Transfer of Land

A Transfer of Land service covers moving title to a property from one owner to another when no purchase or sale contract is driving it. Think of a gift to a family member, adding or removing a spouse on title, moving a property into a personal corporation, or severing a joint tenancy. You add it to a matter when the firm has been retained to carry out that transfer, and it unfolds its own pages for the details the job needs.

It is deliberately not the conveyance step inside a purchase or a sale, a transmission on death, or a court-ordered transfer. 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 Transfer of Land 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 after the subject property it concerns, updating that name as you link or unlink parcels. Link more than one and the name carries a count of the others.

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.

What you record inside it

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

Transfer Details holds what the transfer is. Who the firm acts for, the consideration, how the new owners will take title, and, once the registry comes back, the registration number and date.

Two of those deserve a word. Consideration is what the transfer recites, which on a family transfer is often nominal. Where the recital needs words rather than a number, and it usually does, write them in the recital override: something like “ONE ($1.00) DOLLAR and natural love and affection”. Whatever you write there wins over the amount in every document.

Subject Properties is the land. Add each parcel with its LINC, legal description and title number, then record its declared value: the sworn worth of that parcel in this transaction. Declared value is a different fact from consideration, and the difference matters. A $1 gift of a $500,000 house recites $1 and declares $500,000, and it is the declared value the registration levy runs on.

Transferors lists the people giving up title, each with their name exactly as it appears on the current certificate. In Alberta each transferor also records their dower status, which decides what dower paper the transfer needs. When a transferor’s spouse is consenting, add that spouse here too, in the Consenting Spouse role; they are a person on the file, not a name typed into a box.

Transferees lists the people taking title, each with the name they will be registered under, their address for service, and, where they take as tenants in common, their share.

The registration levy

When at least one parcel carries a declared value, Laminar adds the Alberta registration levy to the matter’s billing as a disbursement, recovered from the client at cost. It is calculated the way the Land Titles Act calculates it: $50, plus $5 for every $5,000 of declared value or part of it. One instrument covers every parcel it transfers, so the $50 is charged once and the $5 runs on the parcels added together. A $500,000 transfer comes to $550.

Correct a declared value and the charge follows it, right up until the invoice carrying it is finalised. After that it is history and stays where it is.

One thing Laminar does not add for you: when a transfer covers more than one certificate of title, Land Titles charges a further fee for each additional title. Add it as a line item yourself. It is not part of the levy above, and the current amount is worth confirming with Land Titles before you bill it.

The documents it produces

Generate from the matter and you will find the Alberta transfer packet ready to fill from what you have recorded:

• Transfer of Land (Form 8), with the affidavit of attestation
• Consent of Spouse (Form A) with the certificate of acknowledgment
• Dower Affidavit (Form B)
• Affidavit re Value of Land (Form 32)
• Citizenship Declaration (Form 1)
• A covering letter to Land Titles
• A reporting letter to the client

The dower documents follow what each transferor swore: a transferor who is not married gets the affidavit, a transferor whose spouse consents gets the consent and acknowledgment instead, and a transferor whose spouse already signed a registered release still swears an affidavit saying so. Where both spouses are transferring, the transfer itself answers dower and no separate document is needed. The covering letter lists exactly what ends up in the envelope.

Worth knowing why only one spouse ever consents. What decides it is how many people are transferring, not how many are on title. Where two or more co-owners all execute the transfer, either one of them is not the spouse of another, in which case the land is not a homestead and dower does not apply, or they are married to each other, in which case signing the transfer is itself the consent. Either way no separate consent document is needed. Where only one person transfers, dower can apply, and that person has one spouse. Note that this includes a case that is easy to misread: two people on title and only one of them transferring, such as removing a spouse from title, is a single transferor, so dower does apply and the consent is required. So Laminar lets you record one Consenting Spouse per transfer, alongside the one transferor disposing of the homestead. Once a second transferor is on the file the role does not apply, and the Consenting Spouse section disappears from the Transferors page entirely. Remove a transferor and it comes back. If you add a second transferor while a consenting spouse is already recorded, Laminar tells you the role no longer applies and asks before removing them; it never drops someone from the file on its own. If you mark more than one transferor as having a consenting spouse, the consent form prints a note asking you to check the dower statuses, because that is not a combination the Dower Act produces.

Two of these deserve a note. The Citizenship Declaration is only required for controlled land, which means land outside the boundaries of a city, town, village or summer village. An ordinary transfer inside a city needs no declaration at all. And the forms are drafted for signing in person; if you are swearing by video conference, the Dower Act and Land Titles Act prescribe a different jurat, so edit it before you produce the final document.

As always, every generated document is a draft you can edit before it is final. The prescribed wording is reproduced from the current Alberta regulations, but the file in front of you is yours to check.

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 a 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.