Reading the Builder's Fine Print Before Signing an Assignment

The situation

Harpreet had been saving for a home for years, working shifts at a factory and watching prices in the neighbourhoods he could afford climb faster than his down payment. A coworker mentioned a condo unit going for well under what similar finished units were listing for nearby. The catch, and the reason for the discount, was that Harpreet would not be buying the condo from a builder or from someone who already lived in it. He would be buying an assignment: the right to step into someone else's pre-construction purchase agreement before the building was even finished.

An assignment sale happens when the original buyer, who signed an agreement of purchase and sale with the builder years earlier at a lower price, sells their contractual position to a new buyer before the building registers and the original deal closes. The new buyer effectively takes over the original buyer's spot in line. Because the original price was locked in when the project first launched, and the market has often moved since, an assignment can let a buyer step into a unit below current resale value. It also comes with a structure that looks nothing like a normal resale purchase, and Harpreet had never bought a home before, let alone one built this way.

The seller, a landscaper named Anh who had bought the unit purely as an investment two years earlier, wanted out before the building's scheduled completion. Anh's price for the assignment worked out to a unit in the roughly $400,000 to $600,000 range once the original deposit and the price bump were added together — still meaningfully below what comparable finished units in the building were expected to sell for once registered. Harpreet came to our team before signing anything, wanting to understand what he was actually agreeing to.

What the review found

Every pre-construction purchase agreement includes a clause governing whether, and how, the original buyer is allowed to assign it to someone else. Builders control this closely, because an assignment changes who they are ultimately closing the sale with, and most agreements require the builder's written consent before an assignment can proceed at all. Our review of Anh's original agreement with the builder turned up three separate provisions that needed to be worked through before Harpreet could safely commit to anything.

The first was a builder consent fee, charged for the builder's permission to allow the assignment to happen. These fees are set out in the original agreement and are not negotiable after the fact, but they are also easy to overlook when a buyer is focused on the headline price. The second was a requirement that the builder approve the new buyer's financial qualification before consenting, similar to the vetting a lender would do, and that this approval could take longer than either Harpreet or Anh expected given how close the building was to completion. The third, and the one with the most room to go wrong, was a clause allowing the builder to pass on its own legal costs for processing the assignment, on top of the flat consent fee.

None of these figures were disclosed in the one-page deal summary Anh's real estate agent had put together. Taken together, if left unaddressed, the combined fees stood to erode a meaningful slice of the discount that made the assignment worth pursuing in the first place. There was also a timing problem: the building's final closing, when Harpreet would actually take possession and pay the balance, was still many months away and had already been pushed back once by the builder, which is common in pre-construction but meant Harpreet would need to budget for the possibility of another delay before he could move in.

What we did

1. Obtained and read the full original purchase agreement, not just the assignment summary. Assignment deals are often presented to a new buyer as a simple substitution of names, but the new buyer is bound by everything in the builder's original agreement, including clauses negotiated years earlier that have nothing to do with the assignment itself. We requested the complete agreement and all amendments from Anh's lawyer before advising Harpreet on price.
2. Quantified every fee the builder was entitled to charge. We itemized the flat consent fee, the estimated legal cost pass-through, and the builder's stated timeline for processing consent, then set out in plain terms what Harpreet's true all-in cost would be if every fee applied at its maximum stated amount, rather than relying on Anh's estimate of what the fees would probably come to.
3. Negotiated a fee allocation into the assignment agreement itself. Builder consent fees are fixed by the builder and cannot be negotiated away, but which party pays them is a matter between the assignor and the assignee. We negotiated a term requiring Anh to cover the builder's consent fee and legal cost pass-through, since Anh was the one benefiting from a faster sale, while Harpreet's own closing costs stayed his own responsibility.
4. Flagged the closing-date uncertainty in writing before Harpreet signed. Because the building's final closing date was still an estimate that had already shifted once, we made sure Harpreet understood, before committing, that his own closing costs, land transfer tax, and mortgage rate could all land on a different calendar than he expected, and that his mortgage pre-approval would need to be revisited if the closing slipped much further.
5. Reviewed the deposit structure and confirmed how Anh's original deposits would be credited. An assignment purchase typically requires the new buyer to reimburse the original buyer's deposits paid to the builder, on top of any profit built into the assignment price. We confirmed the exact deposit amounts already paid, cross-checked them against the builder's records, and made sure the assignment agreement credited them correctly rather than relying on Anh's own accounting.
6. Coordinated the builder's consent process directly. Once terms were settled, our team submitted Harpreet's financial documentation to the builder's assignment department, followed up on the review timeline, and confirmed written consent was received well ahead of the eventual closing date, rather than leaving that step until the final weeks.

The outcome

The assignment closed on the terms our team had negotiated. Anh paid the builder's consent fee and legal cost pass-through as agreed, which meant those charges never reduced the discount that had made the unit attractive to Harpreet in the first place. Harpreet's own costs were limited to his standard closing costs and the deposit reimbursement to Anh, both of which had been clearly set out from the start rather than discovered midway through the deal.

The building's closing did shift again, by a period of several weeks, before final registration. Because Harpreet had been told from the outset that this was a live possibility rather than a formality, he had kept his financing arrangements flexible enough to absorb the delay without scrambling. He took possession of the unit at a total cost that stayed meaningfully below the going rate for comparable finished units in the building, with no unexpected fees added along the way.

The deal worked because the fine print was read and priced before anyone signed, not because assignment purchases are inherently safe. A different buyer, working only from the one-page deal summary, could easily have signed an agreement obligating them to pay consent fees and legal costs that were never mentioned until the builder's paperwork arrived close to closing, by which point there is very little room left to renegotiate who pays what.

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