CindyECC wrote:
Yikes, I hate this kind of stuff! I'm not 100% sure of the legalities, but isn't there something about use and care of a property? As in, if you use/care for it a certain amount of time, it becomes yours? If that's really the case and not just folklore, then it's a GOOD thing you have that notarized paper to reinforce that the area they're using for yard does NOT belong to them...despite 8 yrs of mowing it and using it.

As for the house possibly being on your property...I think you'd find it very difficult to do *anything* about that if the house was there when you bought your house. It's one of those situations where you should have had your property surveyed before buying it so any disputes could be addressed before purchasing it.

I would think that you could "cancel" the easement situation with nothing more than a letter, perhaps notarized and sent via registered mail. It depends on what you want...do you want the neighbors to stop using ANY of your property?

I would love to find out the actual legal side of it. We have a friend that buys and resells houses and he's the one that found out this info for us. He said that not having the property properly surveyed when we bought it wouldn't matter, we could survey it now and force them to either buy us off or move their house. Or we could have them lease the land they use OR do nothing. We hadn't decided if we were going to do anything about it other than just survey it to find out for sure but it's about $5,000 to do so, so we haven't done it yet.

I would like more than anything just get this easement canceled since we have never used it. I have no problem saying they can still use our property for a lawn as long as they continue to only mow it and no building on it.

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