SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The house seems perfect. Whether it was the kitchen, the backyard or any other reason which leads a buyer to bid on a home, that new homeowner will need a real estate lawyer to seal the deal.

Leanne Dragon, a lawyer at Dragon Toner Law Office in Yellowknife, has been practising real estate law for more than 12 years in the North. -

When Leanne Dragon, a lawyer at Dragon Toner Law Office in Yellowknife, will enter the picture depends on whether a realtor is involved. Without a realtor, Dragon will get involved in the offer-to-purchase process. With a realtor, she will typically start once the purchase price is set.

Dragon moved to Yellowknife in 1997 and articled at what is now Peterson, Stang and Malakoe before she was called to the bar a year later. She was not interested in courtroom law, she said, and when the firm she was working for needed a real estate lawyer, she stepped up to the plate.

"I sort of fell into it and just fell in love with it," said Dragon, who practises throughout the NWT and Nunavut.

She added she likes the interaction with clients, but dislikes dealing with some lenders from the south.

"People are happy to be buying or selling a home so I have happy clients," she said. "My biggest dislike would be when we have to deal with particularly lenders down south, who just can't appreciate how things work up here. Sometimes they think things should be done very simply and it takes some convincing for us to help them understand that it doesn't always work that way in a Northern setting."

She recalled one client from Fort Good Hope. Dragon had difficulty explaining to a Toronto lender that the community had no notaries.

"I actually had to tell her to get a map," she said, "for her to try to get some perspective from downtown Toronto of where this tiny community was, in relation to the nearest place where there even was a lawyer."

The lender eventually got it. "I was absolutely dumbfounded by that response of 'why can't he just go to a lawyer's office down the street?'"

Dragon meets with clients either on the purchase or sale of a home to finalize the deal of transferring the ownership from one party to the other. This entails, for instance, searches at land titles offices, obtaining tax certificates, verifying that people have insurance, gathering documents, registering documents and preparing others.

Her fees for dealing with a Yellowknife file typically range from $750 to $1,400, she said.

The length of the process depends on the purchase offer's closing date.

In Nunavut, she explained, most of the properties are leased, usually to a 30-year-term, from the landowner because of land claims agreements. This means extra paperwork, as she must deal with two levels of property ownership - the municipalities and the government of Nunavut.

"The Nunavut files are quite different, in that you're dealing with the whole leasehold process and dealing with long-distance clients who I generally never meet," Dragon said. "That's an added challenge to the job."