Residential Sale

A Residential Sale service covers acting for the vendors on the sale of a home: recording the agreement and the land it is about, deciding what happens to every interest registered on the titles, the statement of adjustments and how its balance due on closing arrives in trust, the deposit and the listing brokerage’s settlement, the signing, and the promises given and received on closing.

It is deliberately not the purchase on the other side, which is a service of its own, the Residential Purchase, and not the discharge of the vendors’ mortgage. Deciding that a mortgage must be cleared creates an obligation on the sale, and a Mortgage Discharge opened from that obligation does the work of clearing it.

Adding it to a matter

Open a matter and choose Add service in the sidebar. Residential Sale appears on residential real estate matters. Adding one asks for the jurisdiction and an optional name; Alberta is the province available today, and the jurisdiction cannot be changed afterwards. A matter can hold more than one sale.

Drop in the purchase agreement

Upload the signed purchase agreement as a PDF, on the sale’s Assets tab or anywhere on the matter, and Inlet reads it and fills the sale for you: the purchase price, the agreement date, the firm date, GST on the price when the agreement says it is included, the initial and additional deposits and who holds them, the vendors and purchasers, both sides’ agents and brokerages, the closing and possession dates, and the property with its parcel. The agreement itself is filed on the sale as its agreement.

Inlet fills what is empty and never overwrites. People are matched to the matter’s contacts by name before anyone new is created, so a vendor already on the matter is given the role rather than added twice. A date that is not on the calendar, or an address too long to record, is left for you to enter; everything else still fills.

Not everything is written straight away. A change waits for you when the sale already holds something else, when part of the agreement was hard to read, when a name matches more than one contact, when the role already has someone in it, or when other land is already linked. The sale’s header then says how many changes from which document are waiting, and a waiting field, date or role shows what the document says beneath it. Choose Review: for each change, use the document’s value or keep what is recorded, and for a name, say who it is, create someone new, or search the firm’s contacts. Use all decides every change except a name and a value that changed after the document was read: those you decide one at a time, and the review says what the value was, so you overwrite it knowingly. Anything you leave undecided stays waiting. Adding a second vendor where a consenting spouse is on the file asks you first, because the consenting spouse no longer applies.

No sale on the matter yet? Upload the agreement anyway. The vendors and purchasers are added to the matter, the closing and possession dates go into its Events section, and the property is added to the matter. When you then add the sale, the matter’s closing and possession dates become the sale’s, the sale is filled from the agreement, and Laminar tells you how many values it filled and how many wait for your review. If the agreement’s closing date differs from the one already on the matter, it waits for you rather than replacing it, and anything you already decided about the agreement stays decided.

Two sales on the matter? Upload the agreement from the sale it belongs to. An agreement uploaded to the matter itself could belong to either, so it fills neither and changes nothing; each sale then offers Fill this one from it, and so does the document’s page in Inlet Activity. The same choice appears if you remove the sale an agreement filled while another sale remains.

Not read from the agreement yet: the included and excluded goods, the possession time, the conditions and the purchaser’s lawyer. Fill those in as usual.

How it is named

Leave the name blank and Laminar names the sale after the land it sells: Residential Sale while no parcel is linked, then Residential Sale 83 Elm Street once one is, taken from the street address of the property of the first linked parcel. A sale of one property with two titles is still named once, by its street. Two sales with the same name are numbered until something tells them apart. Type a name to override it; clear the name to hand naming back to Laminar.

The vendors are the matter’s clients. Every vendor, whether you add them or Inlet reads them off the agreement, becomes a client of the matter; the purchasers do not. So a matter you leave without a typed title names itself after them: Smith Sale. Remove a vendor and they stop being a client, unless they are still on the client’s side of another service on the matter, such as the mortgagor on its Mortgage Discharge. While someone is a vendor, their client role stays with them. Leave the matter’s description blank too, and it describes the matter by its property: 83 Elm Street, Edmonton.

Its dates

The sale’s governing date is its Closing Date. Set it from the sale’s own page; it appears in the matter’s Events section with the matter’s other dates. The other dates sit beside what they govern:

• Possession Date, on the Closing page’s Possession tab.
• Conditions Deadline, the condition day, on the Agreement page’s Conditions tab. It follows the Firm Date you record on the agreement: set the firm date and the event appears, move it and the event moves, clear it and the event is cancelled.
• Signing Appointment, on the Vendors page’s Signing tab, as many as the file needs.

Changing the closing date re-derives the statement of adjustments and the receipts of its balance due. It never changes the due date of an obligation already recorded.

