The Shared Driveway Nobody Mentioned Until the Offer Was In

The situation

Maricel, a pharmacist, and Franco, a police sergeant, had been looking for a house in Brockville for the better part of a year, priced out of the first few neighbourhoods they tried and slowly widening their search. When they found an older two-storey on a corner-adjacent lot, priced in the upper part of their range, it felt like the one. The driveway ran along the side of the house, wide enough for two cars, sloping down toward a detached garage at the back. It also, as it turned out on their first showing, was the only way the neighbouring property reached its own garage. A narrow paved strip cut across the edge of what would become Maricel and Franco's lot, connecting the neighbour's backyard parking pad to the street.

Their real estate agent, Rosa, mentioned it in passing as a quirk of the older street, the kind of thing common in towns built up decades before anyone worried about parking. Maricel and Franco assumed, reasonably enough, that there would be a legal right of way registered on title spelling out who could use the strip and on what terms. They made an offer in the property's stated range, it was accepted, and they retained our team to act on the purchase with a closing date roughly six weeks out.

A right of way, sometimes called an easement, is a registered legal right for one property to use part of another property for a specific purpose, most often access. It runs with the land, meaning it binds future owners on both sides, not just the people who agreed to it originally. Our first step on any purchase is a title search, which pulls the full history of registered interests against the property, including any easements, mortgages, and restrictions. That search is where the first sign of trouble showed up: nothing.

What the title search found

The title search came back clean of any registered easement over the driveway strip. No document gave the neighbouring property a legal right to cross that land. And yet the driveway had clearly been used that way for years; tire tracks wore two distinct paths into the asphalt, one leading to each garage, and the neighbour's car was parked on the strip during at least one of the showings. This is a common gap in older Ontario neighbourhoods, where informal arrangements between long-ago owners were never put in writing, or were put in writing decades ago in a document that was lost, never registered, or registered incorrectly and later dropped off title during a subsequent transfer.

Without a registered easement, the neighbour's use of the strip had no clear legal footing. That cuts two ways, and neither is comfortable for a buyer. On one hand, Maricel and Franco could, in theory, block the neighbour from using the driveway once they owned it, since nothing on title obligated them to allow it. On the other hand, decades of open, continuous use of land can sometimes give rise to a claim that a right exists regardless of what is or is not registered, particularly where the use began years ago and has continued without objection. Testing that question in court is expensive and uncertain for either side, and it was not a fight Maricel and Franco wanted to inherit along with a mortgage.

There was a further complication once our team spoke with the seller's lawyer. The seller confirmed there had been a handshake understanding between two previous owners roughly twenty years earlier, but no lawyer had ever been involved and nothing had been registered. The neighbour, when contacted, was equally certain the arrangement was permanent and had no interest in giving it up or paying for the privilege. Two households, one driveway, and no paper trail connecting them: this needed a resolution before closing, not an assumption carried forward on good faith.

What we did

1. Confirmed the gap in writing before advising on next steps. We obtained written confirmation from the seller's lawyer of the informal arrangement's history, so everyone was working from the same facts rather than dueling recollections about who had agreed to what twenty years earlier.
2. Explained the real choice to Maricel and Franco. They could close without a registered easement and rely on the seller's informal account, take on the driveway dispute as a problem to solve after taking title, or make closing conditional on a registered right of way being put in place first. Given that the neighbour showed every sign of asserting a right to the strip with or without paperwork, closing without resolving it risked a dispute with someone living twenty feet from their new front door.
3. Made the purchase conditional on a resolved easement. We amended the agreement of purchase and sale with the seller's lawyer to add a condition: closing would proceed once a registered right of way, acceptable to both properties, was in place. This kept the deal alive while giving Maricel and Franco a way out if no agreement could be reached.
4. Negotiated the terms of the easement directly with the neighbour's lawyer. The neighbour wanted an unrestricted, permanent right to use the full width of the strip at no cost. We pushed for terms that limited the easement to vehicle access only, required the neighbour to contribute to shared maintenance and snow clearing, and set out a defined width rather than an open-ended one. Neither side got everything it wanted.
5. Had a licensed surveyor confirm the exact boundaries of the strip. This avoided the same problem recurring in a different form: an easement described in vague terms is nearly as risky as no easement at all, since it invites disagreement over exactly how much land it covers.
6. Registered the easement on title before closing. Once terms were agreed, the document was drafted, signed by both property owners, and registered against both titles, so the right of way and its conditions would bind not just Maricel and Franco and their neighbour, but every future owner of either property.

The outcome

The final easement gave the neighbouring property a permanent right to cross the strip for vehicle access to its garage, in exchange for a fixed annual contribution toward driveway maintenance and an equal split of snow clearing costs, split roughly down the middle of what each side had initially proposed. Maricel and Franco did not get the unrestricted control over their own driveway they had hoped for going in, and the neighbour did not get free, undocumented use of it either. Closing slipped by about three weeks past the original date while the terms were negotiated and the survey completed, and Maricel and Franco absorbed a modest cost for the survey and the extra legal work involved in drafting and registering the easement, in the low thousands of dollars against a purchase in the eight-hundred-thousand to one-point-three-million-dollar range.

What they avoided was worse: closing on a property with an unresolved, undocumented access arrangement, then discovering months or years later that the neighbour's understanding of the deal did not match theirs, with no easement on title to settle the question and a relationship with the person next door already soured. The compromise was not the deal either side pictured when they first sat down, but it gave both properties a clear, enforceable, and permanent answer to a question that had gone unanswered for two decades.

What you can learn from this