The Retaining Wall Behind the Rental Property Sat on the Township's Land

The situation

Mirela's plan was ordinary. She had owned a single rental property in Casselman for about six years, the only investment property she held alongside her main work running a logistics company, and after her long-term tenant gave notice, she decided it was a good time to sell rather than find a new tenant. She listed it with an agent, ordered a standard pre-listing survey to confirm the boundaries for the listing package, and expected the process to run the way her one previous sale had: clean, a few weeks, done, freeing up capital she wanted to put toward expanding her business instead.

She had bought the property carefully, at a price that made sense as a rental, and had kept it well maintained through two long-term tenancies. She knew the building's mechanical systems, its roof age, its recent improvements, in the kind of detail an owner who checks in on a property regularly tends to accumulate. What she had never had reason to check, because nothing about the property's use or her ownership of it had ever raised the question, was whether every structure on the lot actually sat inside the lot's legal boundaries.

The survey came back with a note her agent flagged immediately. A retaining wall along the rear of the property, built by a previous owner well before Mirela had purchased it, extended roughly a metre and a half beyond the property's rear boundary and onto land owned by the township. The wall itself was unremarkable, holding back a modest grade change at the edge of the yard, the kind of feature a buyer would never think to question and a tenant would never notice at all. But the survey made the boundary issue impossible to ignore once it existed on paper, and once it existed on paper, it had to be disclosed to any buyer, and arguably to the township as well.

Mirela's husband Rejean, an anesthesiologist who had helped her manage the rental over the years without much involvement in its legal details, was the one who suggested she get advice before her agent went any further with the listing, since neither of them knew whether the encroachment was a minor fix or something that could derail the sale entirely. The property sat in the $1,200,000 to $2,800,000 range, reflecting its size and the improvements Mirela had made over the years, and a serious title problem at that price point was not something either of them wanted to discover partway through a buyer's due diligence instead of before it began, when there would be far less room to manage it calmly.

What neither of them expected was how little room the township would leave for negotiation once it learned about the wall.

The risk we had to size

An encroachment onto municipal land is not treated the way an encroachment onto a private neighbour's lot often is. A private neighbour might agree to an easement, a boundary adjustment, or simply look the other way if the encroachment is minor and long-standing, especially where the two owners have a cordial relationship. A municipality answers to a different set of obligations, has standard-form processes for encroachments on its land, and generally has far more resources and far less incentive to negotiate informally than an individual homeowner would, regardless of how reasonable that homeowner's request might be.

That imbalance was the real risk, more than the wall itself. Once we contacted the township on Mirela's behalf to raise the issue proactively, before any buyer's lawyer could raise it adversarially, the township's engineering department took the position that the wall needed to either be removed, relocated fully onto Mirela's land, or covered by a formal encroachment agreement with the township, and made clear that the timeline and terms for whichever option Mirela chose were largely the township's to set, not hers. There was no informal, quiet path available; every option ran through a defined municipal process with its own paperwork and its own pace.

The township was not acting in bad faith. It was applying a standard process to every encroachment it identifies, treating Mirela's file no differently than any other property owner's, and it had no particular reason to move quickly for Mirela's benefit or to absorb any of the cost itself. That meant the negotiation was never going to be a discussion between equals. The township could afford to wait; Mirela, with a sale in progress, a listing that needed to move, and carrying costs accumulating on a vacant property, could not.

Rejean, hearing the township's initial position relayed back to him, asked the obvious question: could Mirela simply ignore it, given the wall had stood undisturbed for years before she even bought the property. That was not a realistic option once the survey had documented the encroachment in writing as part of an active sale; ignoring a known and disclosed title issue would have exposed Mirela to a claim from a buyer later, and arguably to the township pursuing the matter on its own initiative regardless of what she chose to do.

The sizing question we had to answer for Mirela early was blunt: this was not a problem she could negotiate her way out of cheaply, and the honest advice was to plan for a real cost and a real delay rather than hope for a quick, low-cost resolution that the other side had no incentive to offer her.

