A Fence Six Feet Over the Line Nearly Sank a Peterborough Sale

The situation

Halima worked as a university professor and Yusuf as a physiotherapist, and after several years of renting they had agreed to buy a detached home in Peterborough for roughly $975,000. It was their first purchase of any kind, and they had done the ordinary things a careful buyer does: toured the house twice, had it inspected, and made their offer conditional on financing and a satisfactory home inspection. Neither condition raised anything alarming, and the deal firmed up on schedule with a closing date about six weeks out.

Halima and Yusuf retained our team to handle the purchase once their offer was accepted, and the file proceeded the way most residential purchases do for the first several weeks: title searches, mortgage instructions, and routine correspondence with the seller's lawyer. As is standard practice for a resale purchase where no recent survey exists, we asked the seller for a current or recent survey, and when none was available, we recommended Halima and Yusuf order one rather than rely on the decades-old survey referenced in the seller's file. They agreed, mainly out of caution, and a surveyor was booked for the following week.

What the survey found

The new survey showed something the old paperwork had never caught. The wooden fence along one side of the yard, the raised deck attached to the back of the house, and a garden shed near the rear corner of the lot all sat, in whole or in part, over the registered boundary line and onto the neighbouring property. The encroachment was not trivial: at its widest point, the fence line ran roughly six feet inside the neighbour's registered lot, and the shed sat almost entirely on land that, according to the survey, had never belonged to the house Halima and Yusuf were buying.

An encroachment of this kind creates a real problem for a purchase, separate from whatever the seller believed about their own yard. A buyer's lawyer's job includes confirming that what the buyer is agreeing to pay for actually sits within the boundaries shown on title, and that any structures on the property do not intrude onto land the seller does not own. A fence built in the wrong place is usually a minor fix. A deck and a shed built substantially on someone else's registered land are a different order of problem, because they raise the question of what happens if the neighbour later insists on their removal, and because a lender will not want to advance a mortgage against a property with an unresolved encroachment affecting its usable land.

The neighbour, a homeowner named Ming who had lived next door for about a decade, had never raised the issue, and it appeared the seller genuinely had not known the deck and shed crossed the line; the previous survey the seller relied on had been prepared over twenty years earlier and evidently either predated the deck's construction or was never checked against it. That made the problem easier to explain but no easier to solve on the timeline the deal required. Closing was five weeks away, and neither an unresolved encroachment nor a silent hope that the neighbour would never notice was an acceptable way to proceed.

What we did

1. Flagged the encroachment to the seller's lawyer immediately. Waiting to raise a title problem close to closing narrows everyone's options. We wrote promptly, attached the new survey, and asked the seller to address the encroachment as a condition of closing rather than leave it to be discovered later by the buyers or their lender.
2. Assessed what a lender would accept. Mortgage lenders generally require either a clean survey or acceptable title insurance covering any encroachment before advancing funds. We confirmed with Halima and Yusuf's lender what level of comfort it needed, which shaped how far the resolution had to go before closing could proceed on schedule.
3. Opened contact with Ming, the affected neighbour, through the seller. Because Ming's land was the one actually encroached upon, no fix was complete without an agreement from Ming, either to sell the strip of land, grant a right for the structures to remain, or require their removal. The seller's lawyer made the introduction, and we set out plainly what the survey showed and what outcomes were realistic.
4. Negotiated a boundary adjustment rather than forcing removal. Tearing out a deck attached to the house on short notice was neither practical nor something Ming, who had no complaint about the deck itself, particularly wanted. Instead, we proposed a minor boundary adjustment: a small strip of land, roughly matching the footprint of the deck and shed, would be transferred from Ming's lot to the property being purchased, formalized through a registered reference plan and transfer, with the fence relocated onto the new, corrected line.
5. Negotiated the cost split with the seller. The encroachment was the seller's problem to have caught, not the buyers', but a full legal fight over responsibility would have cost more than the fix itself and jeopardized the closing date. We negotiated a compromise: the seller paid for the boundary adjustment survey, the reference plan and the land transfer costs to Ming, while Halima and Yusuf agreed to accept a small purchase price reduction rather than a full holdback, and to cover the modest cost of relocating the fence themselves after closing.
6. Confirmed the paperwork before waiving conditions. The boundary adjustment could not be fully registered before closing given the timeline, so we required a signed agreement among the seller, Ming and the buyers committing all parties to complete the transfer promptly after closing, along with title insurance covering the interim period, before advising Halima and Yusuf it was safe to proceed.

The outcome

The sale closed on schedule. Halima and Yusuf took title to the house with a signed commitment in hand for the small strip of land under the deck and shed to be formally transferred to them within a few months, backed by title insurance in the meantime so the interim period carried no real risk. The purchase price was reduced by an amount in the low thousands of dollars to reflect the buyers' share of the cleanup cost, and Halima and Yusuf separately budgeted a similar amount to move the fence onto the corrected line once the transfer registered.

It was not the clean closing they had expected when they made their offer, and it cost them real money and several stressful weeks they had not planned for. But it also avoided the worse outcomes that were genuinely on the table: a closing delayed indefinitely while the boundary was litigated, a lender refusing to fund against an unresolved encroachment, or a future dispute with Ming inherited without warning. Ming, for their part, came away with a small cash payment for the strip of land and a fence finally built where the title said it should be, and had no interest in prolonging a disagreement over land they had never actively used. The seller absorbed the larger share of the cost, which reflected that the problem had originated on their side of the sale, even though nobody involved had acted in bad faith.

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