New build in Ottawa? You have 45 days to protect your deposit

There is a clock on your purchase agreement, and the sales centre will not start it for you

If you signed an agreement of purchase and sale on a new freehold home in Ottawa this spring, there is a 45-day deadline attached to it that most buyers have never heard of. For a lot of people reading this, it has already gone by.

Since April 1, 2026, buyers of new freehold homes in Ontario have to give Tarion notice of the purchase within 45 days of signing the APS. Not the builder. You, or your lawyer or agent acting for you. It is free, it takes a few minutes on Tarion's portal, and it runs off the Home ID printed on the Warranty Information Sheet attached to your agreement.

Miss it and you do not lose your warranty. Construction coverage against defects is untouched. What changes is the quality of your deposit protection.

What that protection is actually worth

Ontario is the only province in Canada where new home deposit coverage is universal. Everywhere else you buy it separately, or you go without.

Tarion's freehold coverage scales with the purchase price. At $600,000 or less, you are covered up to $60,000. Above $600,000, you get 10% of the purchase price to a ceiling of $100,000. It pays out when the builder goes bankrupt, fundamentally breaches the agreement, or you acquire a statutory right to treat the agreement as terminated, and the deposit then does not come back.

Put an Ottawa number on it. A $780,000 new single with $60,000 down is fully covered. A $950,000 house is covered to $95,000. For most people buying new in Barrhaven, Kanata or Orleans, that limit is larger than the deposit they have actually written cheques for.

Register within 45 days and those limits are yours. Skip it and your claim gets paid from a separate pool capped at $15 million per year, shared with every other late registrant in the province, prorated, in the year following the claim.

Here is what prorating does. Say 200 late registrants each claim $100,000 in the same year. That is $20 million of claims against a $15 million fund, so everyone collects 75 cents on the dollar and walks away with $75,000. If total claims land under $15 million, nobody's coverage gets touched.

The odds are in your favour, and I would still file the form

Tarion's own position is that this will rarely bite anyone. Before 2023, deposit claims averaged roughly $1 million a year across about 30 purchasers province-wide, and three things have to go wrong before you are in the pool at all: the builder fails to complete, the deposit does not come back, and you missed the window.

Fair enough. But the rule exists because the last two years were not average years. Tarion has described illegal building and selling of new homes as driving the largest claims event in its history. Registration is what lets Tarion check in real time that your vendor is actually licensed and alert the HCRA if not, instead of everyone finding out at closing when the money is gone. A free five-minute form is a strange thing to bet a $60,000 deposit against.

The date most coverage is getting wrong

The obligation started April 1, 2026. The consequence did not.

Tarion built in a transition period and deferred the changes to deposit coverage until January 1, 2027. So the requirement to register is live now, but the reduced-coverage penalty has not switched on yet.

What Tarion has not published clearly is whether that January 1 line keys off the date you signed or the date you claim. I am not going to guess at it in a blog post, and neither should the sales rep who tells you not to worry about it. The ambiguity is an argument for registering, not against.

Who this covers, and who it does not

Freehold homes, including homes on parcels of tied land. The POTL piece matters more in Ottawa than most cities, because a large share of new townhouse stock in the south and west ends is sold as freehold title with a common element condominium attached. That counts as freehold here.

It does not apply to condominium units. Condo deposits already sit in trust under the Condominium Act, and Tarion backs those to $20,000 if a builder fails to return them, a much thinner backstop than the freehold program and worth understanding before you sign. More on that side of it in buying your first Ottawa condo.

It also does not apply to contract homes, where you own the lot and hire a builder to put a house on it.

While you have the agreement open, read the dates

The 45-day rule is the new thing. The old thing buyers still get wrong is the closing date structure, and it costs more.

Your builder picks either a Firm Closing Date or a Tentative one. Tentative lets them push the date twice, by up to 120 days each time, with no compensation owed to you, provided they give 90 days written notice each time. That is potentially eight months of delay that costs the builder nothing.

Past the Firm Closing Date, compensation runs at $150 a day for living expenses, no receipts required, to a maximum of $7,500, with moving and storage claimable on top with receipts. If the builder fails to give 10 days notice of a delay, that alone is worth $1,500. You claim from the builder within 180 days of closing, and if they refuse, from Tarion during your first year of possession. Most buyers never claim, which is why builders are comfortable with the arithmetic.

The Ottawa backdrop

Construction started on 3,728 units in Ottawa from January through May, down 10% from 4,127 over the same stretch last year. Only 587 of those were single detached.

CMHC's read is that ground-oriented starts are softening partly because resale inventory is giving buyers a cheaper alternative. That is the same soft-resale story I have been writing about all month, seen from the builder's side of the table. It also means a new-build buyer has more leverage on incentives and upgrades than two years ago, and should use it.

Check the builder before you check the finishes

The Ontario Builder Directory at obd.hcraontario.ca is free and takes a minute. Search by builder name, licence number, or the name of a principal, director or officer. It returns licensing status, how long they have operated, how many homes they have built, and any conduct concerns, charges or convictions.

One caveat for this week. HCRA has paused updates to the directory from July 24 to August 4 for scheduled Tarion maintenance, so what you see right now may not be current. If you are doing builder due diligence this week, look now and look again after the fourth.

The short version

Register the purchase the same week you sign it, and have your lawyer confirm it was filed. The builder's only obligation is to hand you the information sheet. Read the Statement of Critical Dates before you read the finishes list, and check the builder in the HCRA directory before you put down a dollar.

Signing on a new build this summer, or sitting on a spring agreement and unsure whether the clock ran out on you? Forward me the first two pages and I will tell you where you stand. 613-262-6545 or fil@613realtor.ca.