The Parking Spot That Did Not Belong to the Unit on Paper

The situation

The call came in two weeks before Ming's scheduled closing on a condo unit in Carleton Place. Ming, who already owned and managed several rental properties as a commercial landlord, was not new to real estate deals, and that experience was exactly why something in the file had caught attention early. The lawyer's assistant reviewing the title search had flagged an inconsistency between the legal description in the registered condominium documents and the description used in the agreement of purchase and sale, and wanted a second opinion before anyone signed off on it and moved the file toward closing.

On the surface, the deal was straightforward. Ming was buying a unit from a seller named Anjali, with the purchase price sitting well above a typical resale condo in the area, given the size of the unit and the two parking spaces the listing had advertised as included with it. Ming's co-buyer, Wei, was going on title alongside Ming, and both had budgeted the purchase around the assumption that the unit came with a specific, defined set of parking and locker rights attached to it permanently and transferring cleanly with the sale.

Ming had also arranged financing and a closing timeline around owning a business that used one of the parking spaces to store equipment tied to a separate manufacturing operation, which made the parking allocation more than a convenience. It was part of why the price had made sense in the first place.

What the title search actually showed was narrower than the listing had promised. The registered description tied only one parking space to the unit Ming was buying. The second space referenced in the listing and in the agreement appeared, on the condominium corporation's own schedule, to belong to a different unit entirely, one that Anjali did not own and had never had any legal right to sell as part of her unit.

Anjali's own understanding, based on what she said she had been told when she bought the unit years earlier, was that both spaces had always gone with it. She was not trying to mislead Ming. She genuinely believed the second space was hers to include in the sale, and had used it, unchallenged, for years without anyone raising a question about it. That belief, and the discrepancy sitting underneath it, were what Ming brought to us with the closing date already circled on the calendar and little time left to sort it out.

What the other side was relying on

Anjali's position rested entirely on long, unchallenged use. She had parked in both spaces since she bought the unit, no other owner or the condominium corporation had ever objected, and the real estate listing she used to sell the property described both spaces as included, the same way it had been described to her when she bought. From her perspective, years of uninterrupted possession was proof enough of ownership, and she was relying on that history, along with the original listing language, to support the sale going through exactly as advertised and priced.

What she was not relying on, because she had never had reason to look, was the condominium corporation's original declaration and the schedule attached to it, which is the document that actually and permanently assigns parking and locker units to condo units under the Condominium Act, 1998. Use and honest belief do not override a registered declaration. If the schedule says a given space belongs to a different unit, that allocation controls regardless of who has been parking there, for how long, or how confident either side was about the arrangement.

The complication went a layer deeper once we started pulling the condominium corporation's own records. The corporation's common expense allocations, which determine how much each unit owner pays toward shared building costs, were calculated using a unit factor tied to each unit's registered size and its attached exclusive-use spaces. If the parking space had, in fact, been misallocated on paper for years, this was not just a parking dispute between two buyers. It potentially meant that Anjali's unit, and the unit that the registered schedule said actually held that second space, had been paying the wrong share of common expenses for as long as the error had existed on the books. Untangling who actually owed what meant reconstructing years of the corporation's own accounting rather than simply reading a single line on a schedule.

None of this was something Anjali had any way of knowing before Ming's lawyer flagged it. She had bought and used the unit in good faith, relying on what she had been told at her own closing years earlier. But good faith does not change what a registered legal description says, and it did not change what the corporation's own financial records, once reconstructed piece by piece, ultimately showed about which unit the second parking space actually and legally belonged to. A buyer's or seller's honest belief about a property, however long-standing and however reasonable it felt at the time, is simply not evidence of what the registered record actually says, and the registered record is what decides what changes hands at closing. It is not quite the only thing that decides it, since a small set of interests can still bind a buyer without appearing on title, among them a short lease where the tenant is in actual occupation, unpaid municipal taxes and utility charges, and certain Crown and expropriation claims. None of that narrow list had anything to do with a parking space governed by the condominium's own schedule, which is exactly the kind of registered record that did control here.

