same balance due.

Beneath it, Their statement of adjustments holds the one figure you record from the vendor’s lawyer’s statement of adjustments: the balance due it arrives at. Upload their statement of adjustments from the same tab; each version stays on the purchase with its date. Once their figure is recorded, the tab shows it beside yours with the difference, and says when the two agree. The difference is a fact, not a warning: it may be an adjustment they left out, or one you chose not to record.

You can work either way:

Check theirs against yours. Record the tax and condominium facts on the property and type your own adjustments. If the two figures differ, compare the lines and call the vendor’s lawyer.
Work from theirs alone. Skip your own adjustments and record their figure. That is enough to pay the balance.

The payments always follow their figure once it is recorded, and yours until then. The headline on the purchase’s landing page shows the same figure.

Paying the balance due on closing

On a sale the balance due arrives. On a purchase you send it, and it is usually the largest payment on the file.

Beneath the statement of adjustments, Balance due on closing: how it will be paid lists the payments in the trust ledger that pay it. Create the payment creates one expected payment to the vendor’s lawyer’s firm (to the vendor’s lawyer when no firm is recorded), titled “Balance due on closing to” the firm, with the firm’s standing payment method already chosen when it has exactly one. When the purchase has neither the firm nor the lawyer yet, the section says which roles are needed first.

Split off a stated amount creates a further payment for an amount you name, for example when the balance goes in two wires, or when the lawyers agree that you hold part of it back to send later. The payment that takes the rest follows the balance less every stated amount. The footer says whether the payments equal the balance to pay, and shows the difference when they do not.

A payment follows the balance until it is approved. A wire cannot be approved until the account it goes to has been verified: confirm the instructions by calling the firm on a number you found independently of the trust letter, then record that verification on the payment method. Once approved, a payment is frozen. If the closing date or a figure changes afterwards, the frozen payment does not move: the footer shows the difference, and Create the payment comes back for anything still to pay.

A holdback is not an adjustment. Adding or releasing a holdback obligation changes nothing on the statement of adjustments or on these payments. Money you will send later out of the balance due is simply a stated amount, approved and sent when the time comes.

The Closing page shows nothing else about money: no receipt from the purchasers, no lender’s advance, no total of money in. Those are rows in the matter’s Trust Transactions section.

Registration

Registering the transfer is part of the purchase. The Closing page’s Registration tab holds:

Manner of Closing: the Western Conveyancing Protocol, title insurance, or conventional (the balance due is released only once the transfer registers). This records what protects the purchasers between paying and registering.
Date Submitted for Registration: the day you submit the transfer.
Registration Number and Registration Date: when the transfer registers, usually weeks later.
Each parcel’s Declared Value and New Title Number. They are shown here and recorded on the Property page, on each parcel’s link to the purchase. The declared value is the value sworn on the affidavit of value.

The landing page’s line for Closing says which stage the registration has reached: not yet submitted, submitted on a date, or registered on a date.

The registration levy is worked out from the total of the declared values and added to the matter’s billing as a cost the firm pays and recovers from the purchasers. No Transfer of Land service is needed. Change a declared value and the levy follows while it is a draft; clear them and it goes.

Recording the registration changes nothing on the parcels. When the transfer registers, pull a new title search and update each parcel’s title number and registered owners from it, as you would after any search.

Drop in the purchase agreement

Upload the signed purchase agreement and Inlet fills the purchase the way it fills a sale, with the sides the right way round: the buyers become purchasers and the sellers vendors, each side’s agent and brokerage land on its own page, and the terms, the deposits and who holds them, the closing and possession dates and the land fill in. Nothing already recorded is overwritten; a different value waits for your review.

A sale and a purchase on the same matter? An agreement uploaded to the matter itself could belong to either, so it fills neither until you choose Fill this one from it on the service it belongs to. Upload it from the purchase’s own Assets tab and it fills the purchase straight away.

Condominium

The Condominium page and the condominium corporation and property manager roles appear only once condominium facts are recorded on the property, as on a sale.

Removing it

Laminar refuses to remove a purchase while it owns an open obligation, such as an undertaking the vendor’s lawyer still owes, or while a payment of the balance has been approved. It lists everything that blocks the removal at once. A purchase nothing blocks takes its draft payments and its draft levy with it, and leaves its parties, its parcels, its decisions and its closed obligations as history. A parcel cannot be unlinked while an open undertaking covers it.

What the purchase does not do

It ships no document templates yet. Its fields, parties, parcels and statement of adjustments are available to templates your firm writes.
It does not handle the purchasers’ mortgage or the lender’s requirements, such as proof of home insurance.
It does not work out what the purchasers must bring to close.
It does not submit anything to the land titles office or order title insurance. You record what happened.