LOTR issues when buying property in the name of a partnership:

If you are buying property in British Columbia's provincial land title system and you will be registering it in the name of a partnership, or in your name as a partner of a partnership, you will need to do a significant amount of additional disclosure paperwork.

You, as a partner of a partnership, will likely be a "reporting body".

You might be a reporting body if:

you are a partner of a general partnership, limited partnership, LLP, professional partnership or foreign partnership;
you are in a prescribed partnership;
you are involved in a legal relationship created in another jurisdication that falls with these first two categories.

As a partner in a relevant partnership, you must disclose additional information about the partnerhip's beneficial interests. This information will be disclosed to LOTR in a Transparency Report.

For example, you have to disclose information about the partnership's interest holders. You might be a partnership interest holder if you are:

a partner in a relevant partnership;
a a corporate interest holder in a relevant corporation which is a partner in the partnership;
the government has made other prescribed rights, interests or abilities under which you fall.

You must certify that the information in the Transparency Report is true and complete. There are significant penalties for failure to certify this information, and the Land Title office will reject any application to transfer land which does not contain this Transparency Report.

What do you need to do?

Short answer: more paperwork. A LOT more paperwork.

But don't worry, we'll help you with it.

If you are a reporting body, we will ask you for all of this information.

We will prepare a Transparency Report for your review and signature. You must certify that the information in this Transparency Report is true. This Transparency Report will be filed with your application to transfer the property into your name.

Additionally, if any partner is a trust, partnership or corporation in their own right, you must disclose information about those trusts, partnerships or corporations as well.

You also need to notify the relevant interest holders that you are disclosing their information to LOTR in this process, to advise those individuals that the information being disclosed about them will be publicly available, and to provide those individuals with information about how they can request that information to be omitted or obscured from LOTR's publicly accessible information.

If you think you might be a reporting body, please let us know that as soon as possible, so we can make sure to start the information-gathering process as soon as possible. In fact, we recommend that you talk to us about these additional requirements as soon as you start looking at registering a property in the name of partnership (or in the name of an individual partner for the benefit of a partnership). Do not wait until your property transfer date.

Some of this information may be in documents you already have, such as a partnership agreement. Some of this information may be missing, in which case we will need to sort out how to find that information. Remember that you are certifying this information to be true, and there are significant penalities for certifying incorrect information.

Your purchase cannot proceed without this additional paperwork, so the sooner you get started on it, the better.

Confused and baffled?

That's not surprising. This is a brand new law and Registry, and there are no other similar registries in Canada that can be looked to for guidance. We will help.