A Missed Deadline and a Right of Way No One Disclosed

The situation

The requisition deadline had already passed, two days earlier, when Keisha called our office, having just fired the lawyer who had handled the first month of her and Gurpreet's home purchase. The requisition date is the point in a resale transaction by which a buyer's lawyer must raise, in writing, any problem found with the title or the property, and once it passes without a requisition being sent, most problems the buyer later discovers become the buyer's to live with rather than the seller's to fix. Their previous lawyer had done almost nothing with the file since the offer was accepted, had not ordered a survey, had not responded to two of Keisha's emails asking for an update, and had let the deadline lapse without ever telling her it had happened.

Keisha and Gurpreet had arrived in Canada a little under a year earlier, Keisha to take up a position as a surveyor with a private engineering firm and Gurpreet as a registered nurse at a hospital in the city. They had rented for the first several months, saved carefully, and found a detached house in North York with a mature backyard and a driveway that ran along the side of the lot, the kind of feature that had made them fall for the property the first time they walked through it with their daughter Jasleen. The purchase price sat solidly in the middle of what a family in their position could responsibly carry, financed with a substantial down payment built partly from savings brought over during the move and partly from a year of careful budgeting since, along with a mortgage they had been pre-approved for before they started looking seriously at listings.

The timeline mattered in a second, less obvious way too. The family's moving company was booked, their rental apartment's lease ended the week after the planned closing date, and Jasleen's enrolment at her new school was tied to the family's address as of a date fixed on the school board's calendar. A delayed closing risked a gap between the end of their lease and the start of ownership of the new house, with nowhere settled for the family to live in between.

What worried Keisha most, professionally, was that she understood exactly what a survey was for and what could go wrong without one. As a surveyor herself, she knew a driveway crossing a boundary line was one of the most common sources of dispute between neighbours, and one of the easiest problems to miss if nobody looked for it in time.

She called three firms that afternoon. We were the only one willing to start reviewing the file and order a rush survey immediately, rather than tell her a passed deadline made the file too late to help with.

The problem

We opened the file the same afternoon Keisha called, and the first task was simply to understand what, if anything, the previous lawyer had actually done. The answer was very little. No title search had been ordered beyond a basic electronic check, no survey had been requested from the seller or commissioned independently, and no requisition letter had gone out raising any issue at all, because none had been identified. There was no clock left to work with, only the question of whether the seller could still be persuaded to engage with a problem raised late, and whether there was even anything worth raising before that question needed an answer at all.

We ordered an urgent real property report the same day, paying a premium for rush turnaround, and asked the seller's lawyer whether the seller would accept a requisition raised outside the formal window given that a change of counsel, not any strategy on the family's part, had caused the delay. The seller had no legal obligation to agree, but the request was granted within a day. The survey came back two days later, and it showed what Keisha had feared as a professional even before she had reason to suspect it in her own transaction. The driveway serving the house ran, for roughly its final third, across a strip of the neighbouring lot, under an old right of way that had never been registered on title for either property. The arrangement had clearly existed for decades, long enough that both current owners treated it as settled and unremarkable, but an unregistered right of way is not the same thing as a registered one, and it is not binding on a future owner of the neighbouring lot who has no notice of it and no obligation to honour an informal arrangement their predecessor tolerated.

In practice, this meant Keisha and Gurpreet could buy the house, move in, and use the driveway exactly as the current owners had, right up until the neighbouring property changed hands and a new owner decided, entirely within their rights, to fence off the strip of land the driveway crossed. At that point the family's own driveway would become unusable without a car being angled awkwardly onto the narrower portion that sat fully on their own lot. This was precisely the kind of defect a requisition letter exists to catch, sent to the seller while there was still a chance to fix it, rather than discovered by a new owner after closing with no one obligated to help. The formal leverage a requisition is built to give a buyer was already gone; what remained was the seller's willingness to fix it voluntarily, a different and far less certain thing.