The pages

The landing page lists every page with a one-line summary: how much of the agreement is recorded, the parcels linked, the vendors and purchasers, the deposit and commission, the balance due on closing, and the open obligations with the number of undecided interests. An obligation that appears on two tabs is counted once, and one is overdue when its due date is before today on your own calendar.

Agreement has three tabs. Terms holds the purchase price, the agreement date, the firm date, GST on the price, the vendors’ residency for section 116, and the included and excluded goods. Conditions lists the sale’s conditions (financing, inspection) as obligations, each closed by marking it satisfied or waived with its evidence, and shows the condition day above them. Assets lists the signed agreement and its amendments, newest as-of first.

Property is the land: add the property the sale is of, with its first parcel, then any further parcel, and record Alberta’s two facts on each linked parcel, Controlled Land and Dower. Land belongs to the matter, so the same parcel shows under every service on it.

Vendors has five tabs: Vendors (each with their name as registered, residency, signing capacity and tenancy), Also on Our Side (a spokesperson, an interpreter with their language, and the consenting spouse, offered only while the sale has exactly one vendor), Listing Brokerage and Agent, Signing (the appointments) and Our Team (the responsible lawyer and the assignee, read from the matter, with the members of the assigned team when a team is assigned).

Purchasers has three tabs: Purchasers (name as registered, tenancy), Purchaser’s Lawyer (the lawyer with their file reference, and their firm, whose standing payment methods show beneath), and Co-operating Brokerage and Agent.

Other Parties lists the municipality, the homeowners association, the tenant and, on a condominium, the condominium corporation and the property manager.

Deposits and Commission holds the initial and additional deposit, the commission before GST and whether GST applies to it, with who holds the deposit, and the settlement they leave with the listing brokerage named on the Vendors page (see below).

Closing has the Statement of Adjustments tab, with how its balance due will arrive beneath it, and the Possession tab: the possession date, the possession time, vacant possession, when the keys are released, and the interest owed if the balance due is late.

Obligations has four tabs: Title (a decision on every interest), To Clear or Pay (discharges, payouts and holdbacks), We Give (our undertakings and trust conditions) and They Give (theirs). Each tab adds the kind of obligation it lists.

Condominium appears only while a property the sale links carries condominium facts. It shows those facts, the current condominium certificate, and the statement lines derived from them. The facts themselves are edited on the property.

There is no payouts page, no money page, no documents page and no dates page. A payout the vendors instruct is an obligation, money is the matter’s trust ledger, documents are generated from the matter, and each date sits beside what it governs.

Deciding every interest on title

The Title tab lists every interest registered on any parcel the sale links, once each, with the parcels it sits on and its state on each. Each confirmed interest takes one decision:

• Permitted to stay: the purchaser takes title subject to it (a utility right of way, a restrictive covenant).
• Must be cleared: Laminar creates a discharge obligation owned by the sale, about that interest, covering the parcels the sale links on which it is registered, given by us, with the purchaser’s lawyer as counterparty and due sixty days after the closing date (with no due date while the sale has none). Sixty days is only a starting point: Alberta’s Conveyancing Protocol asks for the discharge within a reasonable period and names no number of days, so change the due date on the obligation when a trust letter or an agreement with the other side sets a different one. Neither is filled in later: an obligation keeps the counterparty and due date it was created with. Its title names the interest, its instrument and the parcels, for example “Discharge the RBC mortgage 192 334 222 from Lot 12 and Lot 13 and deliver the registered discharge”. From that obligation you can open a Mortgage Discharge to do the work.
• Assumed by the purchaser: recorded as a decision and nothing more.

An interest recorded as unconfirmed offers Confirm and nothing else, until someone has checked it. Until every confirmed interest has a decision, the tab, the page and the landing page say how many are undecided. A parcel linked later brings its interests in undecided. If an interest you decided must be cleared later turns up on another linked title, its row names that title so you can add it to the obligation.

You can change a decision. Changing away from must be cleared removes its open obligation, unless that obligation has a payment that has been approved or received, or a Mortgage Discharge working it; then Laminar refuses and says which, and you deal with those first. An obligation already closed stays as history, and the change is made without asking. It cannot be reopened while the decision no longer says it must be cleared, or while a title it clears is no longer linked to the sale; decide must be cleared again instead, which creates a new one. Decisions are made only here. A parcel’s own page shows each sale’s decision as a badge that links back to this tab, and two sales on one matter decide the same interest independently.

The statement of adjustments

The Statement of Adjustments tab shows the statement in two columns, Credit to the vendor and Credit to the purchaser, with their totals, and a last line, Balance due on closing, which is the vendor column less the purchaser column.

