Homeowners need to be aware of the location of their property lines to avoid running into legal problems when they try to sell their houses in the future, according to a presentation to St. Albert city council on Monday.
Guy Boston, general manager of planning and engineering, took council through the growing problem of encroachments throughout the city. Encroachments are defined as any illegal or unauthorized intrusions into land in which the city holds an interest. Those lands can include parks, utility lots and rights of way, drainage swales or road right of ways.
Typically, such encroachments are innocent and stem from homeowners not knowing the exact location of their property line, Boston said. He cited an example of an individual who builds a fence that might intrude onto city land or might obstruct the view of an intersection ahead.
Boston admitted he is one of those homeowners. At the last home he had in Edmonton, he built the rear of his fence 165 millimetres over the property line, which led the City of Edmonton to approach him to enter into an encroachment agreement.
“I’d like to think I’m a relatively well-educated guy, but I made the assumption that my neighbours had done their fences correctly,” Boston said. “I should have had a survey done and didn’t. It’s innocent. It wasn’t egregious.”
The problem with encroachments, regardless of how minor they might be, is they can complicate a home sale when an agreement is nearly in place. Financial institutions will ask for a real property report (RPR) as part of a request for a mortgage. The seller goes to the city for a compliance certificate. That’s when encroachments come to light and can interfere with the sale.
“If things don’t comply, we don’t give a certificate,” Boston said. “Now everyone gets excited. Some do go political and say we are picking on them or being mean. Cleaning up an encroachment costs money, as does an encroachment agreement.”
Encroachment agreements, which cost approximately $500, are agreements between the city and homeowner that state any unauthorized fixtures or landscaping can remain but if work needs to be done where the problem is, the homeowner is responsible. That can get particularly uncomfortable for individuals who build sheds over drainage swales or along utility rights of way.
“It does transfer liability to the owner instead of the city,” Boston said.
Other encroachments can be more egregious and intentional. Boston showed a slide that showed a group of three homes in an unidentified neighbourhood of the city in which the homeowners have built their fences into land that is not theirs and built firepits or done other landscaping. In those cases, Boston said the city can run into some attitude problems in which the homeowners tell the city they’ll just put it right back if the city takes anything down.
“People that start to head off into ravines or start fencing off parks, you’d think they know,” Boston said.
Council took no action after receiving the report. Mayor Nolan Crouse said he plans to discuss the issue with his senior managers and bring something more tangible to council. At the moment, the city has one staff member who issues compliances certificates, which means administration only discovers encroachments when they receive a request and notice the problem. Boston and Crouse would both like to be more proactive.
“They brought this forward without a really strong recommendation so we should at least have an opportunity to vote and we didn’t get that,” Crouse said. “We don’t have a solution.”
Boston said responsibility ultimately lies with homeowners to know the boundaries of their properties, abide by any restrictions listed on the title and seek appropriate permits from the city when adding a shed, deck or anything else.
“Not too many people pull out the title and look,” he said. “With all these instruments, if it impacts your property, it’ll be listed there.”