What we did

1. Took over the file within hours of Keisha's call and triaged what was missing. We reviewed the agreement of purchase and sale, the previous lawyer's correspondence, and the requisition date, and concluded that no meaningful due diligence had been completed and that the deadline to raise anything formally had already passed two days earlier without anyone telling the family.
2. Contacted the seller's lawyer immediately to ask whether a late requisition would be entertained at all. With the formal deadline already gone, there was no automatic right left to invoke, only a request resting on goodwill and the fact that a change in counsel, not any strategy, had caused the delay; the seller's lawyer agreed within a day, converting what looked like a closed door into a workable, if unofficial, timeline.
3. Ordered an urgent real property report on a rush basis, rather than accepting the standard multi-week turnaround. Given what Keisha's own professional experience suggested about the driveway, a survey was the single highest-value document available to us, and paying a premium for expedited turnaround was worth the cost given how little time remained before closing to act on whatever it showed, and how little room there was left to go back to the seller a second time.
4. Identified the unregistered right of way as soon as the survey arrived and confirmed its legal status. We reviewed the parcel register for both the subject property and the neighbouring lot and confirmed that no easement or right of way had ever been registered, which meant the driveway arrangement had no protection against a future owner of the neighbouring lot.
5. Drafted and sent a formal requisition letter as soon as the survey confirmed the defect, treating the seller's cooperation as time-limited goodwill rather than a guarantee. The letter set out the defect precisely, explained why an unregistered right of way was not adequate to protect the driveway access, and required the seller either to obtain a registered easement from the neighbouring owner or to address the problem in some other legally binding way before closing.
6. Negotiated directly with the seller's lawyer over how the fix would be structured, rather than simply demanding a price reduction to walk away from the problem. The seller, keen to keep the sale on track, agreed to approach the neighbouring owner about registering a formal right of way, and we worked out the terms of that easement so it would run with the land and bind future owners on both sides of the boundary.
7. Reviewed the registered easement document before closing to confirm it actually solved the problem. We checked the width, the exact path, and the wording of the easement against the survey to make sure it covered the full stretch of driveway that crossed the boundary, rather than a narrower or differently located strip that would have left the family only partly protected.
8. Confirmed the easement was registered on title before releasing funds at closing, rather than accepting the seller's word that registration was underway. Closing did not proceed until the registration was verified against the parcel register directly, so the family took ownership of a right they could actually rely on and enforce against a future neighbour, rather than a promise that the paperwork would eventually catch up after the money had already changed hands.

The outcome

Keisha and Gurpreet closed on the house on the original date they had planned, with the registered right of way in place and confirmed on title before the deal completed. Jasleen started at her new school the following week from a house the family could move into without an unresolved boundary question sitting quietly in the background of what should have been a straightforward first home purchase for a family that had already been through the larger upheaval of a move to a new country.

The seller's willingness to accept a late requisition cost the family nothing beyond a tense few days and the fee for a rush survey, and the seller absorbed the modest cost of formalizing the easement rather than risk losing the buyer, even though nothing legally obligated that cooperation once the deadline had passed. Because the problem was caught and resolved before closing, no one had to litigate anything, no one had to renegotiate the price, and no future dispute over the driveway ever had the chance to harden into the kind of standoff that can take years to unwind once a new owner has moved in.

The near miss was real, though, and worth sitting with. Had Keisha not called three firms that same afternoon, or had the seller simply declined to entertain a requisition raised after the formal deadline, which the seller was fully entitled to do, the right of way would have gone undiscovered until after closing, with no formal leverage left to force a fix. At that point the family's only recourse against a future access dispute would have been whatever informal goodwill the next owner of the neighbouring lot happened to extend them, which is not a legal right and not something a family can plan a driveway, a garage, or a daily commute around. Prevention, in this file, depended on a seller willing to cooperate after the formal window had already closed, which is not something a buyer can safely count on twice.

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