A Fence Line, a Dying Maple, and a New Start in Belleville

The situation

Anh had spent eighteen months rebuilding after a separation, working full-time as a hotel front-desk supervisor while she saved for a place of her own. In the spring, she found a modest bungalow in Belleville with a fenced backyard and a mature maple tree that shaded most of the deck. It felt, she told our team later, like the first thing that was entirely hers. She made an offer in the property's mid-range for the area, it was accepted, and closing was set for roughly six weeks out. She was buying alone this time, on a single income, and had budgeted carefully to make sure closing costs would not stretch her thin.

Anh retained our team to act on the purchase. Ontario real estate transactions almost always include a step that buyers sometimes assume is a formality: a review of title and, where the file calls for it, a survey or at least the existing survey on file for the property. Anh's realtor had passed along an old survey from a previous sale, done about fifteen years earlier. Our review of that document, cross-checked against the registered property description and a fresh look at the boundary on site during a walk-through, is what surfaced the problem.

Nothing about the property looked unusual to Anh. The fence had clearly been there a long time, the yard was tidy, and the tree gave the kind of shade that had partly sold her on the house in the first place. That is exactly why the discrepancy mattered: a problem invisible to the buyer is not a problem that goes away, it is a problem that surfaces later, usually at the worst possible time, once the buyer has no one left to negotiate with but the neighbour.

What the review found

The rear fence, which had clearly been standing for years and looked entirely ordinary, was not on the boundary line described in the old survey. It sat roughly two feet inside the neighbouring property. That meant a two-foot strip of what Anh believed was her backyard, including part of the base of the shared maple tree, actually belonged to the house next door. Whoever built that fence years earlier had either measured wrong or simply fenced along a line that looked right by eye, and every owner since had inherited the mistake without knowing it existed.

The second issue was more subtle. The previous owner had regraded part of the backyard several years earlier to fix a drainage problem, sloping the soil away from the house. That regrading had raised the ground level around the base of the maple by several inches, well inside the tree's root zone. Mature trees are sensitive to changes in grade around their roots; too much added soil can suffocate roots and cause slow decline, sometimes over several years, which is exactly the kind of harm that would have been very hard to trace back to its cause once Anh owned the property. The tree showed early signs of stress in the crown, the kind of thing an arborist would flag on close look but that goes unnoticed from the street.

Under Ontario property law, a boundary encroachment does not simply resolve itself because a fence has stood in the same place for a long time. There are legal doctrines that can, in some circumstances, let a long-standing structure stay where it is, but relying on one of those is uncertain, often requires a court application to establish, and was not a foundation Anh wanted under a house she was about to sink her savings into. The safer, faster path was to fix the actual boundary and get it in writing before closing, not to buy a lawsuit along with a house.

There was also a practical timing problem. Once title transfers, the buyer becomes the party who has to raise the issue with the neighbour, often after the relationship has already started off on the wrong foot. Sellers, by contrast, still have a strong reason to cooperate before closing: an unresolved boundary problem can be grounds for a buyer to delay or even walk away from the deal, which is leverage no seller wants to test this close to closing day.

What we did

1. Flagged the discrepancy immediately. As soon as the old survey was compared against the legal description and the fence's actual position, we raised it with Anh and with the seller's lawyer. Waiting to deal with an encroachment after closing puts the burden entirely on the new owner, who by then has no leverage with the seller and has to deal directly with a neighbour who was never part of the transaction.
2. Ordered an updated survey. A licensed Ontario land surveyor confirmed the fence's true position and pinpointed exactly how much of the neighbouring lot the fence, and the affected part of the maple's root zone, sat on. This turned an assumption into a measured fact both sides could act on.
3. Opened a three-way conversation with the seller and the neighbour. The seller had an interest in getting this resolved quickly, since an unresolved boundary problem can hold up a closing or give a buyer grounds to walk away. We worked with the seller's lawyer to bring the neighbour into a short, direct conversation about moving the fence rather than litigating over it.
4. Negotiated a boundary line agreement. Rather than leave the fence in place and hope for the best, the parties agreed the fence would be relocated onto the correct line before closing, at the seller's cost, with a written boundary agreement signed and later registered on title so the correct line would be a matter of record for future owners too.
5. Addressed the grading issue separately. Since moving the fence did not undo the drainage regrading, we had the seller commission a short arborist assessment. It confirmed the maple was stressed but not in danger of dying, and recommended removing some of the excess soil from around the root zone. The seller agreed to pay for that work as well, completed in the weeks before closing.
6. Adjusted the closing documents to reflect the resolved state. The agreement of purchase and sale was amended to confirm the fence relocation and grading correction as conditions satisfied before closing, so there was no ambiguity about who was responsible for what, and no surprise left for Anh to discover after taking possession.

The outcome

The fence was moved about two weeks before closing, onto the boundary confirmed by the survey. The excess soil around the maple's roots was removed and the grading adjusted so water would drain away from the tree without piling more earth against its base. The seller covered both costs, which fell in the low thousands of dollars, well below what a boundary dispute resolved after closing typically costs once a lawyer, a surveyor and possibly a court application are involved on the buyer's own dime.

Anh closed on schedule, with a signed and registered boundary agreement confirming the true property line, and with a backyard that matched what she thought she was buying in the first place. The maple, according to a follow-up she mentioned months later, was recovering well. What could have become a dispute dragged out over months, fought against a neighbour she would have to live beside indefinitely, was instead closed out before she ever moved a box into the house.

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