Easements and property rights

Property rights tend to be taken for granted until the day they are needed. Lorries can no longer reach a loading bay because the neighbouring plot has been sold and fenced off; a new owner next door objects to a drain that has always run across their land; a survey for a sale shows that a warehouse wall stands on someone else’s ground. Disputes like these rarely stay small: they hold up a sale, stop a building project or cut a business off from its own premises.

Much of what an owner may do with land depends on rights that someone else holds in it — some written into old deeds, some acquired through long use, some never recorded at all. Settling them, by agreement or before a court, turns on:

• the rules on how an easement comes into being, whether by deed, by long use or by the way land was once divided;
• the rules on the extent of an easement, and on when its use has grown heavier than the one it was granted for;
• the rules on moving, suspending or extinguishing an easement that no longer serves its purpose or has fallen out of use;
• the rules on usufruct, building rights and long leases, which split the same land between different holders;
• the rules on fixing the boundary between two plots, and on the expert survey that settles where each one ends;
• the rules on encroachment, when a wall or a foundation is built over the line, and on whether the remedy is removal or compensation;
• the rules on pipes, cables and drains that cross another owner’s land, and on a network operator’s right to reach them;
• the rules on the interim measures a court can order to halt works or restore access while the case is heard.

Our lawyers can support you with this.