Possession day, by the hour

A FOUNDRY COMPANY FIELD GUIDE · NO. 06

Possession day is the day the money moves, the title transfers and the keys change hands. Almost none of it happens where you can see it. Here is the order of the day, and where your own part of it sits.

The morning belongs to the lawyers

Your lawyer and the seller's lawyer spend the morning doing the work the contract has been pointing at for weeks. Funds move from your lender to your lawyer and on to the seller's side. The transfer of land goes to the Land Titles Office. Adjustments get settled, meaning property tax and any prepaid cost apportioned between the two households by the calendar.

Your job through this stretch is mostly waiting, and it is a strange few hours. Everything has been decided and nothing has finished. Pack the kettle last, because the thing you want in the first hour of a house is a way to make something hot in a kitchen you have never used.

Keys release once the funds land

The keys follow the money, and that sequence is the whole mechanic of the day. Nothing releases on the strength of the date alone. Your lawyer confirms the funds have arrived on the seller's side, the seller's brokerage or lawyer releases the keys, and somebody calls you.

The standard Alberta contract does name an hour. It sets completion, full payment of the purchase price and vacant possession together on the completion day at noon, which is why noon is the figure everybody has heard. What it does not do is guarantee that the money clears by then, and the practical hour depends on the lenders, the two law offices and the Land Titles Office all clearing in sequence.

So plan the day around an afternoon that might start on time and might not, and do not book the movers for nine in the morning. Noon is the contract's hour rather than a prediction about yours.

The walkthrough happens with the door open

First pass through the empty house, door propped, before a single box comes off the truck. You are checking that what was promised is present and working. Every inclusion from the contract is there. The appliances run. The furnace and the hot water tank do what they did at the inspection. Nothing has been removed that was supposed to stay and nothing has been damaged getting the last owner's furniture out.

Anything amiss goes to your lawyer while the day is still young, because a problem raised at four in the afternoon on possession day has options that the same problem raised on Thursday does not. This is the last checkpoint on a chain that started at the first showing. What to notice on a first viewing is where that chain begins.

Take photographs while you walk. Every room before anything of yours is in it, every appliance, the meter readings, and anything already damaged. Ten minutes of photographs on an empty house settles arguments that would otherwise come down to two recollections, and nobody has ever regretted having them.

The first night is not for unpacking

Order in. Find the box with the bedding and the box with the towels and stop there. The rest of the boxes will keep, and the evening will not come round again.

There is a practical version of this too. Locks get changed in the first week, the mail redirect wants confirming, and the utilities should already be in your name from the possession date rather than from the day you remember to call. The rest of the list can wait until the weekend.

Find the shutoffs before you need them. The main water valve, the gas shutoff and the electrical panel, located and understood on the first evening, are the three things you will want to know in the dark at some point in the next few years. Label them while the house is still empty enough to move around in.

The whole day is a handoff

Possession looks like a single moment and behaves like a relay. Lender to lawyer, lawyer to lawyer, registry to title, title to keys, keys to you. Each handoff is somebody else's job and every one of them has to clear before the next begins.

We stay through the whole day. The five terms an offer is built from is where the date you are standing in was written down, weeks earlier, by somebody with a calendar.