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You should see a lawyer as soon as you receive an Agreement for Purchase and Sale from the builder.

My advice is based on my own personal experience when my wife and I made a costly mistake many years ago.

My wife and I were looking for a home for a long time before we found one that we both agreed on. It was a newly built model home in a decent neighborhood, reasonably priced with lots of bells and whistles. It was presented as a “Single Family Home” in all of the paperwork. The purchase agreement was a lengthy document prepared by the builder’s lawyers and seemed safe for us to accept.  Although we had our own lawyer, for cost reasons, we decided to skip the step asking him to review the builder’s purchase agreement. When all of the paperwork was complete and we went to see our lawyer to complete the transaction, he asked us if we were aware that the house we bought as detached was in fact an “Underground Link Property” with the neighbor’s house. This came as a shock. The difference in price between linked and detached homes around that time was anywhere between $20,000-30,000.  After that, all of our attempts to cancel the agreement or to get the builder to agree on concessions were unsuccessful. We had to admit that we made a costly mistake and accept the contract as it was already executed.

By trying to avoid paying our lawyer’s fee to review the agreement before accepting, we lost more money paying an inflated price for a property that was not what we thought it was.

For more informative and professional advice on this topic, check out the article, “When to contact a real estate lawyer” by Jacques Robert, an Ottawa real estate lawyer.