Christmas, Boxing Day and Your First Canadian December: Buying in the Quiet Weeks

What December actually is here

A household living through its first Canadian December is surrounded by people who seem to know a set of rules nobody has written down.

Christmas is a Christian festival marking the birth of Jesus, and for a great many Canadian families it is also simply the season when work stops and the year is closed out. Boxing Day follows it, and New Year’s Day closes the stretch. Whatever a household believes, the practical effect is the same: over that stretch, the people you need in order to buy a house may not be at their desks.

A family arriving from India may recognize the shape of it, in the way work slows around Diwali and plans get made around the slowdown. Canada has its own version in late December, and a household in its first year here has not yet learned where the gaps fall.

In December the calendar decides, not the market

Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day are statutory holidays in Ontario. On a statutory holiday the banks are closed, government offices are closed, and Ontario’s electronic land registration system does not run. A property transfer can only be registered on a business day, so a statutory holiday cannot be a closing day at all.

The gaps are wider than the holidays themselves. When a statutory holiday lands on a weekend the observed day can shift, pulling a further weekday out of the working week. Many law firms, brokerages and lender offices then close for the ordinary weekdays between Christmas and New Year, even though those days are not holidays. Nothing announces this. A calendar app shows them as ordinary working days.

So the first job of anyone buying in December is unglamorous: get the real working days written down before agreeing to any date — which days are statutory holidays this year, and which days each office is actually staffed. Your real estate lawyer can confirm the year’s statutory holidays and the days the registry runs, and will tell you the last date their own firm will take a new closing.

• A statutory holiday is not a business day. Registration does not happen and banks do not move money.
• Ask each office directly which days it is staffed rather than assuming the week is normal.
• Have your real estate lawyer confirm the year’s dates in writing before a closing date goes into an offer.

A closing is a chain, and December breaks chains

A closing is not one appointment. It is a chain of people who all have to be working on the same business day.

Your lender releases the mortgage funds to your lawyer. Your lawyer completes the title search, exchanges the funds with the seller’s lawyer and registers the transfer electronically, and registration is what releases the keys on the seller’s side. Behind all of it, your insurance broker has to have bound the home insurance the lender requires before it will advance a dollar. Because the registry only records a transfer on a business day, the whole chain has to land on a day that is a business day for every link in it.

In June a link that is out of the office is an inconvenience, because someone else at that firm covers it. Between Christmas and New Year the whole office may be away. Your real estate lawyer runs this chain for a living and is the person to ask, before you commit to a date, whether every link can be in place on it.

Give a December closing more runway than you think it needs

The closing date is negotiated while the offer is being written and is very hard to move afterwards. In December that single line decides what the rest of the plan can look like.

The dates to be most careful about are the ones with no working days behind them. If a lender’s document is wrong on the morning of the last business day before the holidays, the next available business day may be a long way off — and until then the seller still owns the house and your belongings are on a truck. The first business day back is no safer: every postponed file is competing for the same lawyer’s afternoon.

Money is the slowest link in the chain, because funds move only on banking days and a transfer sent from abroad passes through banks on both sides. So ask for a date with working days on either side of it, then work backwards and put everything that has to happen first — the appraisal, the insurance binder, the lender’s final conditions, the funds — comfortably ahead of the closures rather than up against them.

• Tell your lawyer, your lender and your insurance broker your target date before you sign anything, and confirm each of them is working that day. Clear the lender’s final conditions early, because a document requested once the offices have started to close may not be obtainable until the new year.
• Avoid the last business day before the holidays and the first business day back, unless there is a real reason.
• Ask your lawyer what a delayed closing costs a buyer, in general terms, before choosing a tight date. It is an easier conversation in advance.

Condition deadlines behave strangely in December

An offer with conditions is an offer with deadlines, and it is easy to sign one without having read them closely. A financing condition gives a lender time to review the property and confirm the mortgage; an inspection condition gives you time to have the home looked at. Both expire whether or not the work got done.

