The Garage That Sat On the Wrong Side of the Line

The situation

The buyer's lawyer called on a Thursday afternoon with a single line that stopped the deal cold: the new survey showed the detached garage sitting roughly two feet over the boundary, onto the lot next door. Closing was five weeks out. Tyler, who had agreed to sell a mixed-use property in Owen Sound that he had owned for over a decade, had never questioned where the garage sat. It had been there when he bought the building, and it had never come up in any conversation with any neighbour in all that time.

To understand how a single garage wall turned into a dispute worth well over a million dollars once the full picture emerged, it helps to go back further. The property Tyler was selling sat beside a second lot owned by Bogdan, a partner in an engineering firm who had bought his property more recently and had his own plans to redevelop it into something larger. Behind both lots, sharing a rear boundary with Bogdan's, was a third property owned by Radu, who ran several franchise locations of his own across the region and whose access driveway ran close enough to the disputed garage that any resurvey of one boundary risked disturbing the other. Three lots, three owners, one old mistake buried in the ground between them.

None of the three had ever formally agreed on where the lines actually ran. The original subdivision survey was decades old, fence posts had shifted a foot or more over the years, and a prior owner of Tyler's lot had apparently built the garage using the fence line as a rough guide rather than a proper survey mark. As long as nobody was buying, selling, or building anything new, the discrepancy cost nothing and nobody noticed. The moment a sale was on the table and a fresh survey was ordered, it cost everyone something, and it did not cost them all the same amount.

Tyler's buyer was not going to close with an unresolved encroachment sitting on title. Bogdan, sitting on redevelopment plans of his own, saw an opening to negotiate something in his favour rather than simply consenting to a quick fix that cost him nothing to give. Radu, whose driveway access was the quiet complication nobody had mentioned at the outset, had leverage of his own and no particular reason to help Tyler close on schedule. Three owners, three sets of motives, and one closing date that did not care about any of it. Tyler's own read on the situation, going in, was that this was a simple survey error someone would just fix.

Why this was harder than it looked

A straightforward encroachment usually has a straightforward menu of fixes: buy the strip of land, register an easement, or move the structure. What made this file difficult was that no single fix satisfied all three owners at once, and each of them had a different reason to hold out for something better than the obvious answer.

Bogdan's engineering background meant he understood exactly how much a permanent right-of-way or a sold strip of land could affect his own future severance or redevelopment plans. He was not being difficult for its own sake; he was protecting an asset he valued in the high six figures once his own project was factored in. Any solution that made his site harder to redevelop later was a solution he would resist, even if it solved Tyler's problem cleanly and cost him nothing today. That made straightforward compromise, the kind that works when only two owners are involved, impossible to reach quickly.

Radu's position was different again. His driveway ran close enough to the boundary in question that a resurvey touching Bogdan's line could, in theory, touch his too. He had not caused the garage encroachment and had no direct stake in Tyler's sale closing on time, which meant he had little natural incentive to move quickly on anything. Getting his cooperation meant identifying and addressing a concern that was adjacent to the actual dispute, about his own access rather than about the garage at all, rather than assuming his agreement would follow automatically once the other two owners settled.

Layered on top of the competing interests was the closing clock. Every week of negotiation was a week the buyer's patience wore thinner, and Tyler's exposure grew if the deal collapsed and had to be relisted with a known title defect now formally disclosed to any future buyer. The amount ultimately at stake, once the value of the disputed land, the redevelopment implications for Bogdan's lot, and the risk of a failed sale were all totalled, ran well into seven figures. Solving three people's problems at once, on a deadline, with unequal leverage on each side and no shared incentive to hurry, was the actual job in front of us. A file with two owners and one obvious answer rarely needs much strategy. A file with three owners, three lawyers, and three different timelines needs a plan for the order in which conversations happen, not just for what each conversation should conclude.

