Our offer to purchase contained two main conditions: an inspection within 7 days of the acceptance, and obtaining an approved mortgage loan within 15 days of the acceptance.

Since we’re going for a renovation and extending the mortgage to cover that cost, it’s usual to add another condition to allow for a contractor to visit the space to provide the required work quote. In our case, we rolled the contractor visit the same day we did the inspection, so there was no extra visit required. The inspection had to be performed within 7 days of the offer’s acceptance, and we did it on day 5. We got the quote for the renovations on day 8. We sent all the documents for the mortgage beginning on day 1, completing them on day 8 with the renovation quote.

The lender sent us two “letters of commitment” to sign. The first one about 4 days after we had the accepted offer, then a second one about 3 days after sending the renovation quote (so 11 days into the process). We signed and returned them as soon as we received them, and then the lender sent the final approval letter 2 days before our 15-day deadline for completing financing was up, which was a bit nerve-racking. So my advice would be:

1- Do the inspection as soon as possible. If possible, within 3 days of the offer acceptance.

2- Fulfil all of the lender’s requirements as soon as possible. Don’t drag your feet; get a notary well in advance.

3- Ask for a slightly longer time to get financing. We asked for 15 days because of the extra renovation quote time required.

Our agent and mortgage broker were very helpful during all this process and mostly we only had to sign documents and collect some information. Most of this had already been pre-screened by the mortgage broker so in reality, things went pretty smoothly.

Once you get the letter from the lender or mortgage broker, send it to your agent (our broker actually sent the letter to the agent for us – mortgage brokers are really helpful), this should fulfill all the conditions of the offer.

Most of the next steps will be done by the real estate agents, the lender/bank and the notary. At this point I did call everyone to ask what I had to do next, and the main response was “nothing” and “wait for the notary to call you”.