Enforcing Unwritten Real Estate Purchase Agreements

It's generally accepted good law that, in order to create a valid contract for the purchase and sale of real property, the agreed-upon terms must include, at a minimum, the identity of the parties, the description of the property at issue and the purchase price. It is also generally understood that pursuant to the statutory requirement set out in section 4 of the Statute of Frauds¹, agreements for the purchase and sale of real property must be in writing to be enforceable. It almost seems intuitive that a purchase agreement must be put down in writing of some sort.

That said, courts have been increasingly tolerant of informal expressions of what constitutes evidence of a written contract. Memoranda and emails have been accepted as constituting a contract. In fact, in a recent Saskatchewan judgement, South West Terminal Ltd. v Achter Land, a Saskatchewan judge ruled that the "thumbs up" emoji is a valid way to confirm acceptance to an agreement.