How a Pre-Listing Review Caught a Hidden Lien in Ottawa

The situation

Feng and Jing had spent more than a decade driving buses for Ottawa's transit system, working opposite shifts so one of them was always free to run the small franchise sandwich shop they had bought outright, building included, on the side. Between the two incomes, neither of which was large on its own, they had managed to pay off the commercial unit years ahead of schedule, treating it as their retirement plan more than a going concern. By their mid-fifties, with both of them eligible for early pension options through the transit system, they decided it was time to sell the building and step back from the food business for good.

Before listing the property, they came to Treadstone Law for a pre-listing review — a routine check of title, permits and any registrations against the property that a buyer's lawyer would eventually ask about anyway. Most pre-listing reviews turn up nothing more dramatic than an old, spent mortgage discharge that needs tidying up before a search will read cleanly. This one turned up something the couple did not know was there, and did not expect from a business they thought they had wound down cleanly.

What the review found

A title search showed a construction lien registered against the property roughly ten months earlier, claimed by a contractor, Abena, who had done kitchen and flooring renovations for the shop the previous year. Under Ontario's Construction Act, anyone who supplies labour or materials to improve a property and is not paid can register a lien against the title itself, without going to court first. A notice of the registration had gone to the couple's mailing address at the time, but it arrived during their busiest season and, by their own account, got set aside rather than acted on.

A registered lien does not need to be proven valid to cause damage — it only needs to sit on title. Once it is there, almost no buyer's lawyer will let a purchase close with it outstanding, because a lien is a claim that the property itself could eventually be sold to satisfy a debt. Liens also carry a strict window during which the contractor must perfect the claim by starting an actual court proceeding, or the lien expires; this one was still active, and the deadline for Abena to perfect it had not yet passed. Left alone, the lien would most likely have surfaced the moment a buyer's own lawyer ran a title search — weeks into a firm agreement of purchase and sale, with a closing date already fixed and a chain of plans already built around it.

The claim itself was roughly $58,000, covering electrical work, new flooring and equipment installation Abena said had been finished but never fully paid for. Feng and Jing disagreed with part of the invoice, saying some of the listed work fell short of what was promised, but they had never put that disagreement in writing — the shop had simply stopped paying and gone quiet on the balance, assuming the matter would fade rather than escalate into a formal claim against the building itself.

What we did

1. Confirmed the lien's status before doing anything else. We checked whether Abena had already started a court proceeding to perfect the lien and confirmed the statutory deadline to do so was still weeks away, which meant there was room to act deliberately instead of scrambling.
2. Reviewed the underlying dispute on paper. We went through the renovation contract, the invoices, photographs the couple had taken of the finished work, and their own notes on what they felt was incomplete, to understand whether the $58,000 figure looked solid — not to fight the claim outright, but to know what a fair resolution might eventually look like and whether the amount claimed was defensible.
3. Recommended vacating the lien by payment into court rather than negotiating a discharge directly with Abena. The Construction Act allows an owner to apply to have a lien removed from title by paying the claimed amount, plus an additional amount as security for costs, into court. It does not decide who is right about the invoice — it simply moves the dispute off the property and into a fund the court controls, so the sale can proceed on clear title.
4. Brought the application before the shop went on the market. Rather than wait for an accepted offer and a closing date to force the timeline, we filed while there was no live deal at risk, so any delay in scheduling or paperwork could not jeopardize a transaction already in motion.
5. Confirmed the discharge was reflected on title before listing. Once the court ordered the lien vacated and the funds were paid in, our team verified the change was registered so any future buyer's search would come back clean.
6. Kept the underlying payment dispute separate from the sale. Whether Abena was owed the full $58,000, part of it, or none of it remained an open question to be worked out on its own timeline, deliberately decoupled from the property sale so one could not hold the other hostage.

The outcome

The shop went to market with title exactly as clean as it should have been. When the buyer's lawyer ran their own search partway through the transaction, there was nothing to flag — no lien, no explanation needed, no last-minute renegotiation of price while a contractor dispute got untangled mid-deal. The sale closed on the date the agreement set, at the price the couple had negotiated, with none of the usual scramble that comes from a title problem discovered days before closing.

The money paid into court — roughly $72,500, reflecting the $58,000 claim plus the additional amount required as security for costs — stayed there, tied up and earning nothing, while the underlying dispute over the renovation invoice was worked through separately in the months that followed. That cost was real: it was money the couple could not put toward their next step for longer than they would have liked, and it is the honest price of buying certainty on a live sale. But it was a contained, predictable cost, chosen on their own schedule, disclosed to no one but the people who needed to know — not a collapsed transaction, a claim for damages from a buyer who walked away, or a forced renegotiation with a purchaser who suddenly held leverage they should never have had.

Because the lien was cleared before the property was ever shown to a buyer, nobody outside Feng, Jing, Abena and their respective lawyers ever knew there had been a problem at all. Feng and Jing went into retirement with the sale proceeds in hand and the renovation dispute still to settle, but settling it no longer had any power to touch the biggest transaction of their working lives, closed the way any ordinary sale should close.

What you can learn from this