If you’ve bought a pre-sale condo or townhouse in British Columbia, you’re used to seeing estimated construction dates in the developer’s disclosure statement — and you’re used to being warned that those dates can change.
A recent decision of the BC Supreme Court, Ye v. Vesta Properties (Latimer) Ltd., 2025 BCSC 773, is a useful reminder that developers don’t have unlimited room to move those dates around, and that how and when a change is communicated to purchasers matters just as much as the change itself.
Quick takeaways:
- A developer that accelerates a pre-sale completion date by a year, and takes six months to tell purchasers, breached its disclosure duties under the Real Estate Development Marketing Act (“REDMA”) — even though it filed the amendment with the regulator on time.
- Standard “dates are estimates only, sooner or later” boilerplate in a disclosure statement does not excuse a developer from telling purchasers promptly about a material change.
- The result: the purchasers’ contracts were declared unenforceable and their deposits were ordered returned with interest — a real-world example of what a pre-sale contract cancellation and deposit refund can look like when a REDMA disclosure statement amendment isn’t delivered on time.
The background
Six purchasers had signed pre-sale contracts in March 2022 to buy strata units in “the Towers,” part of the Latimer Heights development in Langley.
The developer’s disclosure statement — the document every BC developer must file with the Superintendent of Real Estate and provide to purchasers before a pre-sale contract is signed — originally estimated that construction of this phase would be completed sometime between October 1 and December 31, 2025.
Construction, it turned out, moved faster than expected. In February 2024, the developer determined that completion would actually land a full year earlier. The new dates were between October 1 and December 31, 2024.
Under the Real Estate Development Marketing Act (“REDMA”), a developer who becomes aware that its disclosure statement contains a misrepresentation must immediately file an amendment with the Superintendent, and then provide that amendment to purchasers within a reasonable time.
It’s worth noting that, like most disclosure statements, the developer’s included boilerplate language warning purchasers that estimated dates “should not be relied upon” and that actual closing dates “may occur sooner or later than the estimated date for completion.”
Buyers stll have recourse if a date changes.
Many buyers assume language like this means they have no recourse if a date changes. As this case shows, that assumption isn’t correct. REDMA’s disclosure obligations exist on top of that kind of contractual language, not instead of it.
The developer filed its amendment with the Superintendent within the required 30 days. But because of what its own sales director candidly described as an internal mistake, the purchasers of the Towers units had simply been left off the mailing list. The amendment wasn’t actually sent to the purchasers themselves for another six months, arriving on August 28, 2024. By then, the new completion window was set to open in just over a month.
The purchasers objected. Months of back-and-forth followed. In January 2025 the developer unilaterally set a completion date of February 12, 2025. This was less than 30 days’ notice.
The purchasers refused to complete. Instead, they applied to the court for a declaration that their contracts were unenforceable. They asked for the return of their deposits with interest.
What the court decided
The key issue: whether the developer had properly told the purchasers about the change, and in time.
Justice Milman sided with the purchasers. The key issue wasn’t really whether construction finishing early was a problem in itself. It was whether the developer had properly told purchasers about it, and in time.
The court didn’t agree with everything the purchasers asked for.
Notably, the court did not accept every complaint the purchasers raised.
They had also argued that the developer breached REDMA by waiting 13 months to disclose that below-grade parkade construction had quietly started in February 2022, ahead of the original estimate. Justice Milman rejected that argument. The early parkade work had no real bearing on when the units themselves would be finished. It didn’t meet the minimum threshold of materiality REDMA requires.
This part of the decision is a useful reminder that not every deviation from an estimated date — or every technical disclosure lapse — gives purchasers a right to walk away. The defect has to be substantial enough to actually matter to a purchaser’s decision.
The one-year acceleration was a material change to the deal.
The one-year acceleration of the completion date was a different story. The court held it was a material change to the deal. The kind of thing a reasonable purchaser would want to know before deciding whether to buy.
Justice Milman specifically accepted evidence that purchasers had relied on the longer original timeline to plan their finances. An earlier completion date compresses the time available to arrange their financing. Buyers needed to get a new mortgage, sell or liquidate other assets, and budget for closing costs. It also meant an extra year of strata fees, property taxes, and other carrying costs the purchasers hadn’t planned to absorb yet.
