What is BC's home buyer rescission period?

Direct answer

Three business days after the seller accepts, a residential buyer in BC can walk away for any reason, and it costs 0.25% of the purchase price. That right is the Home Buyer Rescission Period, set out in the Property Law Act with regulations in force since January 3, 2023, and it cannot be waived, so it is there even on an offer written with no subjects. To use it you deliver a written notice of rescission to the seller inside the three days. The fee has no cap and scales straight off the price: $2,000 on an $800,000 townhouse, $3,750 on a $1,500,000 Surrey house, $6,250 at $2,500,000. That is the number worth holding next to the alternative, because a buyer who walks on an unmet subject condition pays nothing at all. The right covers detached and semi-detached houses, townhouses, residential strata and manufactured homes on a parcel. It does not cover leasehold interests on First Nations land, sales under court order, foreclosure sales or auctions. Nor does it cover a presale, and that exclusion is written into the right itself: Property Law Act s.42(2) removes it from any contract governed by section 21 of the Real Estate Development Marketing Act. Presale buyers are not left without one, they get a different and better one. Seven days rather than three, counted in calendar days from the later of the purchase agreement or the signed acknowledgement that they had a chance to read the disclosure statement, and no fee at all. It is also a short, fee-bearing last resort rather than a replacement for subject conditions, which run for as long as the parties agree and cost nothing to exercise. Count the three days carefully: business days exclude Saturdays, Sundays and anything the Interpretation Act calls a holiday, a list that takes in Easter Monday and December 26 but not a Monday taken in lieu of a weekend holiday.