On Adverse Possession

In 2004 I moved into a new house with a peach of a neighbor.  He lived next to me in a 7br mansion on the river. The houses across the street from us were 1 or 2bedroom econo homes, so a bit of a class divide depending on how you look at it if I can still say that kind of thing.  To give a flavor of the man, the neighbors across the street told me that when they complained about his contractors backing into their driveway – drives that were over a peat bog and thus degrade easily – his response, as paraphrased by one man that heard it, “I don’t care about you little people, I’m rich.”  Maybe he was or wasn’t, idk. The house signaled status but more on that later. In appearance he was a blue blazer, tan pants, and bow-tie guy.  But sartorial descriptions are banal. Here is a better way to frame it: he had a condescending smirk perfectly located halfway between his Harvard MBA bowtie and a mop of past-the-right-age prep-school hair that Tyson would have loved as a target. 

Less than one month after unpacking, my neighbor had his lawyer send me a letter – note that I never actually spoke to him in person one-on-one and he never had the courage to approach me as a man – that laid on me an adverse possession claim to 15 % of my land based on a thin interpretation of maintenance of the ravine that separated the two properties.  Hahahhahhahahhaha <sigh> What he didn’t know, which I did, was that I had a Registered Torrens property. Look it up.  Specifically designed to thwart adverse possession by both design and philosophy of its utility to the state. This is something relatively uncommon, though. We see it in sparse jurisdictions like MN, MA and Australia and even then, it is not always uniform.  He hadn't done the homework which was something I was about to help him with.    

I let him bang his head on both law and my conviction of what common sense means and my stalwart belief in the legal defensibility of my position.  Letter after letter after letter.  Cost me maybe 25k. He finally gave up with a dose of hard snark from the attorney and indignation that he was no longer master of the universe.  The day after that letter, he put up 30 feet of “spite fence” right on the line.  A bit unnecessary but I didn’t mind since it blocked the view of his house.  I was once going to put tiki torches on the fence and book-end it with two 7 foot tall Moai. I didn’t. Wanted to.

In the end it never really mattered. In 2009 I had to sell the house due to a move and divorce.  When I came back for the disposition and sale of the property, the aggrieved neighbors threw me a party for having taken the time and money to stand up to his insufferability. It was worth every penny.  Later in 2009, the bank foreclosed on his house. Heh. Fin.