On that point, the court followed an earlier decision, McEachern v. 752265 B.C. Ltd., in which an eight-month acceleration was already found to be material. A full year was, if anything, an easier case.
Where the developer ran into trouble was on timing. REDMA requires a developer to file an amendment with the Superintendent immediately upon becoming aware of a misrepresentation. Separately, to preserve the enforceability of its contracts under REDMA’s cure provision, the developer also has to file that amendment within 30 days of becoming aware of the problem, and then deliver it to purchasers ‘within a reasonable time’ after filing.
The court found that six months was not a reasonable time. Particularly because it meant the developer could, in theory, have asked purchasers to complete on as little as 30 days’ notice from the moment they finally learned of the change.
Changing the completion date didn’t cure the original problem.
The developer argued that later setting completion for February 2025 cured any prejudice. Effectively giving purchasers more time than the accelerated window would have allowed. The court disagreed.
The developer never told the purchasers they had extra time. Instead, the original disclosure statement led them to believe they had until October 2025. Then, after they complained, the developer gave them no clear direction — it simply handed them a firm completion date with under a month’s notice. Far from curing the problem, the court found this compounded it.
Because the developer didn’t deliver the amendment within a reasonable time, the statutory exception that can otherwise ‘save’ a non-compliant disclosure statement didn’t apply. The result: the six contracts were unenforceable against the purchasers. The court ordered the developer to return the purchasers’ deposits with interest and to pay their costs.
(The purchasers also argued that two of the deposits exceeded the 10% maximum allowed under REDMA policy. The court rejected that argument — the contracts themselves called for exactly 10%, and a small overpayment made unilaterally by two purchasers didn’t change that.)
Why this matters if you’re buying (or selling) a pre-sale property
Takeaways from Ye v. Vesta
A few practical takeaways stand out from this decision:
1. Disclosure statements are living documents, not one-time formalities. REDMA legally requires developers to update purchasers whenever a disclosure statement no longer accurately reflects material facts. An accelerated completion date counts as material, just as a delayed one would. Not every change is significant enough to matter (the early parkade work wasn’t). A change of this size clearly was.
2. Filing with the Superintendent isn’t the finish line. A developer can comply with the filing deadline and still breach REDMA if it drags its feet getting that amendment into purchasers’ hands. “We told the regulator” is not the same as “we told you.”
3. Boilerplate “estimates only, sooner or later” language has limits. Disclosure statements routinely warn purchasers not to rely on estimated dates, and Vesta’s was no exception. That language didn’t save the developer here. REDMA’s disclosure obligations exist independently of it. The real problem wasn’t the estimate itself, it was the developer’s failure to properly and promptly communicate a change to it.
4. If your closing timeline changes significantly and your developer didn’t give you proper notice, you may have options. This case confirms that if a developer’s disclosure failures are serious enough, purchasers can seek to have their contracts declared unenforceable and their deposits returned with interest. Accelerated completion dates carry real financial consequences. BC courts are willing to treat late or inadequate notice of them as more than a technicality.
Practical Considerations from Ye v. Vesta
It’s also worth pausing on what’s actually at stake for a purchaser in a situation like this. Most people who sign a pre-sale contract aren’t investors — they’re buying a home they intend to live in.
From the moment they sign, purchasers start planning their lives around the completion date in the disclosure statement: when to list and sell their existing property, when to book movers, when to arrange financing for the new place.
Those plans often take shape over a year or more. They can be seriously disrupted if a completion date shifts without enough notice to adjust.
That’s part of what makes a remedy like rescission an incomplete answer, even when it’s legally the right one.
It’s correct that you can walk away from the contract and get your deposit back — and in a case like this, that may be the only real option remaining once a developer has left a purchaser no other choice. But it doesn’t actually solve the purchaser’s problem.
Most buyers didn’t want out of the deal; they wanted to move into the home they’d been planning around, often for a long time. Rescission returns the money, but it doesn’t give a family back the timeline they built their lives around, or the home itself.
That’s exactly why it’s worth getting advice the moment a completion date changes, rather than waiting until a notice to complete forces the issue — the earlier a purchaser catches the problem, the more options they actually have beyond simply walking away.
Contact us if you’d like help reviewing a pre-sale contract, or to discuss options in these circumstances.
By Tim Janzen, Notary Public