The Unassumed Road: A North York Buyer's Winter Wake-Up Call

The situation

Bohdan and Tomasz, both physiotherapists working at different clinics across the city, had been renting a condo in North York for three years and were ready to buy. Condo prices in the neighbourhoods they liked had climbed past what their combined income comfortably supported, so their real estate agent suggested widening the search to a pocket of North York with older detached homes on larger lots, set back from the main road on a private laneway shared by four properties. The price was appealing: about $960,000 for a renovated three-bedroom home, well inside the range they had budgeted, which sat somewhere between $800,000 and $1,300,000 depending on the property.

They made an offer with a financing condition and a home inspection condition, both fairly standard protections, and the sellers — an older couple, one of whom, Marek, handled most of the correspondence — accepted within a day. Nothing about the listing suggested anything unusual. The laneway looked like any other driveway, paved and lined with mature trees, and the agent's listing photos made the approach look like part of the property itself.

What the title search found

Once the agreement was signed, the file came to Treadstone Law for the standard closing work: a title search, a review of the status of any liens or easements, and preparation of the closing documents. Ontario title searches reveal who owns a property, what registered rights and restrictions run with it, and whether the municipality has assumed responsibility for the road that serves it. In most urban transactions this step is a formality. Here it was not.

The search showed that the laneway serving the four properties, including the one Bohdan and Tomasz were buying, was an unassumed road. In Ontario, a road becomes a public road that the municipality is obligated to maintain, plow and repair only once the municipality has formally assumed it, usually after the developer or original owner who built it transfers responsibility. Until that happens, an unassumed road remains privately owned, often owned collectively by the abutting property owners under a right-of-way registered on title, with no municipal obligation to plow it, light it, or repair potholes. There was a registered right-of-way giving each of the four homeowners a legal right to use the laneway, but no agreement on record describing who paid for maintenance, snow clearing, or repairs, and no reserve fund or cost-sharing formula.

This mattered for reasons beyond inconvenience. Emergency services, delivery vehicles and, in a Canadian winter, basic access to the property all depend on the road being kept clear. Without an enforceable cost-sharing arrangement among the four owners, a dispute over who pays for plowing, or a neighbour who simply refuses to contribute, can leave a homeowner facing an unplowed laneway with no legal mechanism to force a fix short of a lawsuit. The right-of-way guaranteed the legal right to pass over the land; it did nothing to guarantee the road would actually be usable in February.

A further complication surfaced during the search: the right-of-way agreement, registered decades earlier, described the laneway's width in a way that did not perfectly match the current paved surface, raising a question about whether part of the driveway physically used by the sellers actually encroached on a neighbouring lot.

What we did

1. Flagged the issue immediately, before the inspection condition expired. The purchase agreement gave Bohdan and Tomasz a window to satisfy their conditions or walk away with their deposit returned. Raising the unassumed road and the boundary discrepancy while that window was still open preserved their ability to renegotiate or exit without penalty, rather than discovering the problem after they were legally committed.
2. Requested the historical maintenance records and any informal cost-sharing practice among the four owners. The sellers, through their own lawyer, produced several years of shared invoices for a private snow-clearing contractor, paid roughly equally by the four households by informal agreement rather than by any binding contract. This showed a working arrangement existed in practice, which reduced the risk somewhat, but an informal handshake arrangement offers no protection if a new owner refuses to participate.
3. Commissioned a boundary survey to resolve the width discrepancy. A licensed surveyor confirmed that a narrow strip of the paved laneway, roughly along one edge, extended slightly beyond the registered right-of-way onto a neighbouring owner's land. It had apparently been paved that way for years without objection, but an unregistered encroachment is not the same as a legal right to keep using that strip.
4. Negotiated a private road maintenance agreement as a closing condition. Rather than proceeding on the informal handshake basis, we drafted a written cost-sharing agreement for the four owners to sign, setting out how snow clearing and repair costs would be split and how disputes would be resolved. Two of the four neighbouring owners signed before closing; a third wanted more time to review it with a lawyer of their own.
5. Went back to the sellers to renegotiate price given the delay and residual risk. With one neighbour's signature still outstanding and the boundary encroachment unresolved on title, we advised Bohdan and Tomasz that proceeding at the full purchase price without those items settled left them absorbing risk the sellers had not disclosed. Their agent reopened the conversation with the sellers' agent, and the sellers agreed to a price reduction and a closing credit to reflect the outstanding items.

The outcome

The sellers agreed to a price reduction of about $28,000, along with a closing credit of roughly $4,000 earmarked for a formal survey to resolve the boundary discrepancy after closing, since it could not be finalized with the third neighbour's cooperation before the agreed closing date. Bohdan and Tomasz closed at approximately $932,000 instead of the original $960,000, with the signed maintenance agreement from three of the four owners in hand and a clear paper trail on the fourth.

The boundary issue was resolved a few months after closing once the survey was finalized and the neighbouring owner agreed to a minor easement adjustment rather than a costly registered transfer. The fourth neighbour eventually signed the maintenance agreement as well, once it became clear the other three intended to enforce it regardless.

Bohdan and Tomasz got the home they wanted, at a lower price than they had agreed to pay, with the practical risk of an unmaintained winter road addressed in writing rather than left to informal goodwill. It took an extra two weeks past their original closing date to get there, which meant a short overlap paying both their old rent and their new mortgage, a cost they had not budgeted for but could absorb.

Looking back, both said the part that unsettled them most was not the money but how close they came to signing without ever knowing the road existed as a separate legal question at all. Their inspector had checked the furnace, the roof and the foundation thoroughly, exactly as instructed, but a home inspection is not designed to answer questions about title, road status or registered rights, and neither of them had thought to ask. It was the title search, a step that happens well after conditions are usually satisfied on most urban deals, that caught it here only because their closing lawyer chose to review the registered right-of-way document line by line rather than treat it as a formality.

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