The Law Society of Ontario has made amendments to the standardized Document Registration Agreement (DRA) for two party and multi-party situations, which govern the relationship between the parties in electronic registrations until all documents and funds have been exchanged and electronic registration has been effected.
The OBA has been advocating for the LSO to update these documents to make them consistent with current practices and, accordingly, we welcome this move by the LSO.
The new DRAs address a number of critical issues that were not in previous versions of the documents including: vendor take back mortgages; documents returned for correction by the Land Registry Office; door codes and wiring of funds. The updated DRAs are now available on the Electronic Registration of Title Documents page of the Law Society's website.
The DRA is an important part of every transaction and we encourage all counsel to familiarize themselves with it. We will be offering programming in the near future to assist counsel with this.
For ease of review, blacklines of the new DRAs (to the old versions) are available here and here.
The Real Property Section of the OBA is continuing to advocate for further updates including the mortgage discharge guidelines. If you have any questions, please email advocacy@oba.org.