Registering a Writ Before the House Could Sell Out From Under It

The situation

Ines and Amalia run a small renovation contracting business out of Burlington, taking on kitchen, basement and whole-home projects for homeowners across the region. In the previous year they had completed a full home renovation for a client named Abirami, who worked as an insurance adjuster. The signed contract was for roughly $225,000, paid in stages as work progressed. Abirami paid the first three draws, totalling about $85,000, then stopped responding once the project reached its final stage. The finished renovation left a balance of about $140,000 owing, and no further payment ever came.

Ines and Amalia tried to resolve it directly for several weeks, then came to our team once it was clear Abirami had no intention of paying voluntarily. We started a claim in the Superior Court for the unpaid balance, along with contractual interest. Abirami was served with the claim but never filed a defence, and after the required waiting period passed, we obtained a default judgment — a judgment granted because the other side did not respond, without a trial on the merits. The judgment came to about $150,000 once court costs and interest since the last unpaid invoice were added.

A judgment is not the same as getting paid

Many clients assume that once a court grants judgment, the money follows automatically. It does not. A judgment is a court's formal declaration that a debt is owed; collecting it is a separate process that the winning party has to carry out themselves, using tools the court makes available. In Ontario, the two most commonly used tools are garnishment — an order requiring a third party who owes money to the debtor, such as an employer or a bank, to pay that money to the creditor instead — and a writ of seizure and sale, which is filed with the sheriff's office for the county where the debtor lives or owns property and registered against title to any real estate the debtor owns there.

We began enforcement on two fronts. First, we arranged a garnishment against Abirami's wages, which required identifying her employer and serving the garnishment order so that a portion of each paycheque would be redirected toward the judgment. Second, and more urgently, we had a writ of seizure and sale issued and registered against the title of Abirami's home. Registering the writ does not seize the house outright — it places a claim on title that must be paid out of any sale or refinancing before the owner can transfer clear title to someone else.

Within a few weeks of registering the writ, we learned through a routine title check that Abirami had listed her home for sale. If the sale had closed with the writ not yet in place, or if she had moved quickly enough to complete a private sale before registration caught up, the proceeds could have been distributed to her directly and the judgment would have gone from collectible to effectively worthless — a common outcome when a debtor has no other significant assets and simply waits out a creditor's slower-moving paperwork. The timing mattered enormously. Enforcement instruments only bind assets they have already reached; a writ registered the day after closing protects nothing.

What we did

1. Obtained the writ of seizure and sale immediately after judgment. Rather than waiting to see whether voluntary payment would materialize, we had the writ issued and registered against Abirami's property within days of the default judgment being entered, before there was any sign a sale was coming.
2. Ran a title search once the listing was discovered. When Ines and Amalia mentioned they had heard, through the small renovation trade, that Abirami's house was listed for sale, we pulled a fresh title search to confirm the writ was already registered and to check the listing status and any other encumbrances on the property.
3. Contacted the listing realtor's office and the buyer's lawyer directly. Once a writ is on title, any lawyer acting on a purchase will find it during their own title search and will not permit closing to proceed without it being addressed. We confirmed our registration was visible and put the transaction parties on formal notice of the outstanding judgment amount.
4. Negotiated payout instructions for closing. With the writ in place, the sale could still close — but only if the judgment amount, plus accrued interest and enforcement costs, was paid out of the sale proceeds at closing, before any funds reached Abirami. We worked with the closing lawyers to set the payout terms.
5. Kept the wage garnishment running in parallel. Real estate sales can fall through or be delayed, so we did not rely on the writ alone. The garnishment against Abirami's wages continued throughout, providing a second recovery channel in case the sale stalled.

The outcome

The home sale closed roughly two months after the writ was registered. Because the writ appeared on title, the buyer's lawyer required it to be satisfied as a condition of closing, and the full judgment amount — by then about $155,000 with additional interest and enforcement costs — was paid directly out of the sale proceeds before Abirami received the remainder. Ines and Amalia recovered the entire unpaid balance for the renovation, something that would very likely not have happened if the writ had been registered even a few weeks later, after the sale had already gone to firm and binding status.

The wage garnishment, which had collected a modest amount over those two months, was cancelled once the lump sum arrived from the sale. Total recovery came close to the full $150,000 judgment amount plus the interest that had accrued since it was granted, against original unpaid work of $140,000.

What made the difference in this case was not a dramatic legal argument — the debt itself was never seriously in dispute, which is why judgment was granted without a defence being filed at all. It was the speed of the enforcement step. Registering the writ immediately, rather than treating it as a formality to get to eventually, meant it was already in place by the time Abirami tried to sell. Had the team waited even a month to start enforcement, working on the assumption that a debtor who ignored a lawsuit would probably also ignore a judgment quietly, the house might have sold with no claim registered against it at all, and there would have been little left to chase.

Contractors are often in a particularly exposed position when a client stops paying partway through a project, because so much of the value they have delivered is already installed in someone else's home. Unlike a supplier who can simply stop shipping goods, a renovation business has generally finished the visible work by the time non-payment becomes clear, leaving a lawsuit and, eventually, enforcement as the only real path back to being paid. Ines and Amalia's outcome turned less on the strength of their case, which was straightforward, and more on treating enforcement as part of the job rather than an afterthought once judgment was in hand.

What you can learn from this