Stayner's real estate lawyer

Yes. In Ontario a lawyer is legally required to close a purchase or sale, and that applies whether you are buying a house in the village of Stayner or a farm parcel out on a concession road in the surrounding Township of Clearview. Ownright reviews your agreement, searches title, handles the land transfer tax, and registers the deal, all online for a flat, transparent fee, so your Stayner closing is handled start to finish.

Stayner buyers pay only Ontario's provincial land transfer tax — there is no municipal land transfer tax outside the City of Toronto, and the Township of Clearview does not charge one. On an $800,000 property that works out to about $12,475, and first-time buyers can claim a rebate of up to $4,000, which brings it down to roughly $8,475; below about $368,000 the rebate cancels the tax entirely. Ownright calculates the exact amount before you close.

Rarely, and not the way most buyers expect. Land outside Stayner and Clearview's other settlement areas sits mostly in the Township's Agricultural designation, where new lots are tightly restricted — in practice the main route to a new rural residential lot is severing a farmhouse that a farm consolidation has made surplus. The catch matters as much to the buyer as to the seller: as a condition of that consent the remaining farmland has to be rezoned to prohibit residential uses, so the parcel left behind cannot have a dwelling built on it, and Clearview's zoning by-law names specific properties where a house is a prohibited use for exactly that reason. Ownright checks the zoning, the consent conditions and the severance history on title, so you know before you commit whether the land you are buying can be built on at all.

Beyond the purchase price, budget for land transfer tax (about $12,475 on an $800,000 property), your lawyer's fee and disbursements, title insurance, and adjustments for prepaid property tax. Outside Stayner's serviced village area you may also want a well water test, a septic inspection and an up-to-date survey, and on a farm or acreage parcel the zoning and severance checks that tell you what can actually be built. Ownright gives you a clear, flat-fee quote up front so there are no surprises on closing day.

Start with servicing and access. Municipal water and sewer serve much of Stayner and Creemore, but a property out on a concession road is almost certainly on a private well and a septic system, and the road it fronts may not be maintained year-round. Zoning matters just as much: the Township of Clearview requires a new dwelling outside a settlement area to meet the provincial Minimum Distance Separation setback from nearby livestock barns and manure storages, and that applies regardless of when the lot was created — so an older vacant lot is not automatically a buildable one. Ownright confirms how the property is serviced, whether your access is registered on title, and what the zoning actually permits before you go firm.

Stayner is part of the Township of Clearview, and Simcoe County is a two-tier system, so a residential tax bill has three parts: the Township rate, the County of Simcoe rate and the provincial education rate. For 2026 those are 0.842175%, 0.321233% and 0.153%, a combined residential rate of 1.316408%, which puts a property assessed at $400,000 at about $5,266 a year. Those bills are still calculated on MPAC's January 1, 2016 assessed values, which can sit well below what a property sells for today; at closing Ownright prorates the year's tax between you and the seller so each side only pays for the days they owned the property.