Fifteen days if the lender consented to the transfer, thirty days if it did not — and the clock and the consequence both sit with the lender, not the buyer, under PPSA s.48.
Short answer
When a buyer takes over financed equipment and assumes the existing loan rather than paying it out, the lender’s existing registration still names the seller as debtor. Section 48(1) starts a clock the moment ownership changes: “where a security interest is perfected by registration and the debtor, with the prior consent of the secured party, transfers the debtor’s interest in…the collateral, the security interest in the collateral transferred becomes unperfected fifteen days after the transfer is made unless the secured party registers a financing change statement within such fifteen days.”
Without the lender’s prior consent, s.48(2) gives longer: the interest “becomes unperfected thirty days after the later of…the transfer…and…the day the secured party learns the information required to register a financing change statement…unless the secured party registers a financing change statement or takes possession of the collateral within such thirty days.” Read who the section is written for: a buyer has no statutory registration duty at all, and an unperfected competing interest is, on its face, in the buyer’s favour. The exposure only becomes the buyer’s problem if an assumption agreement makes the buyer covenant to maintain the lender’s perfected security — at which point the lender’s missed deadline becomes the buyer’s covenant breach even though the Act put the registration duty on the lender throughout.
the fifteen-day clock after the collateral moved is the direct example: the equipment lender consented to a transfer, then missed the fifteen-day window by twenty-five days, and the gap only surfaced on a post-closing covenant review. A related but different registration problem is covered at a registration for a security interest that never existed.
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