Video – Attorney Michael Campbell Explains The Common Methods You Could Lose Parts Of Your Property Through Adverse Use

Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Attorneys.Media

“Can you tell us some of the common adverse uses where this legal problem arises?”

Michael Campbell – Business Dispute Attorney – Pierce County, WA

“Probably the most common one is a boundary line dispute. Where, let’s say, one person has put up a fence, thinking that it’s on the border of their property, and the other, the other party has discovered,

‘gee, that’s six feet into my property. I object.’

Well, if you didn’t object in time, you might have lost that property. And you know, you’re never going to know. It might be twenty years before the houses are sold. Therefore, you’ve lost the use of that…It could be new owners! It could be the original owner may have put up a fence there. And when you bought the property, you thought… that’s where the property line was. But then, you found out later on that that wasn’t where the surveyor said the property line was. Or a new survey is done, and you find out that that needs to be adjusted. And so, you go to the next door neighbor and say,

‘want to move that fence’.

The next-door neighbor says,

‘sorry, you can’t do that. I’m not going to let you move my fence that’s been there since even before I bought the property, twenty years ago!’

And so, you end up in court, and the court says well, it was there for a long time. And obviously they were claiming that property is theirs because they put a fence around it. And that was the note…That was the open and notorious part of it. It was really…no mistake. They were claiming that property. And you didn’t object. Oh, or you may have just moved in and discovered that to be the case, and the previous owner had already lost the property, and you didn’t know it, but you bought that property, not as it was surveyed, but you bought the property as it actually…the property rights that actually existed as of that time.

So, businesses can have disputes. It isn’t just owners, and it isn’t just property, residential property owners versus other residential property owners who have this problem. Sometimes it’s a business against the business. So, it’s not always purely residential landowners.”