What we did

1. Ordered an independent boundary survey covering all three lots, not just the two directly in dispute, because Radu's driveway concern meant any resolution touching Bogdan's line needed to be checked against his lot too. A survey limited to the original encroachment would have solved one problem while leaving a second dispute waiting quietly to surface later, possibly during Radu's own future sale.
2. Mapped each owner's actual interest separately rather than treating the dispute as one negotiation with one outcome. Tyler needed the title cleared before closing. Bogdan needed his future development options protected. Radu needed assurance his access would not be affected by whatever the other two agreed. Naming these plainly at the outset, rather than assuming everyone wanted the same thing, shaped every offer that followed and avoided wasted rounds of negotiation.
3. Proposed a limited easement rather than a land transfer for the encroaching portion of the garage, because a sold strip of land would have required a severance application on Bogdan's side that neither his timeline nor Tyler's closing date could realistically absorb. An easement kept title clean and enforceable without triggering a planning process measured in months rather than weeks.
4. Negotiated a companion access acknowledgment with Radu, confirming in writing that his driveway rights were entirely unaffected by the survey and the proposed easement, which removed his only real reason to delay signing off on anything. This ran as a separate, smaller agreement alongside the main easement rather than folding his concerns into a document he had little reason to read closely.
5. Built a firm but realistic timeline into every draft, tying the easement's completion date to the closing date rather than treating them as two separate tracks moving at their own pace, and gave the buyer's lawyer scheduled written updates every few days rather than sporadic reassurance whenever there happened to be news. A three-way negotiation running quietly in the background is easy for an outside party to mistake for a deal falling apart; specific, regular updates on what had been agreed and what remained outstanding kept the buyer's lawyer, and through them the buyer, willing to stay at the table while the actual work continued out of view.
6. Negotiated compensation to Bogdan for the easement, reflecting the modest reduction in his lot's future flexibility, funded from the sale proceeds rather than left as an open dispute. This was the point where Tyler absorbed a real, quantifiable cost rather than getting the problem solved for free, and where the file stopped being purely a legal exercise and became a financial one too.
7. Registered the easement and the access acknowledgment against title at the same time, rather than one after the other, so the buyer's lawyer could confirm both documents in a single title search before releasing funds. Registering them separately would have left a window where only half the fix existed on paper, an outcome that could have let a minor procedural snag on one document quietly reopen the whole three-way negotiation just as closing approached, when nobody involved had any appetite left for it.
8. Confirmed directly with the buyer's lending institution that the registered easement satisfied its title requirements before locking in a final closing date, rather than assuming a lender that had already approved financing would simply accept whatever the parties negotiated among themselves. Lenders can and do reject title arrangements that satisfy everyone else in a transaction, and a late objection at that stage would have undone weeks of careful three-way negotiation in a single afternoon, sending a resolved file back to the table with the closing date itself suddenly at risk.

The outcome

The sale closed, roughly three weeks later than originally scheduled, with a clean title and a registered easement covering the encroaching portion of the garage. Radu's access acknowledgment was signed without further dispute once his actual concern, protecting his own driveway rights, had been addressed directly instead of left implicit in a document written for someone else's problem.

It was not a clean win, and it was never going to be one. Tyler paid Bogdan a negotiated sum for the easement, absorbed the cost of the second survey, and lost several weeks of certainty on a deal he had expected to close without any complication at all. The buyer, kept informed throughout by regular written updates rather than silence, stayed at the table but reduced their offer slightly to reflect the delay and the disclosed history on title, a concession Tyler accepted rather than risk the sale collapsing altogether and having to relist with the encroachment now a matter of record.

The relationship with Bogdan, who remained a neighbour to the new owner rather than to Tyler going forward, ended the file more strained than it began. That was the real cost of the dispute: not just the dollars negotiated over eight weeks of back-and-forth, but the working relationship with a neighbour that had never previously been tested by anything more than an old, unremarked-upon fence line. The lesson Tyler took from it, and repeated to other business owners afterward, was that an old, informal boundary is not a settled fact just because nobody has ever raised it. It is a liability that sits quietly until the worst possible moment to surface, usually the week before a closing, and by then the number of people who need to agree on a fix is rarely still just one.

What you can learn from this