What Home Records to Get From the Seller Before You Close

We have a guide for sellers on handing home records to the new owner. This is the same list from the other side of the table: what to ask for when you are the one buying, and what each document tells you.

This article is general information, not legal advice. It covers what to ask for, not how to paper it. How and when you raise a request for records, and anything a seller may or may not be obliged to tell you, are questions for your own real estate lawyer and your agent. Those rules vary by province, and nothing below is a view on them.

Why a missing install date costs more than it looks

Buyers inspect condition and rarely ask about age. The two answer different questions, and age is the one you plan around for years.

An install date is the only way to place a system inside its service life. InterNACHI's life expectancy chart, which much of the home inspection industry works from, puts a gas furnace at 15 to 25 years and a tank water heater at 6 to 12 years, and gives roofing as architectural asphalt shingles 30 years and 3-tab asphalt shingles 20 years. InterNACHI is explicit that the figures assume regular recommended maintenance and normal wear, and are guidelines rather than guarantees.

Consider a house with no paperwork. A water heater of unknown age sits in a span wide enough to hold both "years left" and "this winter," and nothing but a date tells you which. Our home system lifespan calculator does the comparison once you have the year. A date is also what insurers ask for on the roof, furnace, wiring and plumbing, and what lets you get quotes on a calm weekend rather than the night something fails.

None of this is what an inspection is for. An inspection is a skilled read of condition on one day, and our guide to what a home inspection covers is clear about its limits. The inspector tells you how the furnace looks; the invoice tells you what year it went in.

The records worth asking for

Install invoices for the major systems. Furnace, air conditioner or heat pump, water heater, roof, windows, electrical panel. The invoice is the densest document in the set: one page usually carries the date, the contractor, the model and serial, and the work done. A quote is not an invoice, and a brochure is not either.

Permits and inspection sign-offs for work done. A permit with a closed status is evidence the work was reviewed against the building code of the day. Ontario's citizens' guide to building permits sets out the work that requires one and notes permits are generally issued and enforced by municipal building departments. Thresholds and process differ by province and municipality, so confirm locally; our renovation permit guide covers the Ontario detail. Whether an unclosed permit matters to your purchase is a question for your lawyer.

The survey or site plan. Boundaries, easements, the footprint of structures. Useful the first time you want a fence or an addition, and costly to recreate.

Manuals, model numbers and serial numbers. Ask for photographs of the data plates if the seller has them. The serial unlocks a manufacture date and a parts list.

The service history. Annual furnace service, the chimney sweep, the drain cleaning, the roof repair, the appliance call-outs, in date order. It tells you whether the house was maintained or merely survived, and it is usually sitting in the seller's email.

Utility history. Past consumption tells you what the building costs to run, which no listing does. Sellers can usually pull it from their own account, though what each utility releases varies.

For a condominium, the governing records. In Ontario these are gathered in a status certificate, which the Condominium Authority of Ontario describes as a document holding key information about a unit and the corporation, and which anyone can request. Its contents include a statement on the most recent reserve fund study and the state of the reserve fund: the part that tells you what major work is coming and whether money has been set aside. The name and required contents vary by province, so ask your lawyer what the equivalent is where you are buying. What belongs to the corporation and what belongs to you is the line our home passport guide works through.

Contracts attached to the property. A rented water heater or furnace, an equipment lease, a solar agreement, alarm monitoring. These follow the house, not the seller, so get the contract itself.

Warranty transferability is its own question

A warranty you assume you have is worse than none, because it stops you buying the coverage you needed.

Manufacturer warranties fall into several camps. Some transfer with the property automatically. Some transfer only if the new owner registers, inside a window that starts running at closing. Some are reduced after the first owner, and some do not transfer at all. The terms live in the document, which is why to ask for documents rather than a summary of coverage.

New-home warranty programmes work differently again, and they are provincial. In Ontario, Tarion states that every newly built home comes with a seven-year warranty, that coverage stays with the home so a resale buyer is still covered, and that it is not transferred automatically: the new owner must call Tarion to be added to the file. A young resale house may carry coverage the seller never mentioned, and claiming it is on you. Our Tarion guide has the Ontario specifics; other provinces run their own programmes on their own terms.

When the seller has nothing

This is the normal case, not the bad case. Most sellers never built a record, and almost every date is recoverable without them.

• The data plate. Most equipment encodes a manufacture date in its serial number. Our walkthroughs cover the two hardest to read: finding your furnace's age from the serial number and finding your water heater's age from the serial number.
• The installer's sticker. HVAC, roofing and plumbing contractors leave one on the unit, and the company often still has the job on file.
• Your own inspection report. Inspectors routinely record equipment ages and data plate readings, so read yours as a records source and not only a list of defects.
• The manufacturer. Given a model and serial, many will confirm a manufacture date and the original warranty term.
• The municipality. Permit records sit with the building department that issued them, and the process for asking varies.

Where you end up with an estimate rather than a date, write it down as an estimate. A guess recorded as a fact becomes the number you plan around and the one you quote an insurer. "Roof: estimated from the inspection report" beats a confident year you invented.

Your first week as the owner

The handover you did not get is one you can start yourself, while the house is still empty.

1. Photograph every data plate on the furnace, air conditioner, water heater and appliances, plus the electrical panel with its directory visible. Ten minutes, and you never open a panel for a model number again.
2. Write the systems list: make, model, serial and install date where you have one, each marked known or estimated.
3. File the inspection report and anything the seller provided in one place, named date first so the order is the chronology.
4. Deal with the registrations now: new appliance warranties, anything needing transfer, and the new-home warranty programme if the house is still covered.
5. Note the operating facts while you are discovering them anyway: shutoff locations, which breaker runs what, the filter size.
6. Set the recurring reminders for annual furnace service and filter changes, then add a line per event from here.

Habyn is built for this record: one evolving file per home holding the systems inventory, the install dates and the maintenance history, with Home Health reading each system's age against its service life. Your home record is free, for every home you own. Receiving a record directly from a seller's Habyn account is in development and not yet available, so for now the week after closing is where it starts.

Frequently asked questions

Is the seller obliged to give me any of this? That is the question to put to your real estate lawyer and your agent, because it varies by province. This article is about which documents exist and what they are worth to you, not how you ask for them.

Can I rely on an install date the seller tells me verbally? Treat it as a lead, not a fact, and record it as an estimate until a data plate, an invoice or a permit confirms it. A wrong date is worse than an acknowledged gap, because you plan against it.

Does my home inspection make the records unnecessary? No, they answer different questions. The inspection is condition on one day; the records are history, dates and coverage. An inspector often recovers ages for you, making the report a starting point rather than a substitute.

What should I ask for in a condominium, where the big systems are not mine? The corporation's records are where the building's condition lives, so in Ontario the status certificate and its reserve fund statement are what to read. Inside your own unit you still want the same list: appliances, in-suite heating or cooling equipment, the water heater, and their dates.