On one closing, a PDI is an appointment. On a closing week with a dozen units, it is a dozen overlapping 15-day clocks that a single calendar entry per unit will not catch in time.
Key takeaways
On a single closing, the pre-delivery inspection is one appointment on one calendar. On a closing week with a dozen units, it is a dozen appointments — each one carrying its own 15-day clock the moment the keys change hands. Scheduling a PDI well once is a courtesy. Scheduling PDIs well at scale is a system, built around three numbers Tarion publishes directly.
Once a PDI happens, the completed certificate must be submitted to Tarion within 15 days of the date of possession. That deadline runs from possession, not from whenever the paperwork gets around to being processed — on a staggered closing week, each unit has its own 15-day window running in parallel with every other one. A scheduling system that treats each PDI as a standalone appointment, booked whenever it is convenient, is really running several simultaneous 15-day countdowns without tracking any of them as a group.
Tarion gives a duration benchmark to plan against directly: the inspection “may take up to one hour for every 1,000 square feet”. That is a planning unit, not a guess — a 1,000 sq ft unit budgets roughly an hour, an 1,800 sq ft unit roughly 1.8 hours, and a 2,400 sq ft unit roughly 2.4 hours. Multiplying that per-unit figure across a closing cohort turns “we have twelve PDIs this week” into an actual staffing number rather than a hope that everyone fits.
Attendance is not optional scheduling colour — either a homeowner or a designate must be present during the PDI, and a designate can be anyone including a professional home inspector. Builders may only proceed without the purchaser present after making documented best efforts to arrange attendance; skipping the rule outright is not the same as reasonably trying and failing to arrange it. Two forms are completed on the day itself: the PDI Form, recording items that are incomplete, damaged, missing, inaccessible or not operating properly, and the Certificate of Completion and Possession together with the Warranty Certificate, both signed by the builder and the purchaser or designate, with copies going to the purchaser and records kept by the builder.
Tarion also expects a substantive walkthrough, not a signature-collecting exercise: builders must explain how to operate the home’s systems such as the ventilation, plumbing and heating and systematically inspect every area inside and out. Scheduling that assumes ten minutes per unit is scheduling against a standard the appointment cannot actually meet.
On a small builder, the person conducting the PDI and the person tracking the 15-day submission deadline are often the same individual, which makes the scheduling problem mostly a calendar problem. At volume, those two roles usually split: site staff or a dedicated PDI inspector run the walkthroughs, while a customer-care or warranty administrator owns the tracking sheet that turns individual appointments into a submission queue. That split only works if the inspector’s completed forms move to the tracking role the same day, rather than sitting in a site trailer until someone asks for them — a delay of even a few days on a form that has to be logged, reviewed and submitted inside 15 has very little slack built in.
The same tracking role is the natural owner of a second responsibility that scheduling software alone will not catch: matching each PDI’s documented items against the coming form cadence covered in homeowner communication during the warranty year, so that anything noted at the PDI but not yet resolved is already flagged before the Initial Form window opens on day 41.
A builder is closing a 12-unit condo phase over three weeks, averaging 1,800 sq ft per unit. At roughly 1.8 hours per PDI, that is about 21.6 inspector-hours of appointment time across the phase — before travel time between units, paperwork, or a purchaser running late are factored in. Spread across three inspectors doing four units each over the three weeks, each inspector carries roughly 7.2 hours of PDI time per week alongside their other duties, which is a very different staffing conversation than one inspector attempting all twelve.
The scheduling system also has to protect the 15-day submission deadline against back-loading. If all twelve PDIs are scheduled in the final week before closing to suit the sales calendar rather than the inspection calendar, twelve separate 15-day clocks start almost simultaneously, and any one certificate that slips past its window is now a compliance gap rather than a scheduling inconvenience. Spacing PDIs across the full closing period, rather than compressing them at the end, keeps the submission deadlines staggered and manageable instead of stacked. A closing schedule that is set by the sales office without a check against inspector capacity is the single most common way this back-loading happens, and it is worth a standing rule that no closing date gets confirmed to a purchaser until a PDI slot has actually been reserved against it.
Scale the same math to a larger closing: a 40-unit condo phase closing over three weeks, at the same 1,800 sq ft average, comes to roughly 72 inspector-hours of PDI time alone. Spread evenly, that is close to five full inspector-days a week across the phase, and it is the kind of number that makes the case for a dedicated PDI role rather than pulling site superintendents off other duties for the closing period — the trade-off is not really “can someone find the time,” it is “whose other responsibilities are we willing to delay to find it.”
For the documentation itself, treadstonelaw’s own PDI checklist for Ontario condos walks through what a purchaser should expect to see recorded, and is worth pairing with the builder-side checklist above so both sides of the appointment are working from the same expectations. What gets flagged at this appointment also shapes which items hold up as covered defects months later — the PDI record is the evidence a later claim gets measured against.
Either the homeowner or a designate -- which can include a professional home inspector -- must be present. A builder may only proceed without the purchaser present after making and documenting best efforts to arrange their attendance.
Tarion's own guideline is up to one hour for every 1,000 square feet, which scales directly: an 1,800 square foot unit budgets roughly 1.8 hours.
The completed Certificate of Completion and Possession must reach Tarion within 15 days of the date of possession, a clock that runs independently for every unit in a closing cohort.
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