Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
How could one find out more about these, as that's quite interesting. Would you have to go and pull the title for a given property to see where the covenant applies? Or were they applied in a blanket fashion to neighbourhoods when the land was sold?
Also, doesn't a covenant have to have someone on both sides? Could the community association give them up or does it have to be each neighbour within a certain area, or is it more of a "as long as nobody objects" sort of deal.
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Pretty much, you pull a title, notice it has an old RC on it, pull the RC and see in the RC itself what lands it's registered against. Sometimes it's registered against only the specific lands you're dealing with and you cheer because you can get it off easily. Sometimes it's registered against 2, 3, or half a dozen. Or it might be registered against 20 or 50, or 600 (been there). That's part of the problem with them, they're all over the map and you never know until you look into it. Also, before 2002, a lawyer could pretty much walk into private chambers and have the thing discharged ppon request. So if it was regstered against 100 properties in 1910, it moght only be registered against 85 now, but you have to pull 100 titles at $10 a pop just to find out, so you're into it for $1000 minimum just to figure out the scope of who you might have to notify if you want to change it.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of them registered against dozens or hundreds of properties, and those are the toughest ones to justify trying to change.
As for your question about people on the other side. In theory there was, often CP Rail or the City was the original Vendor of the Lands and had the enforcement rights. However, most or all of these would qualify as what is known as a Building Scheme covenant to which the usual rules of restrictive covenants don't fully apply. With a building scheme covenant, all the properties subject to the RC are both dominant and servient tenements meaning that an affected property owner can sue any other affected property owner who violates the RC or even owns a property that is in violation. That's one of th reasons why you have to notify every affected property owner if you want to change it.
This stuff gets pretty technical and I've actually build a little bit of a side practice in dealing with these RC's, but even I'm still learning how to work around and within these things 10 years after the Potts v McCann decision.