Can You Sell a House With an Underground Oil Tank in Ontario?
Yes, you can sell a house with an underground oil tank in Ontario. The catch is that the province expects an unused underground tank to be removed, so most buyers will want to know whether that has happened and what the soil around it looks like.
Plenty of older Toronto houses were heated with oil before gas lines reached the street. The furnace got converted decades ago, and the tank under the lawn or driveway was left behind and forgotten.
The Technical Standards and Safety Authority (TSSA) storage tank FAQ says Ontario regulations require you to remove an unused underground tank. Only a TSSA-registered petroleum contractor can do the removal. The owner pays for it, and for any cleanup if the soil turns out to be contaminated. When a tank comes out, an Environmental Assessment Report is submitted under TSSA's Environmental Management Protocol. Rarely, TSSA grants a variance that lets a tank stay in the ground, but that needs an application and its own environmental assessment.
At sale time, a tank you know about belongs in your seller disclosure. Keeping quiet is a bad bet, because buyers' inspectors look for fill pipes and vent pipes along the foundation. If you only suspect a tank, a pre-listing home inspection is a cheap way to find out before a buyer does.
From there, sellers usually take one of two paths. The cleaner one is removing the tank before listing, so buyers get the contractor's paperwork and the environmental report with the offer. The other is selling as-is with the tank disclosed, which hands the removal risk to the buyer. Expect them to price in the unknown, since nobody can say what is in the ground until the tank is out.
Removal is not always a small job. Digging up a driveway or a finished garden is part of the cost, and a leak changes the numbers entirely. That uncertainty is why a documented clean removal tends to be worth more to buyers than the removal bill itself suggests.
Related reading: What Is a Material Fact in Ontario Real Estate?, What Is a Holdback in an Ontario Real Estate Transaction? and What Is a Seller Property Information Statement?.