Most lines are derived, and each can show the rule and the figures it was computed from:

• Purchase price, credited to the vendor.
• Deposit, the initial plus the additional deposit, credited to the purchaser and naming who holds it. The commission never appears on the statement.
• Property taxes, once the property’s tax certificate facts are recorded (the levy, the amount paid to date and the year). The vendor’s share runs from 1 January to the closing date inclusive, because in Alberta the vendor owns the closing day. More paid than the share is credited to the vendor; less, to the purchaser. Facts recorded for an earlier year, as on a January closing before the new notice, are used as an estimate: that levy, with nothing counted as paid for the closing year.
• Association fee, when the vendor paid the year’s fee: the purchaser’s share of the days after closing, credited to the vendor.
• Condominium contributions: the purchaser’s share of the closing month after the closing date, credited to the vendor.
• Special assessment, levied before closing and unpaid, credited to the purchaser in full.

Every proration is calculated in calendar days and rounded to the cent, half up. Without a closing date only the price and the deposit appear, and the statement says the closing date is needed for the prorations. Derived lines cannot be edited on the statement: change the field, the property fact or the closing date they come from and they follow.

Add anything else the parties agreed as a typed line with Add adjustment: a title, the column it belongs in, and the amount, for example a credit to the purchaser for a garage door repair. Typed lines can be edited and removed; derived ones cannot. The statement never carries GST on the price, an interest charge for a late balance, a commission, a holdback or a payout.

How the balance due on closing will arrive

Beneath the statement, Balance due on closing: how it will arrive lists the receipts in the trust ledger that bring it in. Create the receipt creates one expected receipt for the whole balance due, from the purchaser’s lawyer’s firm. It is offered only while something is left to receive. When the purchaser’s lender will send part of it separately, Split off a stated amount creates a second receipt for that amount, and the first one follows the balance less every other receipt. A share that arrives short leaves the difference on the receipt that takes the rest. A stated amount can be edited or removed until it freezes, and not once its receipt is cancelled. The footer says whether the receipts equal the balance due, and shows the difference when they do not.

The receipts follow the statement until they freeze, which happens when the actual amount is recorded or the receipt is submitted to the team that processes it. Change the closing date and the receipt that takes the rest moves with the balance; the stated ones do not. Once a receipt is frozen nothing re-derives it, so a later change to the statement shows as a difference in the footer for you to deal with.

Nothing else about money is on the Closing page. Payouts are paid from the obligations they settle, and the balance to the vendors is an ordinary row in the matter’s Trust Transactions section.

The settlement with the listing brokerage

The Deposits and Commission page shows the deposit, the commission, the GST on the commission at five percent when it applies, and the settlement: the deposit less the commission and its GST. Create the settlement transaction puts it in the trust ledger:

• When the listing brokerage holds the deposit, it creates one transaction: a receipt of the deposit excess from the brokerage after commission, or, when the commission is larger, an expenditure of the commission shortfall to the brokerage.
• When someone else holds the deposit, it creates two: a receipt of the whole deposit from the holder, and an expenditure of the commission and its GST to the listing brokerage.

The action is unavailable while those transactions exist, and offers again any that is removed, on its own; it lists only the transactions it will create. If money has already moved under the old arrangement (the deposit was received from its holder, and the listing brokerage has since become the holder), the action stays unavailable and the page says why: the new arrangement would ask for that money again, so reconcile the trust ledger first. Until they freeze they follow the deposit, the commission and the parties; a change that turns a receipt into an expenditure, or changes who holds the deposit or who the listing brokerage is, removes the draft concerned and offers it again.

Signing and identity

On the Signing tab, add a signing appointment with its date, time, place, attendees and a note; the vendors are preselected as attendees. It appears in the matter’s Events section too. Each attendee shows whether their identity has been verified; a verification lives on the person’s contact, so one made on an earlier file still counts. For an attendee not yet verified, Verify records the check: the method, the date, who did it, and the evidence, such as a copy of the photo identification. An attendee who has since left the matter is marked as having left; the next time you save the appointment, they are taken off it, and the dialog says so.

The document it produces

Generate from the matter and the Statement of adjustments is ready to fill: every line as the Closing page shows it at generation, derived or typed, with the rule beneath each derived line, the two totals and the balance due on closing. Like every generated document, it is a draft you can edit before it is final.

Removing it

Remove the sale from the sale itself. Laminar refuses while the sale owns an open obligation, or while any transaction derived from it (a receipt of the balance due, a settlement transaction) is frozen or under way, and lists everything that blocks it at once. A sale nothing blocks takes its draft derived transactions with it and leaves its parties, its parcels, its decisions and its closed obligations as history.

A parcel cannot be unlinked from the sale while an open obligation covers it; Laminar names the obligation. Close or narrow the obligation first.