How to Hand Your Home Records to the New Owner

Most house handovers are a key, a garage remote, and a short conversation in the driveway about the recycling schedule. Everything the seller learned about the building over a decade stays in their head, and the new owner starts from nothing.

Two reasons to do better. The honest one is that it is a decent thing to do for the person moving in. The self-interested one is that a documented house is a stronger negotiating position, and a quieter month after closing, because the buyer who has the furnace model number does not phone you in February.

The work is deciding what goes and what stays. Get that right and the assembly is an afternoon.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Disclosure obligations when selling a home are questions for your lawyer or your real estate representative.

Hand over the facts about the building

The test for everything below comes from our home passport guide: is this a fact about the building, or a fact about me? If it stays true after you leave, it travels.

The systems inventory. Make, model, serial number, and installation date for the furnace, air conditioner or heat pump, water heater, roof, windows, electrical panel, sump pump, and the major appliances. If you recovered any of those from a data plate, pass the photograph too, so the next owner never opens the panel. Our walkthroughs for the furnace and the water heater cover how.

The maintenance and service history. The work, the date and the contractor, in date order: annual furnace servicing, the chimney sweep, the drain cleaning, the roof repair, the appliance call-outs. The most persuasive item in the package and the easiest to assemble, since it is mostly already in your email.

Hand over the record of the work rather than the raw invoice where you can. An invoice usually carries your phone number, your email, sometimes an account number or the last digits of a card. None of that is a fact about the building, and the rule in this article is that facts about you do not travel with the house. Either redact those fields or retype the work, date and contractor into a list.

Warranties still in force. The document, the expiry date, and the coverage. Read the transferability terms before you promise anything: some transfer with the property automatically, some only if the new owner registers within a window, some are reduced after the first owner, and some do not transfer at all. Say which is which rather than handing over a folder and implying it is all live. Where a new-home or structural warranty programme applies, its own transfer process governs.

Permits, inspections, and reports. Building and mechanical permits for work done, with their closure status, plus specialist reports: structural, septic, well water, or a wood-burning appliance inspection. Permits pulled and closed are an asset to a buyer. Permits never closed are for your lawyer well before closing, not for burying in a folder.

Manuals and specifications. Appliance and system manuals, or links to them. Paint colours and sheens by room, flooring and tile product codes, filter sizes, door hardware. Small files, genuinely hard for the next owner to reconstruct.

Operating knowledge. Which breaker runs the garage, where the water and gas shutoffs are, where the septic lid is, how the irrigation zones map to the controller, which sash is painted shut, what the sump does in a heavy spring. A one-page note. It is the part people thank you for.

Service and supplier contacts. The HVAC company that knows the furnace, the roofer, the plumber, the snow contractor. Company names, not your account numbers.

Obligations attached to the property. A rented water heater or furnace contract, an equipment lease, a solar agreement, alarm monitoring. These follow the house and the buyer's lawyer will ask about them. Flag them early and hand over the contract.

Keep these, always

Nothing here becomes a building fact because it happened in the building.

• Everything about your financing. Mortgage documents, rate and term, payout statement, refinancing history, home equity borrowing.
• What you paid and what you worked out. Your price analysis, appraisal, valuation estimates, renovation budget versus actual, walk-away number. None of it is useful to a buyer and all of it is useful against you.
• Your tax records. Filings, home-office or rental claims, adjusted cost base worksheets, capital improvement schedules.
• Identity and account material. Identification, SIN, banking details, usernames, passwords. If smart devices stay with the house, factory reset them and remove them from your account. Hand over the device, not your login.
• Your insurance file. That a roof was replaced after a storm is a building fact. Your policy, coverage limits, deductible, and claims file are yours.
• Anything about other people. If you rented the property out, tenant applications, credit reports, income verification, references, and correspondence are personal information belonging to those tenants. Handing a tenant's file to a buyer is a privacy problem, not a thoughtful gesture. Where tenancies continue, your lawyer will identify the narrow set of facts that must be conveyed, and that narrow set is the whole of it.

Keep all of this for as long as the rules require. Our guide to what home documents to keep and for how long has the retention periods, including why to hold renovation receipts for years after you sell. Keep the package too, because questions come back.

Assemble it in four steps

1. Write the index first. One page listing what is in the package and what is deliberately not. Ten minutes, and it makes you notice the gaps while there is still time to fill them.

2. Build one folder per system. Furnace, water heater, roof, electrical, plumbing, appliances, exterior, plus a general folder for permits and reports. Name every file with the date first, so the order is the chronology. A buyer scanning in date order understands the house in two minutes.

3. State what you do not know. If the water heater's age is a guess from the house vintage, write "estimated, from house vintage" beside it. An honest gap is worth more than a confident guess, and a guess you pass on becomes a fact the next owner plans around. It is the safer position too: the handover should not read as representations you cannot support.

4. Use a durable format. Plain files in plain folders, PDFs for documents, photographs as images. Avoid a proprietary export that needs a subscription to open, and a shared cloud link you will eventually delete, since a link is a promise to keep paying for storage. Give them files they own, and keep your own copy.

Hand it over at or just before closing, through your lawyer with the other closing material or directly to the buyer. Do not leave the only copy on the kitchen counter.

Where Habyn sits in this

Habyn is one evolving record per home: the systems inventory, the install dates, the maintenance history, and the warranty terms, with Home Health reading each system's age against its published service life. Your home record is free, for every home you own, so building it is not a sale-time decision.

To be clear about today: a controlled handover of that record to a new owner is in development and not available yet. For now the record is what makes a manual handover easy, because the facts are already in one place and already separated from your financial and personal material. You export what belongs to the building and keep the rest.

Frequently asked questions

Am I obliged to give the buyer my home records? Generally no; a records package is a courtesy, not a requirement. Disclosure of known material defects is a separate legal question that varies by province and by your agreement, and it is one for your lawyer.

Do appliance warranties transfer to the new owner? It depends on the terms. Some transfer with the property, some require the new owner to register within a set period, some are reduced or void after the first owner. Read each one and say which is which.

What about the tenants, if I am selling a rented property? Tenant personal information stays with you. Your lawyer will identify the narrow set of tenancy facts that must be conveyed, such as the current rent and the deposit held. The application and credit file never change hands.

Should I include things that went wrong? Yes, with the invoice that resolved them. A repaired problem with a dated receipt beside it reads as a maintained house; one a buyer discovers with no context reads as a hidden one. Where the issue is still live, that is a conversation with your lawyer, not a filing decision.