Anonymised, illustrative composite. A rural landowner sold off the back portion of a large lot with a scheduled closing date that arrived before the Planning Act consent it depended on ever did.
At a glance
A rural landowner agreed to sell the back portion of a large parcel as a new, separate lot for $310,000, with closing scheduled 90 days out. A consent to sever was needed under the Planning Act to create the new parcel without registering a full plan of subdivision — and the Committee of Adjustment application for that consent had only just been submitted when the offer was signed.
The offer's closing date assumed the consent process would resolve well ahead of schedule. It was not a safe assumption: a straightforward consent application in a cooperative municipality can be approved in 60–120 days; files needing variances, environmental studies or Official Plan amendments can take six months or more, and an appeal to the Ontario Land Tribunal adds further delay on top of that.
This is exactly the trap treadstonelaw identifies as the most common mistake buyers and sellers make with a to-be-severed lot: agreeing to convey a parcel before the consent that creates it has actually been granted, without making the agreement conditional on that consent. Even once granted, a consent typically comes with conditions — servicing confirmation, an entrance permit, sometimes parkland dedication — and a Reference Plan prepared by an Ontario Land Surveyor still has to be deposited at the Land Registry Office before the severed parcel has its own legal description at all.
Legally, there was nothing to convey on the scheduled closing date. The Planning Act's severance regime works on a specific sequence: satisfy the conditions of consent, have the Reference Plan deposited, obtain the municipality's Certificate confirming conditions are met, then register a Transfer/Deed of Land describing the parcel by its new Reference Plan part number in the Electronic Land Registration System. Skipping ahead of that sequence does not just risk delay — it risks conveying a description that does not yet exist on title.
The Planning Act treats this seriously in both directions. Separately from the consent-timing problem, s.50's subdivision-control rule means conveying part of a landholding without the required consent creates a title problem that does not fix itself with time — a decades-old unauthorized split can still surface in a title search generations later, with the same financing and marketable-title consequences.
Agreed price for the severed lot: $310,000. Original scheduled closing: 90 days from acceptance. Time from the Committee of Adjustment application to a granted consent, in this file: 4 months — comfortably inside the “complex file” range the source describes, since the application required a minor variance alongside the consent for the retained parcel's reduced frontage. Add the time to have the Reference Plan surveyed and deposited and the Certificate of Consent issued, and the parcel was not legally conveyable until roughly five months after the offer was signed — two months past the original closing date.
The Planning Act's consent test under s.51(24), applied here by the Committee of Adjustment rather than a Land Division Committee, is what actually creates the new parcel — not the Agreement of Purchase and Sale. And once granted, the conditions of consent must be fulfilled within one year of the decision or the consent lapses and is void, with no automatic extension; a lapsed consent means starting the application over and paying its fees again.
Because the original APS had no clause making the sale conditional on the consent being obtained, the buyer's lawyer and the seller's lawyer negotiated a written amendment once it became clear the consent would not issue in time: the closing date was extended to a fixed number of days after the Certificate of Consent was confirmed and the Reference Plan deposited, rather than a fixed calendar date. The deal ultimately closed roughly two months later than originally scheduled, once the parcel legally existed to convey.
The lesson both lawyers took from the file: an agreement to buy or sell a to-be-severed lot needs its own consent-contingency clause from the outset, tied to the Certificate of Consent and Reference Plan deposit rather than a calendar date — not a retrofit negotiated under time pressure once the original closing date has already arrived. See the severance consent glossary entry and minor variance, defined for the underlying terms.
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