and wound up fielding a pair of competing offers. The sellers accepted the higher of the two and set a date with the notary, where sales in Quebec are finalized. “Everything went smoothly – the inspection went smoothly, all the conditions with the offer went smoothly, and we basically settled that we’re going to the notary on April 12,” Langtry says. “About a week before, the buyer’s agent reached out to us and said, ‘We have a problem with the certificate of location.’” Suddenly, the deal – along with Langtry’s clients’ dreams of beginning the next chapter of their lives – was on the verge of collapse.
Where you end and I begin The sellers’ concerns stemmed from the placement of the owners’ fence, erected almost three decades before. At the time he built the fence, Langtry’s client’s property sloped downward toward a neighbouring vacant lot. Rather than enduring the cost
and hassle of levelling the land, he simply chose to build his fence several feet within his own boundary, sacrificing approximately 300 of the property’s 6,500 square feet. A few years later, the vacant lot was purchased, a home was built on it, and a pool was installed in the backyard. The leftover dirt from the hole dug for the pool was used by the new neighbours to finally level out the slope. In what would be the first of many neighbourly acts between the two households, Langtry’s clients allowed the new residents to install a sprinkler system and two sheds on land that was technically theirs. “My client, he never cared that the sprinkler was there because he would never use that land,” Langtry says. “His fence was already up, with concrete footings in the ground. He didn’t think, when it came to a sale, that it could be a problem. He said that had they thought it would be, he would have sold the land to [his neighbour] for a case of beer, shook hands over it and had everything all done before the sale happened.”
MONTREAL EST EN FEU While Vancouver and Toronto continue to come to grips with their adjusting markets, Montreal’s is blazing. Its low prices, robust economy and foreign buyer-friendliness (for now) have led to intense demand, rising sales and rapidly appreciating prices.
April 2018
Year-over-year change
Active listings
25,466
-17%
New listings
6,584
-2%
Single-family sales
3,105
6%
Condo sales
1,871
18%
Median price (single-family)
$317,000
4%
Median price (condo)
$245,350
2% Source: Centris Residential Statistics Montreal Metropolitan Area, April 2018
But it was too late for handshakes. The sellers felt that their over-asking offer should entitle them to the entire lot. Their threat to walk away from the deal hit Langtry’s clients hard. Failure to sell would render buying a new home in Europe impossible. “My seller said that in 40 years of running his own business, he had never been as stressed out as he was over this issue – he wasn’t sleeping – because this could start a whole chain with a lot of penalties and a lot of people involved,” Langtry says. Confusing matters was the fact that Langtry had been clear with the buyers and their agent about the discrepancy between the land survey done on the property and the placement of the fence. “And I made that land survey accessible to their Realtor from day one,” she says, “so even before they made their offer, that information was accessible.” It seemed like a textbook case of buyer’s
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