Your zoning allows four units. Your title might not.

There is a step in early feasibility that costs a fraction of a set of drawings and gets skipped more often than any other. A title search.

Zoning research is the part everyone does. It is public, it is well documented, and every city now has a page explaining what small-scale housing permits. What that research cannot tell you is whether the specific parcel carries a private restriction that overrides the opportunity entirely.

The city that says it out loud

Most municipal pages do not raise this. Pitt Meadows does, and its wording is worth quoting because it is unambiguous: provincial housing legislation and the city's zoning bylaw do not override restrictive covenants, and therefore additional uses on the property may not be permitted.

That sentence sits in an ordinary information handout about small-scale housing. It is the clearest statement we have found from a Metro Vancouver municipality that the zoning answer and the title answer are two different answers, and that the title one can win.

The principle is not specific to Pitt Meadows. A covenant is a private agreement registered against one parcel, and the provincial legislation reformed public zoning rather than reaching into private charges. A landowner in Delta, Langley, or Maple Ridge is in the same position, their city has simply not put it on a webpage.

What is actually on a title

A BC title search returns a list of charges registered against the property. Several kinds matter for development, and they constrain in different ways.

• Restrictive covenants: private restrictions on what can be done with the land, sometimes registered by a previous owner, sometimes by the municipality as a condition of an earlier approval.
• Building schemes: restrictions registered across a group of lots when a subdivision was first created, binding every lot in that group to conditions about what can be built.
• Statutory rights of way: a defined strip granted to a utility or authority, generally not buildable over.
• Easements: a right granted to another party, commonly access, drainage, or services, occupying a defined area.
• Other charges, including liens, which raise their own questions covered in the builders lien holdback.

One thing to understand about the search itself. The result lists the charges by number and type. It does not tell you what each one says. Every charge is a separate registered document that has to be pulled and read, and a list showing three covenants tells you nothing until someone has read all three.

The title search tells you what to read. It does not tell you what it means. Those are two different pieces of work and only the first one is cheap.

Building schemes and the era problem

Building schemes cause the most trouble on lots in older planned subdivisions, and the reason is chronological.

A scheme registered when a neighbourhood was first laid out reflects what that developer wanted the street to look like at the time. In much of Metro Vancouver that meant one house per lot, sometimes with conditions about size, materials, or where the building could sit. Nobody registering those documents was contemplating a fourplex, because a fourplex was not legal on that lot for another several decades.

So the language is rarely a clean prohibition on multiplex housing. It is more often a condition written for a different world that a multiplex happens to breach, which makes reading it a job for a lawyer rather than a developer with an opinion.

Rights of way remove area without forbidding anything

Easements and statutory rights of way work differently from covenants, and landowners underrate them because nothing about them says no.

A right of way for a sewer main running across the rear of a lot does not prohibit a multiplex. It occupies a strip that generally cannot be built over, and on a standard lot that strip can be the difference between four units fitting and three. The zoning permits the units. The lot no longer has room for them.

This is the same class of constraint as the setback and coverage rules covered in setbacks, height, and floor area, except that it is invisible from the street and absent from the zoning bylaw. It only shows up on title and on a current survey.

Can a covenant be removed

Sometimes. The honest answer is that it depends on who benefits from the covenant and what it says, and that assessing it is legal work.

Some covenants can be discharged where the party benefiting from them agrees. Where the beneficiary is the municipality and the covenant relates to a condition that no longer applies, there may be a path. Others require a court application, with the cost and uncertainty that implies.

What we tell landowners is straightforward: a project should not depend on a covenant being removed unless a BC real estate lawyer has assessed that specific covenant and given a view on it. Optimism about a charge nobody has read is not a development strategy.

Where this surfaces if you skip it

Unfound title problems do not stay hidden politely until someone looks. They surface at the worst points in the process.

The first is at permit, where the municipality reviews the application against what is registered. The second is at financing, when a lender's review reaches the charges and asks whether the project as drawn is permitted. The third, worst case, is at sale, when a purchaser's lawyer finds it and the deal stalls over a document that was sitting in the registry the whole time.

By any of those points the design fees are spent. That is the actual cost of skipping a title search, and it is why we put it in the same first pass as zoning and servicing rather than treating it as a closing item.

What early due diligence should cover

On any lot we look at, before drawings are commissioned, four things get confirmed together.

• Zoning and the unit maximum the municipality applies to that specific parcel.
• Servicing capacity at the street, since water and sewer availability is its own gate in several municipalities.
• A title search, with every charge pulled and read rather than listed.
• A current survey, which shows where the registered rights of way actually sit on the ground.

Any one of those four can end a project, and all four together cost less than the first phase of design. That is the entire argument for doing them first, and it is the same reasoning behind the process described in the feasibility review.

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