December distorts them in two opposite directions. If the agreement counts in business days, holidays and weekends are excluded and a short condition stretches across a surprisingly long piece of the calendar. If it counts in calendar days, that same condition may contain almost no working days at all — and an appraiser cannot appraise, a lender cannot review and an inspector cannot inspect on a day their office is closed.

So before signing, count the actual working days inside every deadline, and ask for more of them if the count is thin. Your real estate lawyer will confirm how your agreement counts days and what a missed deadline means under it, and your mortgage professional will confirm how long their own review needs. An extension requested the day before a condition expires is a favour you have to ask the seller for.

What the quiet weeks give you, and what they take

None of this is an argument against buying in December. The quiet weeks are a genuine opportunity for one kind of buyer and a poor fit for another.

The buyer who does well here is prepared, flexible on timing and clear about what they want. The buyer who does badly needs a very specific home, or takes the wrong one because it was the only thing listed. What follows is Robin’s own read on the trade-off, from working through GTA Decembers with buyers — not a market forecast.

• In your favour: in Robin’s experience the quiet weeks bring fewer buyers out to look, so a bidding war is less likely — and conditions are easier to keep in an offer when other buyers are not waiving theirs.
• In your favour: what Robin watches for is the seller who keeps a home listed through the holidays and accepts showings during them. That seller has a reason to be selling now. Motivation is not a discount, but it makes a negotiation possible.
• Against you: you are choosing from whatever stays listed. Robin also finds a December property harder to price with confidence, because there is less recent sale activity to compare it against. Some sellers take a listing off the market over the holidays and put it back in the new year, so a home you would have wanted may not be visible in December.
• Against you: the other side may be slow. A seller’s agent who is away can leave an offer sitting, and an irrevocable time does not care that it is a holiday.
• Against you: holiday decoration is staging. Lights, a tree and a full house hide walls, floors and how large a room really is.

The money that lands on closing day

A first purchase in Ontario carries costs beyond the down payment, and they arrive together on the closing date, through your lawyer. Land transfer tax is payable to the province on closing, and a purchase inside the City of Toronto attracts a second, municipal land transfer tax — which is why the same price behaves differently in Toronto than in Brampton, Vaughan or Milton. Ontario offers a refund of land transfer tax to eligible first-time buyers, and Toronto offers its own on the municipal tax. Both have eligibility conditions, both are claimed through your lawyer, and neither is automatic because it is your first purchase.

The current rates, thresholds and refund maximums are published by the Ontario Ministry of Finance and by the City of Toronto, and they change. Read them there rather than from a guide, and have your real estate lawyer confirm which of them apply to your purchase before you sign.

Alongside them sit your lawyer’s fees and disbursements, title insurance, and adjustments — the reimbursement to a seller who has already prepaid property taxes, utilities or condominium fees for a period running past your closing date. A late-December or early-January closing sits on a year boundary, so ask your lawyer to walk you through the adjustments beforehand.

One more December point for a newcomer household: it is an easy month to spend more than planned, and that spending lands on the same bank statements a lender reads while assessing your mortgage. Keep the down payment in its own account, untouched, and let your mortgage professional tell you what they need those statements to show.

What Robin tells families in their first Canadian December

Robin works with a lot of households in their first or second year in Canada, and December is where the gap between knowing the rules and having lived them shows up most clearly. Nobody arrives knowing that a law firm might close between the holidays, or that the registry takes days off.

His practical position is that December is a fine month to look and a demanding month to close. Buying in the quiet weeks can genuinely help a first-time buyer keep their conditions and avoid a bidding war. Closing in them requires the dates to be chosen deliberately, with working days on either side and every professional confirmed first.

December does not punish buyers for being in a hurry so much as for assuming everyone else is at work. Ask each person in the chain which days they are working, write the answers down, and choose the date around them.