Buried Cable, Firm Offer: An Oshawa Easement Found Too Late

The situation

Anh and Maricel had sold the business they built together over three decades and were ready for a different pace of life. They wanted a home with no exterior maintenance to speak of, close to amenities, but with enough of a yard to justify keeping the patio furniture they had shipped back from a rental property out east. An executive condominium townhouse in Oshawa, part of a small complex with individual rear yards registered as exclusive-use common elements, fit the brief. It had a finished lower level, a two-car garage, and a yard just large enough for the sunroom addition Anh had been sketching on napkins for a year.

The complex had only a handful of units and turnover was rare. When one came up, four other offers arrived within two days. Anh and Maricel's realtor advised that a competitive offer with no conditions was the only realistic way to win it, and given their financial position, a mortgage condition was unnecessary. They agreed, submitted an unconditional offer at roughly $1,650,000, and it was accepted the same evening. Only after the offer was firm and binding did they retain our team to act on the closing, which is a common sequence in a hot market but one that removes an important safeguard: once an offer has no conditions, a buyer generally cannot walk away from problems discovered afterward, they can only manage them.

Our review of title, the status certificate, and the registered documents affecting the property began the following week, as a routine part of preparing for closing. It was during that review, not before the offer, that a registered document caught our attention.

What the review found

Registered against the property, and against the exclusive-use yard specifically, was an easement in favour of a regional utility company. An easement is a registered right allowing someone other than the property owner to use part of the land for a specific purpose, permanently, regardless of who owns the property in future. In this case, the easement gave the utility a right of access across roughly a third of the rear yard to reach and maintain buried infrastructure serving the wider complex, along with the right to excavate that strip if repairs were ever needed.

Nothing about the easement was hidden in the sense of being concealed; it was on title, where any buyer's lawyer conducting a search would find it. It simply had not been flagged to Anh and Maricel before they made their offer, because no title search had been done before an unconditional offer was submitted. The listing description made no mention of it, and the sunroom Anh had been planning sat almost entirely within the easement area. Building any permanent structure over an active utility easement without the utility's consent risks an order to remove it later, at the owner's cost, if the utility ever needs to dig.

The status certificate, a document a condominium corporation issues describing the unit, the common elements, and any outstanding issues or planned expenditures, confirmed the easement had been registered years earlier when the complex was built and had never been the subject of a claim or repair. That was a genuinely useful fact: the utility had never needed to exercise its rights in the easement's history. But an easement's value to a buyer is not measured by how often it has been used, it is measured by what it permits the utility to do at any time, without needing the owner's permission, for as long as the easement exists.

Because the offer was already firm when this was discovered, Anh and Maricel had no legal path to walk away from the purchase or to demand the seller, Analyn, cure the problem as a condition of closing. An unconditional offer is, by design, close to final; the buyer has accepted the property largely as it stands, easements and all. The question our team faced was not how to undo the deal, but how much of the damage could still be contained before closing and afterward.

What we did

1. Confirmed the exact scope of the easement before assuming the worst. We obtained the original easement registration and had it plotted against a current survey of the yard, rather than relying on the general description in the title search. This showed the affected strip ran along the rear third of the yard, closer to the fence line than to the house, which meant a smaller sunroom set closer to the building would sit entirely outside it.
2. Contacted the utility directly to ask about consent procedures. Some utilities will permit certain surface improvements, such as fencing or planting, over an easement, provided nothing is built that would block excavation equipment. We got written confirmation of what the utility would and would not permit within the easement strip, so Anh and Maricel were planning against facts rather than assumptions.
3. Raised the disclosure gap with the seller's lawyer before closing. Although the offer had no condition allowing withdrawal, we put Analyn on notice in writing that the easement had not been disclosed in the listing, and that its presence materially affected the buyers' plans for the yard. This did not create a legal right to cancel, but it opened a conversation about goodwill concessions that Analyn, wanting a clean closing with no disputes, had a real incentive to have.
4. Negotiated a closing credit rather than a price reduction. A price reduction this late would have required amending the agreement and risked reopening the whole deal. Instead, we negotiated a closing adjustment of roughly $18,000, reflecting the cost of revised landscaping and fencing design work needed to build around the easement, paid to Anh and Maricel through the statement of adjustments at closing.
5. Revised the renovation plan with the constraint built in from the start. Rather than fighting to build over the easement, we recommended Anh and Maricel redesign the sunroom to sit closer to the house, entirely clear of the registered strip, and treat the easement area as a planting and seating zone using only removable furniture and low plantings the utility had confirmed were acceptable.
6. Documented the utility's written position and attached it to the closing file. The utility's confirmation of what could and could not be built in the easement area was kept with the property's permanent file, so that if Anh and Maricel sell in the future, the next buyer's lawyer will not have to start the inquiry from zero.

The outcome

The purchase closed on schedule. Anh and Maricel did not get the sunroom in the location Anh had originally planned, and they did not recover the full cost of redesigning around a restriction they had not known existed when they made their offer. That is a real loss, and it traces directly back to submitting an unconditional offer without a title review first, a decision that made sense competitively but removed the safety net that would normally catch a problem like this before it became binding.

What the firm's involvement changed was how much of that loss they absorbed. The revised sunroom, built closer to the house and entirely clear of the easement, was completed the following spring, smaller than the original sketch but usable year-round. The $18,000 closing credit covered most of the redesign and landscaping costs that the easement made necessary. And because the utility's position was obtained and documented in writing rather than assumed, Anh and Maricel know precisely what they can and cannot do with the rest of the yard, instead of guessing and risking an excavation order down the line.

Anh has said since that she wishes she had asked her realtor whether a title search was possible even on a fast timeline, rather than assuming it had to wait until after the offer was firm. In a genuinely competitive multiple-offer situation, a full search before submitting may not always be realistic. But a shortened review focused specifically on registered easements, rights of way, and other encumbrances, done in the hours before an offer deadline, can often catch a problem like this one while a buyer still has the power to walk away or adjust their price.

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