The Neighbour's Fence, a Land Titles Search, and a Sale in Ajax

The situation

Jing worked as a line cook and Xia as a hairdresser, and between them they had managed to buy one rental property years earlier, a modest detached house in Ajax that they had rented out ever since as their only investment outside their regular jobs. It was not a large portfolio, just one property, carefully managed and mortgaged conservatively, and it represented a meaningful slice of what the couple had built together. When their long-term tenant gave notice and moved out, Jing and Xia decided the time was right to sell rather than find a new tenant, and they listed the house at a price in the roughly $280,000 to $450,000 range typical for the area.

An offer came in within two weeks, at a price the couple was glad to accept. As part of the usual pre-closing work, the buyer's lawyer ordered an up-to-date survey of the property. That survey turned up something Jing and Xia had never thought to question: the wooden fence running along one side of the yard, which had been there since long before they bought the house, did not sit on the registered property line. It sat inside the neighbouring lot's boundary by a narrow strip, several feet wide and running the depth of the yard.

Jing and Xia retained our team once the buyer's lawyer flagged the issue and made clear the sale would not close with the boundary question unresolved. What might have looked, at first glance, like a simple fence-moving exercise turned out to be something more serious a few days later, when the neighbour, a man named Dawit who had lived next door for over three decades, wrote to say the fence had marked the true boundary for as long as he had lived there, and that he had no intention of giving up the strip of land on his side of it.

The claim

Dawit's position was straightforward on its face. He said he and the owners before him had treated the fence line as the boundary for more than thirty years, mowing the strip, planting a row of shrubs along it, and once even repairing the fence itself after a storm. In Ontario, a claim like this is usually described as adverse possession: the idea that someone who has occupied land openly, continuously, exclusively and without the true owner's permission for a long enough period can, in some circumstances, acquire a legal right to keep it, even though they never held title to it.

What Dawit did not know, and what his own understanding of the doctrine missed, is that adverse possession works very differently depending on how a property's title is held. Ontario land is registered under one of two systems: the older registry system, where long-standing possession claims like his can sometimes still succeed, and the land titles system, introduced later and now covering the large majority of properties in the province, where the province's electronic land registry guarantees the boundaries shown on title and a new adverse possession claim generally cannot arise at all. The one exception that keeps the older doctrine alive at all is for claims that had already fully matured before a property was first brought into the land titles system; those grandfathered claims can sometimes survive, but a claim that was still building afterward simply cannot ripen into anything.

The question, then, was not really about the fence, the shrubs, or how long Dawit had mowed the strip. It was about two dates: when the property had first been registered in the land titles system, and whether thirty-plus years of continuous, exclusive use by Dawit and his predecessor had been completed before that date. If the land titles registration came first, Dawit's claim had no legal foundation no matter how long the fence had stood undisturbed. If his use had already ripened into a claim before that registration, the outcome could be very different, and Jing and Xia might genuinely be selling less land than they thought.

There was also a narrower factual weakness in Dawit's account, even setting the land titles question aside. Adverse possession requires exclusive use, meaning the true owner has to have been effectively shut out of the land. Jing and Xia's own tenants over the years had used part of that side yard for storing bicycles and a small shed, and old rental listing photos showed activity on that strip that did not look consistent with Dawit having it entirely to himself. It was a secondary argument, but a useful one if the title history did not resolve things cleanly on its own.

What we did

1. Pulled the full title history for both properties. Ontario's electronic land registry preserves a searchable record of when a parcel was first registered under the land titles system, sometimes decades in the past through a conversion from the older registry system. That search showed the Ajax property, along with the surrounding subdivision, had been converted into land titles registration well over thirty years earlier, before Dawit had even moved into his house next door.
2. Established the timeline against Dawit's own account. Dawit had told the couple he moved in a little over thirty years ago. Even taking his account of continuous use at face value, his occupation of the strip could not have begun until after the land titles conversion had already taken place, which meant no adverse possession claim could ever have started to run in the first place, let alone matured into anything enforceable.
3. Wrote to Dawit's own advisor with the title history attached. Rather than argue the point in the abstract, we set out the conversion date, explained plainly why it foreclosed his claim regardless of how long the fence had stood, and invited a response before the matter went any further. This let Dawit's side verify the position independently rather than simply take our word for it.
4. Kept the buyer's lawyer informed at each step. Because the sale's closing date depended on the boundary question being resolved, we gave regular updates so the buyer's side could judge whether an extension might be needed, rather than leaving them to find out at the last minute that a dispute was still open.
5. Negotiated a practical resolution once the legal point was conceded. Once presented with the title history, Dawit's position softened considerably; his advisor confirmed there was no legal basis to contest the boundary shown on the survey. Rather than leave hard feelings behind for the new owners, we arranged for Dawit to keep the row of shrubs he had planted, with the fence relocated onto the true line at Jing and Xia's cost, a modest expense they accepted in exchange for a clean, undisputed closing.
6. Documented the resolution for the buyer. A short written confirmation, signed by Dawit, acknowledging the boundary as shown on the new survey, was provided to the buyer's lawyer along with proof the fence had been relocated, so the new owners would take title with the boundary question closed rather than latent.

The outcome

The fence was moved onto the surveyed line about ten days before the scheduled closing, at a cost to Jing and Xia in the low thousands of dollars, well within what they had budgeted once the dispute first surfaced. The sale closed on the original date with no extension needed, at the price the couple had originally agreed to. Dawit kept his shrubs, lost a strip of yard he had never actually owned, and by his own account was relieved to have the question settled cleanly rather than carried forward as an open sore with new neighbours he had never met.

For Jing and Xia, the outcome mattered beyond the sale price. Their one investment property was, in practical terms, most of what they had built outside their regular income, and a boundary dispute that dragged into litigation could easily have cost more in delay and legal expense than the strip of land was ever worth. Because the title history resolved the legal question decisively, the couple never had to weigh a settlement against the cost of fighting it out; the record itself did the work. They closed the sale, repaid the mortgage on the property, and kept the balance as the return on an investment they had managed carefully for years.

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