Ownership of access road

bsinc

Hello, not sure if im posting this in the relevent forum but would be greatfull for your advice.

We recently bought a new home in a small development. My house and the neighbours house is accessed from a access road off the main street of the estate. The access road has not been adopted by the council and the main street was. Now i was aware of this and my deeds state i own my plot along with half share of said access road. However my neighbours contract shows no mention of any ownership of road. My question is who would own the other half, and what rights does my neighbour have over the use of the road or any future maintenance etc

Thanks

Fire_Fox

The developer probably still owns the other half, sounds like someone mucked up in preparing the deeds - possibly at one point the developer thought the road would be adopted by the council and then it was not? If your neighbour's deeds do not show any right of way over a private road they need to get back in contact with their conveyancing solicitor right away.

Vomityspice

If the easement is not on the title document this really needs to be remedied. It is surprising that the solicitor acting for the other household did not raise a requisition on this point. However, if this access road is the only way to access the property then there will be an easement of necessity.

As the other owner needs the road to access their property, the expectation will be that they need to maintain it.

Richard_Webster

There are so many possibilities that without knowing more about the layout of the access road relative to the houses etc it is all speculation.

The neighbour's solicitors will advise them about their rights, and if there has been a slip up (one particular national developer is very good at making this kind of mistake) he will take the matter up with the developer's solicitors.

It could be, for instance, that they will have rights to use the access road but will own any of it. In this kind of case the actual ownership is more of a technicality because in practice it is shared, so the precise areas owned by each property are not so important.