The Unassumed Road That Nearly Cut Off a Fresh Start

The situation

Shira had spent two decades building a small portfolio of commercial rental units, and after her separation she wanted something that had nothing to do with the properties she and her former spouse had built together. She found it on a ten-acre lot outside Lindsay: a renovated farmhouse, a pond, and enough distance from the road that she could not hear traffic. She planned to move there with her children, and her partner, Miriam, a specialist physician who worked out of a hospital roughly forty minutes away, would split her time between the new place and her existing home in the city.

The listing described the property as having year-round access and showed a long gravel driveway connecting to a road that, on the surface, looked like any other rural route. Shira and Miriam made an offer of roughly $1,650,000, with a deposit of $75,000, and it was accepted within a few days. Shira brought the signed agreement of purchase and sale to Treadstone Law for review before the conditions on the deal expired, as she always did with her commercial purchases. This one, she said, felt more personal — and she wanted it done properly.

Buying commercial buildings had taught Shira to expect certain categories of problem: environmental questions, zoning restrictions, tenant leases that outlived a sale. Rural residential property carries a different set of risks that catch even experienced buyers off guard, because they involve infrastructure most people never think to question — how a private well is tested, how a septic system is inspected, and, in this case, who is actually responsible for the road connecting the house to anywhere else. Shira had driven the route twice during her showings, once in daylight and once at dusk, and it had never occurred to her to ask who plowed it.

What the review found

Most residential streets in Ontario are what lawyers call assumed roads — roads that a municipality has formally taken over responsibility for, meaning the municipality owns the road allowance and is obligated to maintain it, including plowing it in winter. Reviewing the property description and the township's road records, our team found that the final eight hundred metres of the road leading to Shira's prospective driveway was unassumed. The municipality had never taken it over. It remained privately owned, and no one had a legal obligation to plow it, grade it, or maintain it at all.

In practice, many unassumed roads function fine for years because the handful of homeowners who use them informally share the cost of a private plow contractor each winter. But there is no guarantee behind that arrangement unless it is written down. If one neighbour stopped paying, or a new owner refused to participate, there was no automatic legal mechanism forcing maintenance to continue. For a family relying on that road every day — including a physician who needed to reach the hospital in bad weather — an informal, unwritten arrangement was not something we were comfortable letting Shira rely on without confirming it in writing.

We also checked whether the property benefited from a registered easement, a legal right for one property to use part of another property for a specific purpose — in this case, the right to travel over the private road to reach a public highway. The title search showed an easement did exist, giving Shira's property a registered right to use the road. That answered the legal access question. It did not answer the practical one: who paid to keep the road passable, and what happened if that stopped.

There was a further wrinkle. The easement described the right to pass over the road, but it said nothing about maintenance obligations running with the land — meaning a future buyer of any of the four properties served by that stretch of road would inherit the right to use it without automatically inheriting any duty to help pay for its upkeep, unless that obligation was clearly documented and understood to bind future owners as well as the current ones. If the underlying cost-sharing understanding lived only in the current owners' memories and not in a document any of them could point to, Shira's household could end up carrying a disproportionate share of the cost, or facing a dispute with a new neighbour who felt no obligation to contribute at all.

What we did

1. Flagged the issue before the conditions expired. The agreement of purchase and sale included a standard due diligence condition, giving Shira a window to investigate the property before her deposit became non-refundable. We raised the road status immediately so there was time to act instead of discovering it after firm closing.
2. Requested the private road maintenance agreement. We asked the seller, Yanni, and his lawyer whether a written agreement existed among the road's users covering snow clearing, grading, and cost-sharing. One did exist, but it had never been registered on title and had not been reviewed in several years.
3. Had the agreement reviewed on its own terms. We read it carefully for what it actually promised: how costs were split among the handful of households on the road, how a household could withdraw, and what happened if a user simply stopped paying. It was workable, but vague on enforcement — there was no clear remedy if a neighbour refused to pay their share.
4. Negotiated a firm commitment as a condition of closing. Rather than asking Shira to accept the arrangement as-is, we made confirmation of the existing cost-sharing agreement, evidence of the current winter's plowing contract, and a written acknowledgment from the seller of his own maintenance costs to date a condition that had to be satisfied before the purchase became binding.
5. Advised Shira on the practical fallback. We explained that even with the agreement confirmed, nothing prevented a future neighbour from disputing their share years down the line, and that Shira should budget for the possibility of arranging her own private plowing in a bad year rather than relying solely on the group arrangement.

The outcome

The seller's lawyer produced the plowing contractor's invoice from the previous winter and a written confirmation, signed by all four households on the road, of the current cost split — roughly $650 per household per season. With that documentation in hand, and the easement already confirmed on title, Shira and Miriam waived their conditions and the deal closed a few weeks later on schedule, with Shira's roughly $1,575,000 balance funded through a mix of proceeds from her separation settlement and a mortgage.

Just as important as the documents themselves was what they let Shira decide with open eyes. Rather than treat the confirmation as the end of the inquiry, we walked her through what it did and did not protect her from: it told her what the arrangement currently looked like, not what it would look like in ten years if one of the four households sold to someone unwilling to participate. We recommended she keep her own copy of the signed cost-sharing confirmation with her closing documents, and that if she ever sold the property herself, she disclose the unassumed road status clearly to her own buyer rather than let it surface later the way it nearly had for her.

The road turned out to matter within Shira's first winter in the house. A heavy early-season storm closed the public highway for the better part of a day, and the private contractor reached their stretch of road within hours because the arrangement Shira had confirmed in writing was already in force. Miriam made it to a shift she would otherwise have missed. Shira later said that without the review, she would have assumed the listing's year-round access language meant what it sounded like, and would have found out the hard way that it did not — most likely on the worst possible morning to learn it.

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