Articles 2020

Suppose you own a house and want to open a restaurant on the ground floor. The applicable zoning by-law happens to permit that use on your property so you pull a building permit for the renovations, get a liquor license and start cookin’ with [TSSA-approved] gas. A week later, the City, in its wisdom, amends the zoning by-law to prohibit restaurant uses at your property. What do you do now?

The Ontario government is seeking input on proposed changes to the Real Estate and Business Brokers Act, 2002, and an anonymous survey is available for anyone to provide their input anonymously by March 15, 2019.

As a preview of Kimberly Beckman and Aaron Platt's upcoming 2019 OBA Institute presentation, Aaron Platt helped to summarize some of the due diligence issues that arise in multi-tenant property transactions, especially from a planning lawyer's perspective.

The two-year grace period to create an up-to-date register of real property ownership interests is up. As you set your ambitions high to start off 2019 on a great note, this serves as a quick reminder to call your commercial real estate lawyer and confirm that your real property ownership register is up to date.

The Real Property Law Section of the Ontario Bar Association, in cooperation with the Law Society of Ontario, has updated the educational tool for clients who are buying a residential property in Ontario. This publication is newly improved, is accessible online, and paper copies can be ordered.

A must-read primer for those who manage, own, or rent out condominium buildings and rental apartment buildings and are concerned about the legalization of recreational cannabis.

In a recent decision, the Court of Appeal sheds light on the evidentiary requirements to make a claim of a prescriptive easement against an owner of a “Land Titles Conversion Qualified” property.

Title insurance is a fairly standard aspect of real estate transactions, and particularly so for residential real estate transactions involving mortgages. The author set out to have the major title insurance companies answer some questions about their policies.

Following are summaries of this week’s civil decisions of the Court of Appeal of Ontario, including Yaiguaje v Chevron Corporation, in which it appears that the Court has finally put an end to the matter; and Beatty v Wei, in which the Court set aside the application judge’s interpretation of the Illegal Substances Clause commonly used as an additional term in the Ontario Real Estate Association/Toronto Real Estate Board standard form Agreement of Purchase and Sale.

The Landlord and Tenant Board has been declaring that instead of the single lease that the parties have entered into, there are deemed to be legally separate leases with each of the roommates. If a roommate vacates, that roommate’s share of the rent is no longer payable by the rest of the roommates. The landlord's only option to recover the lost income is to go to small claims court to recover the arrears from the roommate who defaulted.