What we did

1. Pulled the condominium corporation's full declaration and schedule of exclusive-use common elements directly from the land registry, rather than relying on the resale listing or Anjali's understanding of what she owned. That schedule is the controlling document for parking and locker assignments under the Condominium Act, 1998, and it confirmed the discrepancy the title search had first flagged: the second parking space was registered as belonging to a different unit in the building entirely, not to Anjali's.
2. Requested the condominium corporation's records on common expense contributions for both affected units, going back several years, since a misallocated parking space of this kind is often tied to an underlying error in the unit factors used to calculate each owner's share of shared building costs. Reconstructing that accounting, contribution by contribution and year by year, was the only way to tell whether this was a simple clerical slip in the original registration or something that had actually affected what either unit owner had been paying all along.
3. Contacted the condominium corporation's management directly to raise the discrepancy formally and ask what records, if any, existed explaining how the original allocation had been made decades earlier. A clear answer from the corporation mattered both for closing Ming's purchase honestly and for whichever unit actually held the correct legal claim to the second space, a question that was not Ming's to resolve but still needed a documented answer on file.
4. Opened a direct conversation with Anjali's lawyer, laying out exactly what the registered schedule showed and what that meant for what Anjali was actually able to sell to Ming, regardless of what the listing had promised or what Anjali believed in good faith about a space she had used, unchallenged, for years without anyone questioning it. Raising it directly and early gave Anjali's side time to absorb the news before the closing date pressure made a calm conversation harder to have.
5. Advised Ming on the realistic options given the fixed closing date, since a full correction to the condominium corporation's registered schedule, if one were even warranted, was not something that could be completed before the transaction was set to close. Pursuing that kind of correction properly would have meant delaying the purchase indefinitely while the corporation investigated a decades-old registration question with no guaranteed outcome or timeline.
6. Negotiated a price adjustment with Anjali's side to reflect that only one parking space, not two, could be confirmed as legally attached to the unit Ming was buying, rather than allowing the deal to close on the original terms with a misdescribed asset baked into the price Ming had agreed to two weeks earlier, before anyone had looked closely at the schedule.
7. Documented the adjustment and the reason for it clearly in the closing materials, so that Ming's ownership record going forward reflected exactly what had been purchased and did not carry forward the same ambiguity that had caused the problem in the first place, and so that a future buyer of Ming's own unit would inherit an accurate record rather than the same unresolved question passed along again.

The outcome

The purchase closed on schedule, but not on the original terms. Ming ended up owning the condo unit with one confirmed parking space rather than the two the listing and the original agreement had described, and the purchase price was adjusted downward to reflect that difference before the deal completed. It was not the deal Ming had budgeted for two weeks earlier, and the adjustment, while fair given what the registered schedule actually showed, still meant giving up something Ming had reasonably expected to get.

Anjali, for her part, accepted the reduced price rather than delay her own sale while the condominium corporation investigated a decades-old registration question with no clear timeline or guaranteed outcome. Pursuing a full correction to the registered schedule was left as a separate matter for the corporation and the unit that the second parking space was actually attached to, unconnected to Ming's purchase and outside what either party to this sale could resolve on their own.

What the reconstructed accounting also surfaced, and what we flagged for Ming in writing before closing, was that the common expense contributions tied to the unit factors on both affected units might eventually need to be revisited by the condominium corporation, separately from this transaction, once it had time to review the underlying registration issue properly. That is not something Ming's purchase could resolve, and we were clear that it remained an open question for the corporation to address on its own timeline.

Acting before closing, rather than after, was what limited the damage here. Ming ended up with an accurate description of exactly what had been bought, a fair price for it, and no unresolved dispute carried forward into ownership. It was a contained loss rather than the clean deal originally expected, and it was resolved before it became something worse.

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