The corporation has three months from the default to register the lien, and has to give the owner 10 days' written notice first.
Short answer
The corporation must register a Certificate of Lien within three months of the default or the lien automatically expires, and before that, it has to give the owner a Notice of Lien and at least 10 days to pay before proceeding to registration. This is a Condominium Act mechanism under sections 85 and 86 — a completely different regime from a construction lien.
First, the corporation issues a Notice of Lien. “If the owner doesn’t pay within 10 days, the condo corporation can proceed to step two” and register the Certificate of Lien at the Land Registry Office. The 10-day notice period is confirmed independently in condo-law guidance for owners on the receiving end of the notice. Skip the notice step and register early, and the corporation risks the registration being challenged on process grounds even where the underlying arrears are real.
“A lien automatically expires after three months unless the condo corporation registers a Certificate of Lien with the Land Registry Office.” There’s no extension mechanism described in CAO’s guidance — miss the window and “the condo corporation loses priority amongst other parties who have an interest in recovering the money,” including a mortgagee who registers or advances funds in the gap. A corporation tracking arrears manually in a spreadsheet, rather than flagging the default date the moment a payment is missed, is the most common way this deadline slips.
This is the single most common mix-up in condo finance conversations. The s.85 condo lien is a completely different legal mechanism from a construction lien under the Construction Act — different statute, different trigger (unpaid common expenses versus unpaid contractors or suppliers), different clock (3 months to register versus the 60–90-day preservation windows construction liens run on province to province), and no holdback percentage involved at all. If your corporation is also a payer on a capital-repair contract, the construction-lien rules governing that contractor relationship are a separate topic entirely from the arrears lien covered here.
Arrears spikes often follow a special assessment tied to a reserve fund shortfall, and a corporation that’s slow to lien one owner’s arrears is effectively asking every other owner to carry that gap through their own common-expense payments. It’s also worth checking whether the arrears relate to a chargeback dispute — see the insurance-deductible chargeback cap — since an owner disputing the underlying charge is a different problem from an owner who simply hasn’t paid.
A 30-minute call is enough to check your arrears-tracking process against the statutory clock.
