Selling a house as is in Alberta does not switch off the standard contract

Selling as is means you are not doing the repairs and not giving credits for them. It does not mean the house arrives at closing with no paperwork attached, and that is where Alberta sellers get caught.

The standard Alberta residential purchase contract keeps running underneath an as-is deal. Four of its obligations survive the words entirely, and none of them are about repairs.

"As is" is a price term. People read it as a legal shield.

Every page selling this idea describes the same thing: no renovations, no staging, no fixing the furnace before the inspection. That part is accurate, and it is genuinely why people choose it.

What almost none of them say is what the phrase does not do. Search "selling a house as is in Alberta" and the first page is nearly all cash-buying companies — this business included. They explain that you skip repairs, then stop.

The surprises all live on the other side of that gap. A seller told "as is means no work", who finds out in week three that they owe a land survey, has not been lied to exactly. They have been told half of it.

The survey is not a repair, so it does not go away

This is the one that catches people, and it costs real money before closing.

Clause 10.2 of the Alberta Real Estate Association's Residential Purchase Contract makes the seller deliver, as a closing document, "an RPR showing the current improvements on the Property according to the Alberta Land Surveyors' Association Manual of Standard Practice, with evidence of municipal compliance or non-conformance." The obligation only lifts if there are no structures on the land.

A Real Property Report is a survey drawing by an Alberta Land Surveyor. The compliance half is a separate step at the municipality, and in Calgary it has a published price and a published queue:

Swipe the table sideways →

Those figures come from the City's own Certificate of Compliance page, and they assume the drawing comes back clean. If it does not — a deck built without a permit, a garage over the setback, a shed on the utility right-of-way — the City's options are to remove or modify the structure and resubmit, or to apply for a relaxation, which the City says is decided case by case and may be refused.

That is the real cost of an old survey on an older house: not the $189, the month.

A house sold as is still has to arrive in the condition it was sold in

Clause 2.4 is short and it is the one sellers break by accident: "The seller represents and warrants that on Completion Day, the Property will be in substantially the same condition as when this contract was accepted and the attached and unattached goods will be in normal working order."

An as-is price is set against the house as it stood the day the buyer agreed to it. It is not a licence to let it get worse afterwards. Two things go wrong in that window on the kind of houses this comes up with:

• Vacant houses in an Alberta winter. Heat off, a line freezes, and the condition on Completion Day is not the condition on acceptance day. Check what your insurer requires for a vacant property.
• Removing things. Appliances, light fixtures, the shed at the back. If they were attached goods, or unattached goods listed in the contract, they are part of what was sold — whatever the price was.

The words "as is" do not appear anywhere in that clause, and nothing about an as-is negotiation changes it unless both sides write the change in.

The only disclosure that survives an as-is clause is the hidden, serious kind

Alberta runs on caveat emptor — buyer beware — for the things a buyer can see. A cracked driveway, a stained ceiling, a roof visibly at the end of its life: you are not obliged to write those down, because the buyer can look.

The exception is the material latent defect, and the Alberta Real Estate Association's explanation of the term is the clearest short version: "material means major, and latent means hidden." It has to be both. A serious problem in plain view is not one. A hidden trivial one is not one either.

Clause 6.1(f) of the same purchase contract turns that into a promise you sign: known material latent defects, if any, "have been disclosed in writing in this contract." So the seller's exposure is not about defects generally. It is about what you knew, could not be seen, and did not write down.

The example the Association gives is a basement that floods every spring, with new flooring and drywall laid over it the autumn before listing. That is not selling as is. That is concealment, and an as-is clause does not reach it.

This bites hardest on a house nobody has lived in for years — an estate, a rental handed back, a property a family has been carrying. The obligation is about known defects, so if you genuinely do not know, you do not know. If you do know, write it down. A buyer already paying an as-is price is rarely surprised by it.

Where a defect sits on that line is a question for your own lawyer, not for a page like this one.

What actually changes in a private cash sale

Selling directly to a company that buys houses does not delete any of the above. It moves who carries it.

Clauses 2.4, 5.1, 6.1 and 10.2 are terms of a standard form. They are the default because both sides usually want them, not because the province requires them, and parties who agree otherwise in writing can agree otherwise. The RPR is the usual place that happens: buyers are regularly asked to accept title insurance in lieu of a Real Property Report, which is not a straight swap — title insurance covers a loss, a survey with compliance tells you what is actually there.

So if the survey step is what stands between you and a closing date, raise it with the buyer early rather than treating it as fixed. Whether it is a good idea in your deal is a question for the lawyer doing your conveyance, and worth asking before you sign.

On our side, how it works sets out the sequence, and what we pay explains how a number gets made — the condition of the house is the input, which is why we do not ask you to change it first.

When selling as is is the wrong answer for you

If the house is in decent shape and you are not on a clock, listing it will very likely put more in your pocket than any as-is offer, ours included. The repairs you would be skipping are not expensive enough to justify the discount, and Matthew will say so:

"If your house is in good to great condition and you're not in a hurry, listing with a Realtor may be a better option — and I'll tell you so to your face."

An as-is sale earns its place in the other situation: when the work is beyond what you can fund or manage, when a lender will not finance the house as it stands so the ordinary buyer pool disappears, or when a fixed date is worth more than the last stretch of price. If the issue is the building itself, selling a damaged house in Calgary covers that case. If it came through an estate, selling an inherited house is the better start, and the title work after probate usually matters more to the timeline than the condition does.