Service Alberta land titles registry website restored after outage

Fallout from glitch in Alberta’s land title website Kamil Karamali gathers reaction following last weekend’s technical mishap that left thousands of real estate transactions in limbo.

The province’s land titles website is back online after it was knocked out over the weekend and it could cost some Alberta home buyers after thousands of real estate transactions were left in limbo.

Service Alberta says its land titles registry website went down on Sunday following a routine systems upgrade.

Real estate lawyer, Ryan MacKay, says the outage will cause a major issue for some home buyers looking to close a deal, but a minor inconvenience to most.

Buyers usually have to wait a few weeks while the land title registry works on giving a real estate deal the stamp of approval but some Albertans had to get creative when the system went down.

That included paying hundreds of dollars for title insurance or getting the home buyer to directly pay the seller daily interest.

“The other way we close the deal, a buyer moves into the home without paying for it, and for every day that we wait for the deal to close the buyer pays a rent,” said MacKay.

The technical glitch came at a bad time for buyers as most real estate deals close at the end of the month.

Service Alberta says everyone’s personal information is secure.

“We want to apologize for any inconvenience we’ve caused but we want people to know that their data has been protected and there are no other problems with the system ,” said Neil Levine from Service Alberta.

The agency brought its systems back online late Wednesday afternoon and on Thursday announced that land titles offices were open and operating as per ususal.

(With files from Kamil Karamali)