What we did

1. Confirmed the survey's findings independently before treating them as fact, cross-checking the surveyor's measurements against the municipal property records for the rear lot line and the registered plan of subdivision. This step came first because a costly negotiation with the township, one that would consume weeks of Mirela's listing timeline, was not worth starting on a measurement error, and because the township's own engineering department would expect to see the same figures independently verified before it treated the encroachment as confirmed.
2. Paused the listing before it went live, once the survey issue surfaced, so that Mirela was not marketing a property with an undisclosed title defect that a buyer's lawyer would eventually find during due diligence regardless, at a point where it would have cost her far more leverage to address.
3. Contacted the township's engineering and legal departments directly to raise the encroachment proactively, because disclosing the issue on our terms, with a proposed path forward already in hand, put Mirela in a better position than waiting for the township to discover it through a building permit search or a buyer's inquiry down the line.
4. Requested the township's standard options in writing, learning that an encroachment agreement, essentially a licence permitting the wall to remain on municipal land subject to conditions and an annual fee, was available as an alternative to removal, though the township controlled both the fee and the conditions attached to it.
5. Obtained a structural assessment of the wall to determine whether relocating it fully onto Mirela's property was even feasible, finding that a partial rebuild was possible but would cost roughly in the mid five figures and take several weeks, a real number to weigh against the township's licence fee option before recommending either path.
6. Compared the two paths side by side with Mirela, laying out the one-time rebuild cost against the ongoing annual licence fee over a reasonable holding horizon, so she could weigh a larger upfront cost against a smaller recurring one with real numbers rather than a gut instinct.
7. Negotiated the encroachment agreement's terms with the township's legal department, focusing on keeping the annual fee modest and ensuring the agreement would run with the land so it protected a future buyer rather than expiring at the point of sale, which made the property considerably easier to market once the agreement was in hand.
8. Disclosed the encroachment and the agreement to prospective buyers transparently once the listing resumed, providing a copy of the signed encroachment agreement alongside the listing package rather than waiting for a buyer's lawyer to ask. Treating the encroachment as a resolved condition of sale, with the paperwork already in hand, rather than an open risk left for a buyer to uncover kept due diligence from reopening the issue as a fresh negotiating point or a reason to chip away at the price a second time.
9. Adjusted the listing timeline and price expectations with Mirela honestly, given the weeks the township's process had consumed and the cost of the encroachment agreement, so she went into the eventual sale with realistic numbers rather than the ones she had started with before the survey came back.

The outcome

Mirela sold the property, but on a timeline roughly two months longer than she had planned and at a price that reflected the annual encroachment fee and the delay, not the clean listing she had originally prepared. The retaining wall stayed in place under the negotiated encroachment agreement, which now runs with the land and will bind whoever owns the property next, sparing a future owner the same discovery Mirela made, and giving Mirela's buyer a documented answer rather than an open question.

The loss was real and worth naming plainly: legal and structural assessment costs, a listing delay that cost her carrying costs on an empty property for longer than expected, and a negotiation where the township, correctly, never had to give more ground than its standard process already allowed. Mirela did not get a quick or a cheap resolution, because none was realistically available once a municipality, rather than a private neighbour, was the other party, and no amount of goodwill or urgency on her side was going to change the township's standard timeline.

What acting proactively did accomplish was containment. Disclosing the encroachment before it surfaced through a buyer's due diligence kept the sale from collapsing or triggering a price renegotiation late in the process, when Mirela would have had far less leverage than she had at the outset, and when a buyer's own lawyer discovering it unannounced could have soured the entire transaction. The encroachment agreement, though it cost her, gave the property a clean, disclosed answer to a question that would otherwise have followed it, and her, indefinitely into any future sale.

Mirela closed the sale roughly two months later than her original target, with the buyer fully informed and no conditions left open around the boundary. She has since told Rejean that if she buys another investment property, a boundary survey will happen before an offer goes in, not after a tenant moves out.

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