The Driveway That Was Never Actually Theirs to Use

The situation

Xia and Hanna had been looking for a property outside St. Thomas for the better part of a year — something with more land and privacy than anything in town, but still a manageable drive to work. When they found a house on a large rural lot with a long gravel laneway leading back from the road, it felt like exactly what they wanted. They made an offer around $650,000, had it accepted, and arranged financing through their bank. With a firm deal in hand, they retained Treadstone Law to act on the purchase and asked that everything be ready to close in about six weeks.

Neither of them thought much about the driveway. It ran for several hundred metres from the public road, past a neighbouring farm property, before reaching their house. It looked like it had always been there, and the listing photos showed it as simply part of the property. Their real estate agent had not flagged anything unusual about it either. To Xia and Hanna, a driveway was a driveway.

What the title review found

Every Ontario real estate purchase includes a title search — a review of the official land registry record for the property, showing who owns it, what registered rights and restrictions apply to it, and what obligations run with the land regardless of who buys it. Our team ordered the title search as a standard first step, along with a review of the property's legal description and its boundaries against the survey on file.

What the search showed was that the laneway serving the property did not sit entirely within the boundaries of the lot Xia and Hanna were buying. For roughly the last stretch before reaching the public road, it crossed a corner of the neighbouring farm. That kind of arrangement is not unusual in rural Ontario, where older lots were sometimes carved up without anyone formalizing the exact access route each new parcel would need. What matters is whether the crossing right was ever registered as an easement — a legal right for one property to use part of another property for a specific purpose, such as access, that stays attached to the land even when either property changes hands.

There was no registered easement. There was nothing in the title history granting the property, or any owner before it, a legal right to use that stretch of laneway. As best our team could tell from the file and from speaking with the seller's lawyer, the arrangement had simply been informal for decades — one neighbour letting the other cross their corner, an understanding that was never put in writing or registered on title. The current farm owner had never objected, but an unregistered, informal permission like that can be withdrawn at any time by whoever owns the neighbouring land, and it does not automatically pass to a new owner the way a registered easement would. If Xia and Hanna bought the property as-is, they would be relying on the goodwill of a neighbour they had never met to reach their own front door.

This is what real estate lawyers mean by a property being effectively landlocked — not that it has no driveway at all, but that its only practical access depends on a right that does not actually exist on paper. Lenders and title insurers take this seriously too, because a property that cannot be reliably accessed is harder to sell, harder to finance, and vulnerable to a dispute with a neighbour turning into a genuine crisis.

What we did

1. Confirmed the problem before raising it with the clients. Before telling Xia and Hanna anything alarming, our team cross-checked the survey against the registered boundaries and reviewed the full chain of title back several decades to make sure no easement had been registered and later missed. It had not. The gap was real.
2. Explained the risk in plain terms. We walked Xia and Hanna through what an unregistered access arrangement meant in practice: it usually works fine day to day, but it leaves them exposed if the neighbouring property is ever sold, if the relationship with that owner sours, or if the neighbour simply decides to fence off the corner. We were clear that this was fixable, but that it needed to be fixed before closing, not after — once they owned the property outright, their negotiating position with the neighbour would be much weaker.
3. Raised the issue as a requisition with the seller's lawyer. Ontario agreements of purchase and sale typically give the buyer's lawyer a window to raise title objections, called requisitions, before the deal becomes unconditional on title. We formally requisitioned that the seller either establish that a registered easement already existed, or take steps to obtain one, as a condition of completing the sale.
4. Worked with the seller's lawyer to approach the neighbour. The seller had a long-standing relationship with the neighbouring farm owner, Dawit, and was motivated to keep the deal together. The seller's lawyer approached Dawit to formalize what had, in practice, been allowed informally for years: a registered right-of-way easement over the existing laneway corridor, in favour of the property Xia and Hanna were buying.
5. Reviewed and negotiated the terms of the easement. An easement needs to say more than yes, you can drive through here. Our team reviewed the draft to make sure it described the exact width and route of the laneway, confirmed it covered ordinary vehicle access and not just pedestrian use, addressed who would be responsible for maintaining the surface, and was registered on title against both properties so it would bind future owners on both sides.
6. Built a contingency into the timeline. Negotiating and registering an easement takes time that a standard purchase timeline does not always allow for, particularly when a third party who is not part of the transaction has to agree to it. We negotiated a short extension to the original closing date with the seller's lawyer to make sure the easement could be properly registered rather than rushed through informally at the last minute.

The outcome

Dawit agreed to grant the easement without asking for compensation, on the basis that the access arrangement had already existed for years and formalizing it did not change how the laneway was actually used. The easement was drafted, reviewed, and registered on title roughly three weeks after the issue was first raised, using the short extension our team had negotiated. Closing moved back by about ten days from the original date, and completed with the easement already in place.

Xia and Hanna now own a property with a properly registered right to the only access route it has. If the neighbouring farm is ever sold, the new owner will take title subject to that same registered easement — it runs with the land, not with the individual who happened to own it when the arrangement was made informal decades earlier. Had this gone unnoticed and the purchase closed without the fix, Xia and Hanna would have owned a house they could not be legally certain of reaching, a defect that would have made the property harder to resell and likely would have surfaced again, at a worse moment, when they eventually tried to sell or refinance.

The cost of the fix itself was modest — the legal work to draft, negotiate, and register the easement, plus a short delay to closing. The alternative, discovering the gap after taking ownership, would have meant either negotiating from a much weaker position with a neighbour under no obligation to cooperate, or in a worst case pursuing a court application to establish an access right over land they did not own, a process that can take many months and is never guaranteed to succeed.

What you can learn from this