The Pre-Delivery Inspection is the walkthrough a buyer and the builder complete together before possession — and the signed Tarion PDI form that comes out of it is the builder's single best piece of evidence for what condition the home was actually in on handover day.
Tarion describes the PDI plainly: “A PDI is a thorough walk through led by your builder. It is one of your first opportunities to view your completed home or condo unit before you take possession.” The builder completes a PDI Form to “record all items that are incomplete, damaged, missing, inaccessible or not operating properly” before occupancy; the buyer or their designate signs it, and the builder provides copies of “the completed PDI Form and CCP for your records.”
The form's real value shows up later, in a dispute: “Tarion may refer to your PDI Form if there is disagreement over whether any damage occurred before or after you took possession.” Damage that was never noted is harder to establish as pre-existing during a conciliation inspection — Tarion's own phrase for that step. Items not corrected by move-in don't vanish; they carry forward onto “an Initial Form, Mid-Year Form, or Year-End Form” as the warranty-service-request process continues. For a builder, a thorough, specific PDI record does real work later: it's the baseline every subsequent claim gets measured against, and a rushed or vague form just pushes the argument about “was this already there” into a future dispute instead of resolving it on the spot.
On PDI day, the buyer and the builder's representative walk the home together and note a chipped countertop edge and an unfinished baseboard on the signed form. Several months later, on the buyer's Year-End Form, the buyer reports a second, different chip on the same countertop. Because only the first chip is on the PDI form, the builder has a documented basis to treat the second one as new damage rather than an existing defect it already owes a warranty repair for — a distinction that simply isn't available if the original walkthrough was never written down.
See also: The one, two and seven-year warranty tiers · Conciliation on a warranty claim · Using AI for Tarion warranty claims.
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