Section 01
The anatomy of a certificate of title
A title identifies the parcel by legal description — a plan, block and lot, or a metes-and-bounds description for larger parcels, together with a linc number that stays with the land through ownership changes. It names the registered owner or owners and how they hold, and it carries a register of instruments beneath, each with a registration number, a date and a type.
The legal description, not the municipal address, is the identifier that matters. Addresses change, are re-assigned during infill, and occasionally attach to the wrong parcel in informal records. Every other document you gather should be checked back against the legal description on title.
Order a current title. A copy provided by another party may pre-date a registration that changes the position materially.
Section 02
The instruments you will actually encounter
Mortgages register a lender's interest and are ordinarily discharged on closing. Caveats give notice of a claimed interest — an agreement, an option, a restrictive covenant, a builder's arrangement — and their significance depends entirely on the document filed behind them. Easements and rights of way grant a defined use to a utility, a municipality or a neighbouring parcel. Builders' liens register a claim arising from work performed and demand explanation before anything else proceeds.
Restrictive covenants deserve particular attention on estate lots and in planned areas. They can govern building form, materials, siting, accessory structures and use, and they run with the land rather than with the developer's intentions. A covenant that suits the existing house may constrain the addition, the shop or the pool that motivated the purchase.
The only reliable way to understand a registration is to obtain the registered instrument itself and read it. The single-line description on the title register is an index entry, not the terms.
Section 03
Registrations that recur on river, ravine and estate parcels
Parcels near the valley and ravine system frequently carry registrations that ordinary interior lots do not: utility rights of way, drainage easements, access arrangements, and agreements with a municipality relating to slope, top of bank or shared works. Their presence is not a defect and their absence is not a clearance; both are simply facts to be read alongside municipal mapping and any engineering the property has attracted.
Acreage and county parcels add their own recurring items — access agreements, utility corridors, agricultural or environmental registrations. Which authority administers them depends on the municipality the parcel sits in, and that authority should confirm its own position rather than the position being inferred from the title alone.
Section 04
What title is not
Title is not a survey. It does not show where structures sit, whether a garage crosses a boundary, or whether an easement is physically obstructed. That is the work of a Real Property Report, and the compliance question that follows belongs to the municipality.
Title is not an inspection or a permit history. It records nothing about condition, workmanship, unpermitted alterations or mechanical systems. It is not a valuation and reflects no price or market position. It is not a legal opinion: the effect of an instrument on your intended use is a question for your lawyer, on your facts.
Registered interests bind the land. Assume nothing disappears merely because the current owner has never been affected by it.
Section 05
A practical title workflow
Ask your lawyer to order the current title and a copy of every instrument registered against it, then to prepare a short written summary in plain language: what each registration is, whether it will be discharged on closing, and which items constrain use rather than ownership. Read that summary against the survey and the municipal records rather than in isolation.
Where a registration touches the reason you want the property — a covenant limiting building form, an easement crossing the only place a shop could go, an access arrangement over a neighbouring parcel — resolve it before conditions expire. A registration understood after closing has become a fact of ownership rather than a negotiating point.