What happens if the house I am buying has an open building permit?
The renovation is finished and the paperwork is not. What matters is whether anything has been registered against the property, because that is the part a new owner inherits.
The short answer
It means a permit was issued and the required inspections or final notice were never completed, so the file is still open at the municipality. The work is not automatically illegal, but an order about it can be registered on title. Robin Patel, a REALTOR® in Brampton, raises this during the condition period.
Written forBuyers in the GTA who have learned that a permit on the property was never finalised, and owners who are about to sell a house with an addition, a basement or a deck that was permitted but never signed off.
The short version
- An open permit normally means a permit was issued but the inspections at each stage, or the notice of completion, were never finished.
- Open permit is municipal practice language. The phrase does not appear in the Building Code Act at all.
- A chief building official may revoke a permit where work has not been seriously commenced after six months, or has been substantially suspended for more than a year, but both grounds turn on that official opinion.
- An inspector who finds a contravention may make an order directing compliance, and a copy of that order may be registered in the land registry office.
- Where such an order is registered, anyone acquiring an interest in the land afterwards is deemed to have been served with it, which is how it reaches a buyer.
What an open permit is
A permit is required before the work starts. The Building Code Act says that no person shall construct or demolish a building, or cause one to be constructed or demolished, unless a permit has been issued by the chief building official. That is the beginning of the file, not the end of it.
What makes a permit open is everything that was supposed to happen afterwards. The Act requires that at each stage of construction specified in the building code, the prescribed person notify the chief building official that the construction is ready to be inspected, and separately that notice of the date of completion be given. Where those steps stop happening, the permit stays open — somebody built the deck and nobody ever called for the final inspection.
That is the beginning of the file, not the end of it.
What it does not mean
An open permit is not the same thing as unpermitted work, and the two get conflated constantly. Unpermitted work means nobody ever applied. An open permit means somebody did apply, was granted permission, and then did not finish the administrative half. Those are different problems with different fixes, and the second is usually the smaller one.
It also does not, by itself, mean the municipality has done anything about it. The Act says an inspector who finds a contravention may make an order directing compliance. The word is may, and the grounds for revoking a permit are likewise tied to the opinion of the chief building official, so nothing here happens automatically on a schedule.
| Provision | What it says |
|---|---|
| Permit required | No construction or demolition unless a permit has been issued by the chief building official |
| Inspections | At each stage specified in the building code, the prescribed person must give notice that construction is ready to be inspected |
| Completion | Notice of the date of completion must be given to the chief building official |
| Revocation | The chief building official may revoke where work has not been seriously commenced after six months, or is substantially suspended for more than a year |
| Orders | An inspector who finds a contravention may order compliance, and a copy may be registered in the land registry office |
The part that reaches a buyer
This is the provision worth knowing, and it is the reason the question matters at all. Where an order directing compliance has been registered in the proper land registry office, the Act provides that any person acquiring an interest in the land after that registration is deemed to have been served with the order on the day the order was served.
So the mechanism is not that an open permit follows the house. It is that a registered order does, and it does so by deeming a later purchaser to have been served with something they never received. There is a matching provision for getting out from under it: once the requirements of such an order have been satisfied, the chief building official shall register a certificate to that effect, which operates as a discharge.
What to do about it during the conditions
There are two separate enquiries and they are run by two different people. Your lawyer searches title, which is where a registered order would show up, and that is the half with the legal consequence attached. The other half is a municipal enquiry into the permit history for the address, which is what tells you whether anything is open and what stage it stopped at.
Once you know which it is, it becomes an ordinary negotiation: the seller finalises the permit before closing, or the price reflects the work needed to finalise it, or you accept it knowingly. All three happen. What causes damage is finding out after the conditions have been waived, when there is nothing left to trade.
Written by
Robin PatelSalesperson · The Agency Toronto
Updated
Published
Read in your language
A machine translation, not Robin’s words. For anything that decides money, ask him in Gujarati or Hindi directly.
